Korah Had More Wealth Than Solomon and Still Wanted More

Korah was richer than any man in Israel. Richer, possibly, than any man alive.

Three hundred white mules. That is what it took to carry the keys to his treasure rooms. Not the treasure itself. The keys. Bamidbar Rabbah, the midrashic commentary on Numbers compiled in its present form around the eleventh century CE, is precise about this detail, because the detail is the point: the wealth was so incomprehensible that the administrative apparatus for managing it required a small army. Korah was Pharaoh's treasurer, keeper of the imperial stores, overseer of the grain reserves that Joseph had accumulated during seven years of plenty to save Egypt and the known world during seven years of famine.

When Joseph collected grain during those years of abundance, he charged for it. Egypt paid. Canaan paid. Everyone who came to Egypt with silver paid. And the silver flowed into imperial coffers, and Korah held the keys. By the time Moses demanded Israel's release, Korah had been accumulating the profits of Joseph's foresight for generations.

This is not a minor biographical detail. It is the rabbinic tradition's explanation for why Korah's rebellion was so dangerous. He was not a malcontent. He was the wealthiest man in Israel, a man who had prospered under Pharaoh, who had every material reason to support the Egyptian system, and who had transferred his wealth and his ambition into the desert community Moses was building. His challenge to Moses was not the complaint of someone who had nothing. It was the demand of someone who had everything except the one thing Moses had: authority over God's people.

The tzitzit argument, preserved in Bamidbar Rabbah 18, captures Korah's method perfectly. He asked Moses whether a garment made entirely of sky-blue wool still required tzitzit. Moses said yes. Korah pushed: if the whole garment is already the color of the commandment, why does it need a reminder? If a house is full of Torah scrolls, why does it need a mezuzah? The questions were designed not to receive answers but to make Moses look ridiculous, to make the law look arbitrary, to make authority look constructed rather than divine. His wife had goaded him toward this, the tradition says, by humiliating him, asking why he was shaving off his dignity along with his hair at Moses's command. Pride, stoked at home, flowed into public rebellion.

The earth opened. Korah and his two hundred fifty followers and their households were swallowed alive. The fire consumed those who had brought unauthorized incense. The punishment was exactly proportionate to the offense: a man who had tried to pull the ground out from under Moses's authority was pulled under the ground instead.

But the tradition is not finished with Korah even then. Legends of the Jews follows him into Sheol, the underworld. There, Korah and his followers spend their days convinced they are condemned forever, their torment endless, their case closed. Then comes Hannah, the mother of Samuel, quoting her own prayer: "The Lord bringeth low, to Sheol, and lifteth up" (1 Samuel 2:6). Even from here, she tells them, there is a way back.

They do not believe her. Not at first. The wealth and ambition that destroyed them are not easy to release even in the afterlife. But then the Temple portals sink into the earth during the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and Korah's followers grab hold of them, refuse to let go. They become guardians of those portals, waiting for the moment the portals rise again. Their punishment becomes their purpose. The men who pulled everything down around them are now holding something up.

The rabbis who preserved this tradition were interested in something Noah's generation never learned and Korah's generation had to learn the hard way: that wealth and position do not create the standing that matters. Noah had nothing when he built the ark. He built it anyway. Korah had everything and demanded more. The earth, the tradition says, remembered the difference.