All of Them Holy

Korach comes from the tribe of Levi, the same family as Moshe and Aharon - they are cousins. He gets together with Datan and Aviram, who are from the tribe of Reuven and camp right next to him, and with a man called On son of Pelet. The verse begins with the word took, but it never tells us what he took. Some explain that he took himself away from everybody else. Others explain that he took people - with words, talking to them until they agreed with him.

The verb has no object. וַיִּקַּח קֹרַח, and Korach took - took what? Hebrew does not usually leave a sentence hanging like that, and the commentators fill the gap in opposite directions: he took himself aside, or he took people, meaning he talked them round. Either way the rebellion starts as a private decision before it is ever a public one. Watch the names as well. Four men are listed and one of them, On son of Pelet, never speaks, never dies and is never heard from again. Sanhedrin 109b fills the silence with his wife, who asks him what he actually stands to gain, since either way he ends up as somebody’s student. He is the one person here who gets out before the thing becomes irreversible.

Rashi offers two readings of the objectless verb. In the first, וַיִּקַּח is reflexive: Korach took himself off to one side, separating from the community in order to press his claim about the priesthood, and Rashi supports the usage from Iyov 15:12 and from Onkelos, who renders the verb ואתפלג, he separated himself. In the second, the taking is done to other people - he drew the heads of the Sanhedrin after him with persuasive words, the way the Torah says קַח אֶת־אַהֲרֹן, take Aharon. Ramban quotes Rashi’s first reading and then declines it, arguing that the Midrash does not mean Korach moved himself physically anywhere: לבו לקחו, his heart took him, since לקיחה can be said of a thought or a plan. Rashbam keeps it plainer still, reading וַיִּקַּח as approaching and gathering, on the model of וַיִּקַּח אַבְרָם אֶת־שָׂרַי: Korach came, and brought people with him. The genealogy repays slow reading. Son of Yitzhar, son of Kehat, son of Levi - and it stops. Rashi notes that Yaakov prayed his own name should not be recorded in connection with this quarrel, citing his words in Bereshit 49:6, and observes that in Divrei HaYamim the very same line does run all the way up through Yaakov, there in a setting of Levites singing in the Temple. Rashi also explains what two Reubenites are doing here at all: Reuven camped on the south side, adjacent to the family of Kehat, and neighbours make allies - woe to the wicked man, woe to his neighbour. Then there is On son of Pelet, named once and then absent from the entire chapter.

Two hundred and fifty men stand up with Korach, and Datan and Aviram are there too. These are not troublemakers nobody has heard of. The Torah says they were leaders, men whose names everyone in the camp knew. That matters, because it means Moshe is not looking at a small group of angry people. He is looking at the most respected men he has.

Notice what the Torah does not do here. It could have called them a mob. Instead it gives them three titles in a row - leaders of the community, summoned to the assembly, men of name - which is close to the language the same book used for the official tribal princes back in chapter 1. Stories normally shrink their opponents. This one makes them impressive, and it does that deliberately, because you are meant to understand that a bad idea can arrive carried by precisely the people you would have trusted.

Three epithets in a row, and not one of them is hostile: נְשִׂיאֵי עֵדָה, קְרִאֵי מוֹעֵד, אַנְשֵׁי־שֵׁם. Rashi already noticed that the first two are near enough a quotation of how Bamidbar introduced the legitimate tribal leadership at the census - אֵלֶּה קְרוּאֵי הָעֵדָה נְשִׂיאֵי מַטּוֹת אֲבוֹתָם at 1:16 - and he draws from the overlap that the men Korach assembled were of exactly that rank, fit to head the Sanhedrin. The vocabulary the book had reserved for constituted authority is handed here to the men standing against Moshe. Ibn Ezra, consistent with his placing of the episode at the time the Levites replaced the firstborn, identifies the two hundred and fifty as firstborn who had themselves performed the service, which is why fire pans are the natural instrument for them to bring; Ramban, who dates the episode quite differently, reaches the same conclusion about who they were. The order of the verse is also worth noting: וַיָּקֻמוּ comes before any speech at all. They stand up first. The confrontation is staged before it is argued.

Korach and the men with him stand around Moshe and Aharon and say: you have taken too much for yourselves. Everybody here is holy. Hashem is with all of us, not only with you two. Stop for a moment and notice how close that is to being true. Hashem really did tell the whole camp to be holy. But He told them to be holy: that is a job to do. Korach says everybody already is holy, as if it were a prize they had won. So the argument is not about whether people are special. It is about whether being special means everybody should have the same job.

Read the sentence on its own and it is hard to fault. The whole community, all of them, are holy, and Hashem is among them. Korach did not invent the vocabulary - the Torah uses קְדֹשִׁים of Israel more than once - and the same book has just called the men standing with him leaders of the community. So where is the flaw? In two places. The first is a change small enough to read straight past: the Torah says be holy, and Korach says are holy. A job has quietly become a possession. The second is grammatical. A verse earlier those men are נְשִׂיאֵי עֵדָה, from the root נ-ש-א, raised ones, and the charge they bring is תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ, the reflexive of that same root: you raise yourselves. Somebody is raised in Korach’s arrangement too. He is standing in front of two hundred and fifty princes, asking why anyone should be a prince.

