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Chronological

Read the Bible in the chronological order in which its stories and events occurred.

Duration: 365 days

Numbers 16-17

Chapter 16

Rebellion of Korah. ¹^[a]Korah, son of Izhar, son of Kohath, son of Levi, and the Reubenites Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, and On, son of Peleth,^[b] son of Reuben took ²two hundred and fifty Israelites who were leaders in the community, members of the council and men of note, and confronted Moses. ³Holding an assembly against Moses and Aaron, they said,^(A) “You go too far! The whole community, all of them, are holy; the Lord is in their midst. Why then should you set yourselves over the Lord’s assembly?”

⁴When Moses heard this, he fell prostrate. ⁵Then he said to Korah and to all his faction, “May the Lord make known tomorrow morning who belongs to him and who is the holy one and whom he will have draw near to him! The one whom he chooses, he will have draw near to him. ⁶Do this: take your censers, Korah and all his faction, ⁷and put fire in them and place incense in them before the Lord tomorrow. He whom the Lord then chooses is the holy one. You Levites go too far!”

⁸Moses also said to Korah, “Hear, now, you Levites! ⁹^(B)Are you not satisfied that the God of Israel has singled you out from the community of Israel, to have you draw near him to maintain the Lord’s tabernacle, and to attend upon the community and to serve them? ¹⁰He has allowed you and your Levite kinsmen with you to approach him, and yet you seek the priesthood too. ¹¹It is therefore against the Lord that you and all your faction are conspiring. As for Aaron, what has he done that you should grumble against him?”

Rebellion of Dathan and Abiram. ¹²Moses summoned Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, but they answered, “We will not go.^[c] ¹³Are you not satisfied that you have brought us here from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us perish in the wilderness, that now you must also lord it over us? ¹⁴Far from bringing us to a land flowing with milk and honey, or giving us fields and vineyards for our inheritance, will you gouge out our eyes?^[d] No, we will not go.”

¹⁵Then Moses became very angry and said to the Lord, “Pay no attention to their offering. I have never taken a single donkey from them, nor have I wronged any one of them.”^(C)

Korah. ¹⁶Moses said to Korah, “You and all your faction shall appear before the Lord tomorrow—you and they and Aaron too. ¹⁷Then each of you take his own censer, put incense in it, and present it before the Lord, two hundred and fifty censers; and you and Aaron, each with his own censer, do the same.” ¹⁸So each of them took their censers, and laying incense on the fire they had put in them, they took their stand by the entrance of the tent of meeting along with Moses and Aaron. ¹⁹Then, when Korah had assembled all the community against them at the entrance of the tent of meeting, the glory of the Lord appeared to the entire community, ²⁰and the Lord said to Moses and Aaron: ²¹Stand apart from this community, that I may consume them at once. ²²But they fell prostrate and exclaimed, “O God, God of the spirits of all living creatures, if one man sins will you be angry with the whole community?” ²³The Lord answered Moses: ²⁴Speak to the community and tell them: Withdraw from the area around the tent^[e] of Korah, Dathan and Abiram.

Punishment of Dathan and Abiram. ²⁵Moses, followed by the elders of Israel, arose and went to Dathan and Abiram.^[f] ²⁶Then he spoke to the community, “Move away from the tents of these wicked men and do not touch anything that is theirs: otherwise you too will be swept away because of all their sins.” ²⁷So they withdrew from the area around the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. When Dathan and Abiram had come out and were standing at the entrance of their tents with their wives, their children, and their little ones, ²⁸Moses said, “This is how you shall know that the Lord sent me to do all I have done, and that it was not of my own devising: ²⁹if these die an ordinary death, merely suffering the fate common to all humanity, the Lord has not sent me. ³⁰But if the Lord makes a chasm, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them with all belonging to them, and they go down alive to Sheol,^[g] then you will know that these men have spurned the Lord.” ³¹^(D)No sooner had he finished saying all this than the ground beneath them split open, ³²and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their families and all of Korah’s people^[h] with all their possessions. ³³They went down alive to Sheol with all belonging to them; the earth closed over them, and they disappeared from the assembly. ³⁴But all the Israelites near them fled at their shrieks, saying, “The earth might swallow us too!”

Punishment of Korah. ³⁵And fire from the Lord came forth which consumed the two hundred and fifty men who were offering the incense.

Chapter 17

¹The Lord said to Moses: ²Tell Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, to remove the censers from the embers; and scatter the fire some distance away, for they have become holy— ³^[i]the censers of those who sinned at the cost of their lives. Have them hammered into plates to cover the altar, because in being presented before the Lord they have become holy. In this way they shall serve as a sign to the Israelites. ⁴So taking the bronze censers which had been presented by those who were burned, Eleazar the priest had them hammered into a covering for the altar, ⁵just as the Lord had directed him through Moses. This was to be a reminder to the Israelites that no unauthorized person, no one who was not a descendant of Aaron, should draw near to offer incense before the Lord, lest he meet the fate of Korah and his faction.

⁶The next day the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron, saying, “You have killed the people of the Lord.” ⁷But while the community was assembling against them, Moses and Aaron turned toward the tent of meeting, and the cloud now covered it and the glory of the Lord appeared. ⁸Then Moses and Aaron came to the front of the tent of meeting, ⁹and the Lord said to Moses: ¹⁰Remove yourselves from this community, that I may consume them at once. But they fell prostrate.

