Korah Still Cries From Under the Earth Every Thirty Days

A Bedouin found Rabbah bar Bar Hannah in the desert and did not waste the greeting. "Come," he said. "I will show you where Korah and his company went down."

Click for full size

Rabbah was a traveler with a stomach for strange geography. He followed.

The Bedouin Stops at Two Cracks

They walked until the sand gave way to cracked stone. The Bedouin stopped at two fissures in the ground. Smoke curled out of them, thin and dirty, as if a kitchen fire had been burning under the world since the wilderness generation. Heat came up in waves. The air smelled of scorched wool even before anyone lowered a test.

This was the place. Not a monument. Not a grave marker. Two mouths in the earth, still breathing.

Wet Wool Comes Up Scorched

Rabbah took a bundle of wool, soaked it in water, and tied it to the end of a spear. He lowered the spear into the crack. The shaft trembled in his hands. When he pulled it out, the wool was scorched black, the water gone, the fibers crisp as burnt bread.

The heat down there, after all the centuries, was still working.

Then he pressed his ear to the earth. From below, like something rising through rock, he heard voices. "Moses and his Torah are true," they were saying. "And we are liars."

Korah Speaks on a Thirty-Day Clock

The voices did not speak once and finish. Every thirty days Korah returns to the place where the earth swallowed him alive, and he cries those words. The ground boils his company up the way a pot returns what it cannot keep down. They surface. They confess. They go under again.

In life Korah had been eloquent. He had told the congregation that all of them were holy, that Moses had taken too much, that the special status of Moses and Aaron was self-appointed. He had gathered two hundred and fifty princes behind that argument. The camp had stood on the edge of agreeing with him. Then the earth opened (Numbers 16:32), and they went down alive.

Now, on a thirty-day clock, the same mouth says the opposite. Moses and his Torah are true. We are liars. Thirty days is how long a people sits with a death. Korah's company keeps that month forever.

The Wilderness Gate

Korah went down alive into the pit, but the pit had a door. Gehinnom (גהינום), the place of judgment after death, has three gates. One opens at the sea, where Jonah cried from the belly of the deep. One opens in Jerusalem. The third opens in the wilderness, and that is the gate through which Korah and his company descended when the earth closed over them (Numbers 16:33).

Rabbah was not standing over a random hole. He was standing at a gate. Two bands of angels call "Come, come" at such doors. The Valley of Wailing is named for a scream that travels the world from end to end. Rabbah had heard only the confession. The scream was older than his spear.

Joshua Walks the Chambers Behind It

Joshua ben Levi later asked to see the place. The Messiah refused. "It is not fitting for the righteous to see it," he said. "There are no righteous people there." Joshua pressed. The angel Qipod took him to the fiery gates anyway.

The first chamber measured a mile in length and breadth. Open pits. Lions made of fire standing over them. When the wicked fell in, the lions cast them back into the flames. Two brooks ran through, and neither brook was water a man could drink. Joshua walked the rim and did not stay long.

From deeper in the rock the same sentence was still rising, on its thirty-day clock, from the wilderness door. Moses and his Torah are true. And we are liars. Rabbah's scorched wool had already proved the heat. Joshua's walk proved the house behind the heat. Korah has not finished the sentence. He only repeats it.