Nadab and Abihu Tried to Live on the Sight of God Alone

The Tabernacle stood finished, its boards gold and its veil hung, and the fire had not yet come down. Inside the freshness of that new house, two young priests watched their uncle climb a mountain and vanish into a cloud, and they began to do arithmetic with holiness.

Nadab and Abihu, the eldest sons of Aaron, had seen what other men only heard rumored. They had stood on Sinai with the seventy elders while the pavement under the feet of God shone like sapphire, clear as the body of the sky. They had looked up, and they had lived. The verse said it plainly. They beheld God, and they ate and drank.

The Sons Did the Arithmetic of Heaven

It was the eating and the drinking that nagged at them.

"Our master Moses went up to the firmament," one said to the other, and the words had the shape of a ruling already half decided. "He gazed on the Shekhinah. Forty days he stayed, and he did not eat bread and did not drink water. The seeing was his food."

The other took the thought further, the way a student finishes a teacher's sentence to prove he has understood it. "Then we who gaze on the Shekhinah have no need of bread either. We have no need of water. Let us not waste this nearness on appetite. Let us feast the eyes alone."

It was a clean argument. It moved from a true premise to a daring conclusion, and that was exactly its danger. They had stood at Sinai and looked and afterward sat down and ate and drank like men. The hunger had returned to their bodies the way it returns to anyone. But they had decided that the hunger was a failure to be corrected, not a wall built into them by the One who made the body. So they set themselves to do better than the seventy elders. They would look, and keep looking, and let the looking burn the need for everything else away.

A Verse That Was Written Twice

God watched them feed their eyes.

There is a quiet patience in the way heaven answered them, and it is more frightening than a thunderclap. The hand was already raised. But the house was not yet dedicated, and the new altar had no fire on it, and a death before the work began would have been a death without a name. So the sentence waited. It waited through the building of the Tabernacle, through the bringing of the boards and the weaving of the curtains, through the long preparation of the courtyard where the eldest sons of Aaron would one day stand to serve.

When the day came that they drew near to offer, the waiting ended.

Afterward the verse remembered them strangely. Nadab and Abihu died before the Lord, it said, and then it said before the Lord a second time in the same breath, when they offered strange fire before the Lord. Twice the same words, as if the place of their death wanted underlining. They had wanted to live before the Lord without the body, and they died before the Lord because of it. The doubled phrase is the seam where their desire and their sentence were stitched into one line.

The Other Charge Against Them

Rabbi Eliezer told it with a colder edge, and his version had nothing to do with food at all.

The brothers died, he said, for one act. They ruled a point of law in the presence of Moses their master. Somewhere in that courtyard, on the matter of the fire or the incense or the order of the service, they decided the law for themselves and acted on their decision while the man who had brought the law down from the mountain stood close enough to ask. They did not ask. To rule in front of your teacher is to say, with your hands, that his presence has become unnecessary. The whole transgression was the same transgression. They wanted nearness without limit, and limit was the one thing nearness required.

Rabbi Eliezer knew the weight of this rule because he had felt it land in his own house.

The Disciple Who Would Not Last the Year

A student of his once ruled a halakhah in front of him.

The man meant no harm. He answered a question that came to him, decided it, gave the ruling. He was good. He was confident. He was standing where his master could hear him. When he had gone, Rabbi Eliezer turned to his wife.

"Imma Shalom," he said to her, "this man will not live out his year."

And the man did not. The year turned, and he was gone before it closed, just as the words had said. The disciples came to their teacher unsettled, because a thing foretold and fulfilled looks like prophecy, and prophecy in a sage frightened them.

"Our master," they asked him, "are you a prophet?"

He gave them a borrowed answer, an old prophet's refusal. "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet." Then he gave them the true one, the tradition he had received from the masters who taught him. "Whoever rules a halakhah in the presence of his master is liable to death." He had not foreseen the man's end. He had only known the law that the man had broken, and known what such a breaking costs.

The Fire That Answered the Hunger

So the same death has two faces, and they are one face.

In the courtyard of the finished Tabernacle, the sons of Aaron came near with fire that was theirs and not commanded, hungry to see what only Moses had seen and to decide what only Moses could decide. They had reasoned themselves past the body and past the master in a single motion, because both were the same wall, the limit that says a creature does not become the Creator by looking hard enough or ruling boldly enough. Fire came out from before the Lord. It did not consume the curtains or the gold. It went for the two who had tried to live on sight alone, and it gave their hunger the only answer it had been asking for, which was to be filled completely and forever.

And when Israel's grief rose afterward in that courtyard, the One who had sent the fire grieved with them, the way a father carries out his own dead and counts the loss as his own. In all their distress, He was distressed.