Korah Dug Up Joseph's Buried Gold and the Ground Took It Back
Joseph buried gold in four places in the desert and told nobody. A few generations later a Levite named Korah found one of them and started spending.
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The Four Hiding Places
They came to Joseph smeared with clay so he would see how poor they were.
The famine had gone on long enough that the money was gone, then the cattle, then the fields, and men were standing in front of the viceroy of Egypt covered in mud saying, my lord, look at me, look at what I have left. Pharaoh had grain in his own storehouses and would not open them, and the people in the street cursed him for it and blessed Joseph, who sold to anyone who came with a hand out. He fed a whole world through those years the way a shepherd feeds a flock, one day at a time.
The money that came back through his hands was enormous. Some of it he gave to his brothers, some he handed to Pharaoh's treasury, and one portion, gold and silver and cut stones, he took out into empty country and put in the ground.
He buried it in four places. One in the desert near the Red Sea. One on the bank of the Euphrates. Two more out in the waste toward Persia and Media. Then he went back to Egypt and said nothing about any of them.
Two of those four have never been found and never will be, because they are being held for the pious, for the days of the Messiah. One was turned up centuries later by a Roman emperor, Antoninus, the son of Severus.
And one was found in the wilderness by a Levite.
The Man Who Found One
Korah was Levi's great-grandson, a cousin of Moses and Aaron, camped with the rest of Israel in a desert where nobody owned anything but a tent and a share of manna.
He dug in the right place.
What came up out of that hole made him the richest man in the camp by a distance nobody could measure. Everyone else in that wilderness was equally poor and equally fed, and Korah walked around it carrying Joseph's gold, and the arithmetic of who he was and who was giving the orders started to look wrong to him.
He Put His Hand Out Against Moses
He gathered men. Many of them, and not the fringe of the camp either.
He stood them up in front of Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation and quarreled, and the quarrel was about who had the right to speak for God. Not about food, not about the road, not about Egypt. About the two men who taught Israel what was just and who had been put in front of them to do it.
There is a warning in the Torah about that, and it is worded strangely. You shall not curse the judges, and you shall not revile a prince among your people. Of all the things God protected with a caution, the ones he guarded hardest were the men who teach justice and the man who rules. Korah and everyone standing behind him were destroyed for one thing only, and it was that he put out his hand against Moses and Aaron.
The Ground Opened
The earth split under his feet.
It opened its mouth, the way a living thing opens a mouth, and it took him. It took the men who had come out to stand with him. It took their households, their tents, their wives and their children, and it took everything belonging to them, which meant the gold went down too, every coin and every stone of it, back into the ground it had been lifted out of.
Joseph had put treasure into the earth and used the rest to keep a starving world alive. Korah had taken treasure out of the earth and used it to argue that he should be in charge. The ground kept them both honest in the end. It closed over the second man while the first one's grain was still in the memory of every nation that had come begging for it.
The Sons Who Looked Up
Korah's sons were standing there when it happened.
They had come out with their father. They were on the ground that was going, and in the last moment before it took them, they looked up.
That was all. No speech, no offering, no argument. They raised their faces and they were not swallowed. Their father, who had spent his last hour looking sideways at Moses and downward at his own worth, went down alive into Sheol (the underworld of the dead) with his mouth still open.
Look toward him and be radiant, the psalm says of men like the sons. The road of life runs upward for anyone with sense enough to take it. David looked up out of his own worst hour and was covered. Even Nebuchadnezzar, who had eaten grass like an ox, said afterward that he lifted his eyes to heaven and his reason came back to him.
The sons of Korah stood at the lip of the crack with their faces raised while their father's fortune went down past them into the dark, and their songs are still being sung.
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