Numbers 17: The Budding of Aaron's Rod
The HarperCollins Study Bible offers the following footnote for Numbers 16:
"In this section on the revolt of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, there is some mixing of traditions: the complaints are against Moses or Aaron or bother; the complaints are about secular or sacred leadership; either Levites or Reubenites or even the whole community are the rebels; the rebels are swallowed whole or burned by fore from the Lord."Yikes! That's quite some weaving! But keeping track of the myriad strands keeps us from realizing what the author is truly trying to say: that the Israelites are wary of leadership, wayward in their faith of God, and generally disobedient. And really, the biblical author could be saying this about humankind in general. There will always be the dissenters and the people that think they could do it better. But in the biblical narrative, we are shown that there is a supreme leader - the Lord. And if the Lord is not obeyed or the Lord's intermediaries are not obeyed, tragedy will strike the guilty. With few exceptions (see Job) the bible is fairly straightforward in this respect: Obey God and all is well. Disobey God and all is not well. Yet it is the obedience and disobedience that drive biblical narrative. Dialectical tensions between God and the Israelites - the tensions between divine will hand human freewill - ensure the lively narrative we know.
I will try to tell the narrative as completely as possible, but the important part is the message.
Revolt of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram: Numbers 16
Korah (a Levite), along with Dathan and Abiram (both Reubenites) gather 250 Israelite men and confront Moses [or Moses and Aaron]. They tell Moses: "You have gone too far! All the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. So why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?" (Num. 16.3).
There are actually two separate and contradictory arguments here. The first is an argument for a sort of theological communism. Because God resides in the tent of meeting among all the Israelites, all the Israelites deserve equal access to him. The second argument, which runs contrary to the first, is that the Levites should have as much access to God as Moses and Aaron because they have been declared separate from the rest of Israel. The first argument equalizes all the Israelites. The second only equalizes the Levites with Moses and Aaron.
Moses responds to the second argument (argued by Korah, as it concerns the Levites only) with a test. The next morning, Korah and his company of 250 are to light censers (trays that hold coal on which incense are burned). The one that the Lord has chosen will then become apparent. Moses then rebukes the Levites for their pride, asking, "is it too little that" God has set them apart so that they may serve him. They are in a favored position, and yet they want more.
Moses then responds to the first argument by calling for Dathan and Abiram (who made this argument because they are members of the lay people and therefore would believe in equality for all). They respond using the same phrasing Moses used to rebuke the Levites: "Is it too little that" Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt to die in the wilderness. In their estimation, Egypt is "a land flowing with milk and honey," why not then return? Clearly they have forgotten about their oppression.
Angered, Moses tells the Lord to pay no mind to the offering of the people that doubt the Lord.
The next day, the people gather before the tent of meeting and God appears in a pillar of cloud. The Lord speaks to Moses and Aaron, telling them to step aside so he may consume the congregation. Moses and Aaron intercede on behalf of the people a la Abraham: "O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, shall one person sin and you become angry with the whole congregation?" (Num. 16.22). The Lord changes his command, telling Moses that the congregation should get away from the dwellings of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.
Korah, Dathan, and Abiram stand at the entrance to their tents along with their wives and children [this shows that God's wrath extends to the children of sinners]. Moses stands before them and declares that the congregation will know that the Lord sent Moses if the men and their families are swallowed up by the ground and they go down alive to Sheol [not hell, but a shady underworld].
As soon as Moses finishes speaking, the ground "opened its mouth and swallowed them up" along with their families and household goods [the passage of Numbers 16.31-33 mentions only Korah, though the spirit of the story would have the others swallowed up as well]. The earth closes up over where they stood. This thoroughly freaks out the congregation, which does not respond by acknowledging Moses as their leader, but rather by running away fearing they too will be swallowed up. That seems to be a pretty rational response, actually.
Meanwhile, the 250 men [probably Levites, as they are actually allowed to handle the censers] offering incense are all consumed by the fire of the Lord, a la Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu. The moral of the story seems to be obey God and Moses.
Interestingly, the censers are purified by the blaze, as the sacrificers become the sacrificed and sanctify the censers. The holy bronze censers, consecrated in the fire of the Lord [comprised of the burning of unfaithful men] are hammered out as a covering for the altar. This serves as a reminder that only the descendants of Aaron, the priests, may offer incense before the Lord.
What follows is one of the tensest cinematic moments of the Bible.
The next day there is backlash as the Israelites accuse Moses and Aaron of killing the people of the Lord. The two turn around and find God has appeared in the form of a cloud in the tent of meeting.
God has had it with these people.
God tells Moses, "Get away from the congregation, so that I may consume them in a moment." At this Moses falls on his face, as a way of begging the Lord not to do so. Moses tells Aaron to quickly take incense into the congregation, because God has cast a plague on them. The plague has already begun by the time Aaron gets there, and people are dying all over the place. Aaron makes atonement for the people with the incense. "He stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stopped" (Num. 16.48). A vengeful God, however, has killed 14,700 by the plague, in addition to those who died along with Korah and the 250 burned improperly offering incense.
The Budding of Aaron's Rod: Numbers 17
There is one final display of Aaron and Moses' divinely-granted leadership, a response to the first argument above. The Lord tells Moses to get a staff from each ancestral house and write each man's name on the staff. Aaron's name is to go on Levi's staff (having already proved his authority over them). The staffs are placed before the Lord in the tent of the covenant. The next day, Aaron's is discovered to have sprouted, a symbol that Aaron is divinely chosen.
God attempts to use the staff as a deterrent against rebellious Israelites: "Put back the staff of Aaron before the covenant, to be kept as a warning to rebels, so that you may make an end of their complaints against me, or else they will die" (Num. 17.10).
As today's reading has shown, however, constancy is hard to come by. And if the congregation always has something to complain about. Having lost the battle for equality, they mourn, "We are perishing; we are lost, all of us are lost! Everyone who approaches the tabernacle of the Lord will die. Are we all to perish?" (Num. 17.12-13. The answer is no. If the people stay away from the tabernacle and allow the Levites to perform their sacrifices, no one will die.
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