Rashi glosses רַב־לָכֶם as: you have taken far more greatness than is proper for you, and reads the verse as one connected argument - having taken kingship for yourself, you should not have gone on to choose the priesthood for your brother, since all of them, and not only you, heard the divine speech at Sinai. That last point, which Rashi draws from Midrash Tanchuma, is exactly what gives Korach his footing. He is not proposing a novel doctrine; he is invoking an experience the whole camp shares. Now look at what the source verses actually say. קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ in Vayikra 19:2; מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ in Shemot 19:6, itself conditional on אִם־שָׁמוֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ; and - the one Sforno cites on this very verse - וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים לֵאלֹהֵיכֶם, the second-to-last verse of the chapter immediately before this one. Every one of them is imperative or future. Korach’s כָל־הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים is a flat present. The charge has become an inventory. Sforno also supplies the staging: the confrontation was timed for an hour when a crowd had already assembled around Moshe waiting for their cases to be judged, and the two hundred and fifty moved about as though on ordinary business, so that the challenge would have an audience and the audience would carry it back through the camp. The Hebrew, meanwhile, contains its own reply. The accusation is תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ, from נ-ש-א, the very root that titled the accusers one verse earlier. Someone will be raised under any arrangement, Korach’s included, and the question was never whether but by whom and on whose authority. The phrase itself has a life beyond this verse: Moshe throws it straight back at 16:7, רַב־לָכֶם בְּנֵי לֵוִי, and at Devarim 3:26 he hears רַב־לָךְ said to him.

Moshe has just been told, in front of everybody, that he took too much for himself. He does not shout back. He does not explain. He lies down flat on the ground with his face towards the earth. That is what people in the Torah do when something is too heavy to answer with words.

Two hundred and fifty people accuse you in public, you have a reply available, and instead you say nothing and lie face down on the ground. Is that humility, or is it a leader who has run out? Rashi counts this as the fourth crisis in a row and says his hands sank - not a flattering way to describe a prophet. Set against the earlier three the silence is loud: at the golden calf Moshe pleads, at the complainers he prays, at the spies he argues. Here the text does not say that he prayed at all.

Rashi, citing Midrash Tanchuma, does the counting: the golden calf, where the text says וַיְחַל מֹשֶׁה; the complainers, where Moshe prayed; the spies, where he argued from what the Egyptians would say. This is the fourth, and his hands sank. The parable Rashi brings is of a prince who wronged his father, and the father’s friend who obtained pardon once, twice and three times, and on the fourth occasion said, how long can I go on troubling the king, perhaps he will not accept my advocacy again. What is missing from this verse is therefore the point of it. In the three earlier crises Moshe speaks to Hashem; here he does not. Ramban’s reconstruction of the camp’s mood makes that absence heavier still, because on his account the people had already become embittered after the spies, telling themselves that their misfortunes came through Moshe’s words - and the prayer that might have averted the decree had not come. Read against that background, and this is a reading rather than Ramban’s own statement, the silence of falling on his face is uncomfortably close to the thing they are complaining of, performed in front of them.

Moshe says one word first: morning. He is telling Korach to wait a night, and then Hashem will show whose work this is. He is not saying I am right and you are wrong. He is saying that this is not mine to decide - and it is not yours either.

Why does Moshe say morning instead of answering? Rashi gives two reasons and they pull in opposite directions. One is a rebuke: Hashem fixed morning and evening in His world, and just as you cannot turn one into the other, you cannot undo this. The other is generous: a night gives Korach room to withdraw, and Moshe leaves the door open. What both readings share is that Moshe refuses to have the argument at the moment it is offered to him, in front of the crowd Korach assembled. That refusal is worth noticing, because almost every part of Korach’s set-up depended on the answer coming immediately.

Moshe answers with a noun. Rashi gives two reasons for בֹּקֶר. The first is rebuke by analogy: the Holy One has fixed boundaries in His world, and just as you cannot turn morning into evening, so you cannot make Aharon’s appointment of no effect. The second is mercy dressed as procedure - the delay gives them the night, in case they withdraw; Rashi adds that the present hour was a time of drinking and therefore not fitting for appearing before Him. Then the verse does something careful. It names two things and matches them to two acts of bringing near: אֶת־אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ וְאֶת־הַקָּדוֹשׁ, the one who is His and the holy one, וְהִקְרִיב אֵלָיו, and finally וְאֵת אֲשֶׁר יִבְחַר־בּוֹ יַקְרִיב אֵלָיו. Rashi points to the Targum, which renders the two differently - bringing near to Himself, and bringing near to His service - and reads הַקָּדוֹשׁ as the one designated for the priesthood. Watch the number. Korach said קְדֹשִׁים, plural. Moshe says הַקָּדוֹשׁ, singular, and he never denies the plural. The word that decides between them is יִבְחַר. Holiness in this argument is not a rank that some hold and others lack; it is what the whole camp is charged with. Nearness to the service is a different thing altogether. It is an assignment, and the one making it is not Moshe.