¹¹Then Moses said to Aaron, “Take your censer, put fire from the altar in it, lay incense on it, and bring it quickly to the community to make atonement for them; for wrath has come forth from the Lord and the plague has begun.”^(E) ¹²Aaron took his censer just as Moses directed and ran in among the assembly, where the plague had already begun among the people. Then he offered the incense and made atonement for the people, ¹³while standing there between the living and the dead. And so the scourge was checked. ¹⁴There were fourteen thousand seven hundred dead from the scourge, in addition to those who died because of Korah. ¹⁵When the scourge had been checked, Aaron returned to Moses at the entrance of the tent of meeting.

Aaron’s Staff. ¹⁶The Lord now said to Moses: ¹⁷Speak to the Israelites and get from them a staff^[j] for each ancestral house, twelve staffs in all, from all the leaders of their ancestral houses. Write each man’s name on his staff; ¹⁸and write Aaron’s name on Levi’s staff.^[k] For each head of an ancestral house shall have a staff. ¹⁹Then deposit them in the tent of meeting, in front of the covenant, where I meet you. ²⁰The staff of the man whom I choose shall sprout. Thus I will rid myself of the Israelites’ grumbling against you.

²¹So Moses spoke to the Israelites, and all their leaders gave him staffs, twelve in all, one from each leader of their ancestral houses; and Aaron’s staff was among them. ²²Then Moses deposited the staffs before the Lord in the tent of the covenant. ²³The next day, when Moses entered the tent of the covenant, Aaron’s staff, representing the house of Levi, had sprouted. It had put forth sprouts, produced blossoms, and borne ripe almonds! ²⁴So Moses brought out all the staffs from the Lord’s presence to all the Israelites, and each one identified his own staff and took it. ²⁵Then the Lord said to Moses: Put back Aaron’s staff in front of the covenant, for safe keeping as a sign to the rebellious, so that their grumbling against me may cease and they might not die. ²⁶Moses did this. Just as the Lord had commanded him, so he did.

Charge of the Sacred Things. ²⁷^[l]Then the Israelites exclaimed to Moses, “We will perish; we are lost, we are all lost! ²⁸Anyone who approaches the tabernacle of the Lord will die! Will there be no end to our perishing?”

Footnotes

16:1–3 The evidence seems to show that accounts of two, if not more, distinct rebellions have been combined in this chapter. The most obvious are the rebellions of Korah and his faction (Nm 27:3) and of Dathan and Abiram (Dt 11:6); cf. Ps 106. The present account combines both events into one narrative; but even here it is rather easy to separate the two. The rebellion of the Reubenites, Dathan and Abiram, was more political in character, against Moses alone as the civil leader (cf. v. 13); these rebels were punished by being swallowed alive in an earthquake. The rebellion of Korah was more religious in character, directed primarily against the religious leadership of Aaron (though in vv. 19–22 it is Korah and the whole community against both Moses and Aaron). About two hundred and fifty malcontents joined Korah’s faction, and they are punished by fire. The parts of the present section which refer to the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram are vv. 12–15 and vv. 25–34 of chap. 16; the rest of chap. 16 and all of chap. 17 chiefly concern the rebellion of Korah.
16:1 The Reubenites…son of Peleth: some suggest on the basis of 26:5, 8 and Gn 46:9 reading instead of the traditional Hebrew text: “son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, son of Pallu, son of Reuben.”
16:12 We will not go: to appear before Moses’ “tribunal.”
16:14 Gouge out our eyes: blind us to the real state of affairs.
16:24 Withdraw from the area around the tent: the word for “tent,” mishkan, here and in v. 27, is otherwise used in the singular only for the tent of meeting, suggesting possibly the erection of a rival sanctuary by the rebels. Note further, as an indication of the fact that various accounts of rebellion have been fused here, that in v. 19 the entire community had been assembled by Korah at the tent of meeting.
16:25 Since Dathan and Abiram had refused to go to Moses (vv. 12–14), he, with the elders as witnesses, was obliged to go to their tents.
16:30 Sheol: see note on Ps 6:6.
16:32 And all of Korah’s people: the implication of this secondary addition to the text is, on the one hand, that Korah met his death elsewhere, presumably with the two hundred and fifty offering incense (vv. 16–17, 35); or, on the other hand, he died along with Dathan and Abiram in the splitting of the earth.
17:3 Whatever was brought into intimate contact with something holy shared in its holiness. See note on 19:20.
17:17 The staff was not merely an article of practical use, but also a symbol of authority; cf. Gn 49:10; Nm 24:17; Jer 48:17. Therefore, the staff of a leader of a tribe was considered the emblem of the tribe; in fact, certain Hebrew words such as matteh, the word for “staff” here, also mean “tribe.” Perhaps for this reason, to avoid confusion, the author here uses the term bet’ab, “ancestral house,” for “tribe” instead of one of the ordinary words for “tribe.”
17:18 Levi’s staff: it is not clear whether this is considered as one of the twelve mentioned in the preceding verse, or as a thirteenth staff. Sometimes Levi is reckoned as one of the twelve tribes (e.g., Dt 27:12–13), but more often the number twelve is arrived at by counting the two sub-tribes of Joseph, i.e., Ephraim and Manasseh, as distinct tribes. In this passage also it seems probable that the tribe of Levi is considered apart from the other twelve tribes.
17:27–28 The people’s distress here echoes their panic in 16:34, and may be heightened further by the death of the two hundred and fifty leaders offering incense in 16:35.

New American Bible (Revised Edition) (NABRE)

Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.