The Earth Swallowed Korah and He Kept Falling

Down Is Not an Answer

The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them. Numbers 16 is brief and terrible about this. Korah and his followers, Dathan and Abiram and the two hundred fifty men with their censers, went down alive into the pit. The earth closed over them. The Torah moves on.

The rabbis could not. Down is a direction. Down to what? Down through what? The cosmos in rabbinic understanding is not a simple sphere with a crust above and emptiness below. It is a structure of layers, firmaments above and abysses below, spaces between spaces, depths with their own depths. Midrash Mishlei, the midrash on Proverbs compiled in Palestine between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, takes the question of where Korah went seriously and gives it a precise answer.

He went all the way through.

What Lies Below the Ground

The seven firmaments above the earth are a standard feature of rabbinic cosmology, elaborated in Chagigah 12b and throughout the Midrash Aggadah tradition. Each layer has a name, a population of angels, and a specific celestial function. The symmetry of rabbinic cosmology pressed toward a corresponding architecture below. If there are seven heavens, there are seven layers of the earth, and below those, further still.

Korah fell through all of them. He did not land. The Midrash on Proverbs records him still calling out from beneath the lowest level of the earth, his voice rising upward through the layers of the underworld, reaching the surface where Israel could hear him. And what did he cry out from the deep?

Moses is true and his Torah is true and we are liars.

Korah's Wife and the Rebellion She Lit

The fall that never ended began with a conversation in a tent. Korah had grievances: Moses had appointed his cousin Elizaphan as head of the Levite family over Korah's objection. The Levites had been given cities but no portion of the land. The priesthood had gone to Aaron and not to him. The grievances were real enough. But his wife sharpened them into something sharper than they needed to be.

The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin 110a asks why the verse says the earth swallowed up Korah and all his household, but then later refers only to the men of Korah. The answer is that Korah's wife was not among those swallowed. She had instigated the rebellion but she did not go down with it. The tradition treats her as a study in how domestic speech can create public catastrophe. Korah might have nursed his grievances into manageable resentment. His wife turned them into a formal challenge to Moses and Aaron in front of the entire assembly.

Dathan and Abiram Below

Korah did not fall alone. Dathan and Abiram, who had been his partners in the rebellion and who had refused Moses' summons with the most contemptuous language in the Torah, went down with him. Their refusal to come when called was not simply arrogance. The Midrash Tanchuma, compiled in Palestine probably in the fifth or sixth century CE, reads their refusal as the defining act of the entire rebellion: you cannot call people into accountability if they refuse to appear for it. Dathan and Abiram bet that Moses could not compel them. The earth compelled them instead.

The Midrash on Proverbs imagines Korah calling out from below the deepest layer of the underworld, testifying against himself across the enormous distance he has traveled, confirming the justice of what happened to him. It is the most complete reversal in the Torah: the man who stood before the entire assembly and accused Moses of taking too much honor ends by crying out from the abyss that Moses had all the honor rightly and that Korah himself was the fraud.