Korah Still Cries From Under the Earth Every Thirty Days

The Bedouin's Offer

Rabbah bar Bar Hannah was a traveler known for stories that stretched credulity, and this one began the way several of his accounts began: a Bedouin approached him in the desert with a proposition. "Come," the Bedouin said, "I will show you where Korah and his followers went down."

The Talmud records this in tractate Bava Batra 74a without apology for how it sounds. A Bedouin guide, a wandering sage, a desolate place, and an offer to see the specific geography of a punishment described in Numbers 16. Rabbah agreed.

The Test

The Bedouin led him to two fissures in the ground. Smoke curled from within. Rabbah took a bundle of wool, soaked it in water, and attached it to the end of a spear. He lowered the spear into the crack. When he pulled it out, the wool was scorched. The heat down there, even after all the centuries, was still burning.

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

The Thirty-Day Cycle

The tradition the Talmud preserved was specific about the schedule. Every thirty days, Korah returns to the place where the earth swallowed him alive, and he cries out these words. Like a pot that boils and returns its contents, the text said, Korah and his company rise back to the surface of their punishment and speak.

What they say is not a complaint. They do not ask to be released. They do not argue their case. The rebellion that made them famous was built on the claim that Moses had taken too much authority for himself, that all the congregation was holy, that the special status Moses and Aaron held was self-appointed rather than divinely granted. Korah had been eloquent about this. He had gathered 250 princes of the congregation behind his argument. The people had been on the edge of agreeing with him.

And now, cycling up through the earth every thirty days, Korah said: Moses and his Torah are true.

The Gates of Gehinnom

Korah went down alive into the pit, but the pit had geography. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle, described Gehinnom as having three gates. One opens at the sea, which is where Jonah cried from the belly of the deep. One opens in the wilderness, and that is the gate through which Korah and his company descended, referenced specifically in Numbers 16:33 when the text says they went down alive into the earth. The third gate opens in Jerusalem.

Gehinnom had seven chambers beyond those gates, each more severe than the last. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, according to the same Chronicles of Jerahmeel, was escorted by the angel Qipod through these chambers when he pressed the Messiah to let him see the place. The first chamber measured a mile in length and breadth and held open pits filled with lions made of fire. The Messiah had been reluctant to allow the visit, saying it was not fitting for the righteous to see it. But Joshua pressed the matter, and what he saw confirmed that the geography was real and the inhabitants were real and the punishments were specific to what each person had done.

What the Crying Means

Korah's recurring declaration from below the earth is a strange form of vindication for Moses. It is not the vindication of the triumphant. It is the vindication that comes from a defeated opponent who finally saw what he refused to see in life. Korah was intelligent enough to make his challenge persuasive. He was eloquent enough to nearly split the Israelite nation. And he was wrong in a way that thirty-day cycles of declaration could not fully correct, because he had made the error when it still mattered.

The earth that swallowed him kept him in a state that was not quite death and not quite life, and in that state the argument he had made in the wilderness was still running, still being adjudicated, still producing a verdict. Moses and his Torah are true. The fire below was burning the wool off every piece of evidence Korah had ever marshaled for his case.