The Fire Rolled Korah Like a Ball Into the Mouth of the Earth

Click for full size

The Man Nobody Recognized

The razor went over every inch of him.

God had told Moses to purify the Levites, and purifying a Levite meant passing a blade across all his flesh, and Korah was a Levite, so Moses did it to Korah like everyone else. Then Moses took him by the arms and the legs and lifted him and swung him back and forth in the air the way a priest waves an offering, and set him down, and said, "You are pure."

Korah walked back into the camp. People he had known his whole life looked straight at him and did not know who he was.

"Who did this to you?"

"Moses did it to me," he said, and he told them the rest of it. The arms. The legs. The waving. "And then he brought in his brother Aaron, dressed him up like a bride, and sat him down in the Tent of Meeting."

He took his garment and went home and asked his wife what to do.

You Have Too Much

She did not talk him out of it, and by morning he had company.

Two Reubenites came in first, Dathan and Abiram, whose names meant the one who breaks the law and the one who will not bend, and who camped on the south side of the Tabernacle where the sons of Kohath camped, close enough to Korah's tent that the friendship had been forming for years. Behind them came two hundred and fifty men, and these were not malcontents. They were princes of the tribes, men with standing.

They went through the camp counting up what the priesthood took. Moses is king. His brother is High Priest. His nephews are deputies. The gift offering goes to the priest, the tithe goes to the priest, twenty-four gifts in all go to the priest.

Then the whole assembly stood in front of the two brothers and said it out loud. "You have too much. Every one of this congregation is holy and the Lord is among them. Why do you lift yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?"

Korah gathered his people closer. "You have loaded more on us than Egypt did," he said. "We were better off under Pharaoh than under you."

They began looking around for stones. Moses went down on his face in the dirt.

"I am not after a kingdom," he said when he got up. "My brother is not after the priesthood." And then, not to them, "Master of the universe, You are the one who told me to bring Aaron near. They are standing here to kill us."

He straightened up and gave them a time. "In the morning the Lord will make known who is His." Morning, he said, not tomorrow. Every magician in the world could work together to turn a morning into an evening and not manage it, and the one who split light from darkness had split Aaron out from everybody else the same way, and by first light they would all be able to see it.

We Will Not Go Up

Moses sent for Dathan and Abiram.

The answer came back four words long. "We will not go up."

Not we will not come. Not we will not go. Up. They had a mouth on them and the mouth chose the direction, and the direction stuck.

Moses said that if they would not come to him he would go to them, because a man looks different when someone is standing in front of him and they might yet be ashamed. So he walked out to their tents alone. They came out to meet him and stood in the doorway, and they stood there the way Goliath would stand in a valley one day, cursing, blaspheming, letting the whole camp hear what they thought of him.

Moses turned around and said it in front of everyone. "If these men die the ordinary death of ordinary men," he said, "then God did not send me."

The ground under their feet split open.

Two Deaths for One Man

Fire came out from the Lord and took the two hundred and fifty men holding their censers, and the earth took Dathan and Abiram and their wives and their children and the infants at the breast, and Korah got both.

He was standing among the ones being burned, censer in his hand, incense still smoking in it, because Moses had told him to bring his own fire pan and he had brought it. The fire caught him first, in full view of every man burning beside him, so that none of them could ever say Korah had brought this down on them and then slipped out of it. Then the fire rolled him. It turned him over and over on the ground like a ball, all the way across the camp, and kept rolling him until it delivered him to the mouth of the earth, and the ones going down saw him arrive among them, so that none of them could say it either.

Israel ran. They had been standing in a ring around the whole thing and they broke and ran from the sound coming out of the ground, and what they were shouting as they ran was, "Moses our master, save us!"

Then the earth closed over them.

Some Say They Are Still Down There

By the next week the jobs were filled. The men were gone and their offices were not; other leaders were appointed in their places and the camp went on marching.

The court above does not sentence anyone under twenty. The court below does not sentence anyone under thirteen. In Korah's quarrel, day-old babies burned and went down into the deepest part of the abyss, and there is no way to make that arithmetic come out even.

As for the men themselves, the earth closed and that was the last anyone saw, and some hold that nothing after that was ever finished. That they are alive down there. That the punishment is still going on, this morning, under the feet of whoever is standing above them.