Three Things Moses Faced Before God Called Him Home

The Cousin Who Wanted His Crown

Korach's argument was already familiar to Moses. The man was Yitzhar's son, Yitzhar meaning oil, and oil rises. Moses had heard the logic. Aaron was anointed. David was anointed. If oil rises, why did Yitzhar's son not rise with it? Why did Moses get the prophecy and Aaron get the priesthood while Korach got the carrying duties for the Tabernacle furniture?

Rabbi Levi, recorded in Bamidbar Rabbah, refused to let Korach's challenge be dismissed as simple ambition. The Torah says Korach took (Numbers 16:1) without saying what he took. Job 15:12 supplied the answer: to what does your heart take you? Korach took nothing in his hands. His heart took him. The grievance was real. The argument had internal coherence. The problem was that the heart that built the case had mistaken its own genealogy for a consecration.

Moses heard the argument. He fell on his face. He did not strike back. He proposed a test: let everyone bring incense before God and let God choose. The ground opened and closed the question permanently. But Moses had lived with Korach's challenge for forty years, carrying it the way you carry an unresolved argument with someone who died before you finished saying what you needed to say. It was one of the accounts still open when God told him to prepare for the end.

What Moses Saw When He Looked Ahead

Bamidbar Rabbah preserves a strange and beautiful tradition about what Moses was shown when he reached the edge of his own death. Among the things God showed him was a room in the future, a school in the land of Israel, where a man named Akiva ben Yosef was teaching Torah to rows of students. The students were asking questions. Akiva was answering with a depth and precision that Moses could not fully follow.

Moses sat in the back of the room, in the tradition's image, in the eighth row. He listened to what his own Torah had become in the hands of this man who would live fifteen hundred years after him, and he could not recognize half of what he heard. The Torah he had received on Sinai had been transformed into something of such density and range that its own author could not parse it.

This disturbed Moses. Then a student asked Akiva: from where do you derive this law? And Akiva said: it is a law given to Moses at Sinai. Moses heard his own name receive credit for something he had not understood, and the disturbance turned into comfort. It was his Torah. The roots were his. The flowering was Akiva's. Both were true at once.

The War Moses Would Not Leave Before It Was Finished

God told Moses to take vengeance on Midian before he died (Numbers 31:2). Moses organized the army, appointed the commanders, sent twelve thousand men across the Jordan. He did not wait at the camp. He stood and watched. The Midianites who had sent Cozbi and Bilam to weaken Israel, who had turned the plain of Peor into a catastrophe, were to be answered before Moses stepped off the stage.

Bamidbar Rabbah made a point of Moses's refusal to die first. He knew the war was coming. He knew God had told him the war would happen and then the death would follow. He could have accepted the sequence passively, delegated the vengeance and climbed the mountain while the army was still crossing. He did not. He waited until the army came back, until the captains reported, until the inventory was complete and the division of the spoil was settled.

This was not bloodthirstiness. The rabbis read it as a kind of honor owed to the dead of Peor, to the twenty-four thousand who had died in the plague that Phinehas's spear had stopped. Moses had watched that plague begin. He had stood at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and wept while people died. He owed those dead a reckoning before he went. And he stayed to see it happen.

The Prophet Who Died Still Carrying Business

Bamidbar Rabbah's portrait of Moses near the end is the portrait of a man who has not finished. He has unresolved arguments with dead cousins. He has seen the future of his Torah in a school he will never attend. He has vengeance to oversee before he is permitted to close his own eyes.

The serene prophet ready to climb the mountain and dissolve into a divine sleep does not appear in this midrash. The Moses of Bamidbar Rabbah is still doing what he has always done: holding the account open until it can be properly closed, refusing to die until the people are taken care of, watching the school in the vision and taking comfort from credit he did not know he would ever receive.

God, in this telling, accommodates this. The death waits while the business is finished. Korach gets the last argument Moses has for him. Akiva gets the name attached to his wisdom. Midian gets the accounting it is owed. And then, and only then, Moses climbs the mountain, looks across at the land he will not enter, and lets the account close.