Week 6 Numbers
The story of the Korah-Dathan-Abiram uprising against Moses seems like one story but I’m wondering if it’s two overlapping stories.
The three men are all introduced in the first verse of sixteen, and they complain to Moses about his unfair religious hierarchy – sounds like a kind of early-middle-eastern populist religious reformation-type uprising. But when Moses replies he speaks only to Korah (who he suspects is angling for leadership).
It’s only after Moses speaks to Korah that he sets up a separate appointment with D&A. They aren’t Levites like Korah. And their complaint isn’t religious. It’s that Moses didn’t bring them into the Promised Land, and that he’s treating them like a bunch of serfs – which sounds more like a social-political French-Revolution-in-the-desert sort of insurgency.
Which sounds like two separate events with separate leaders and separate complaints that happened to overlap each other in time.
But either way – one story or two – the really crucial question I’m left with is that in the end all three men die for their crimes.
I wonder: is marching for justice and equality a crime? A capital crime? I doubt it. I don’t think that in this story justice and inequality have anything to do with it. Something else was seriously bad. Exactly what I’m not sure.
But when it comes to death and dying I never get the sense the bible is frivolous.
When someone is capitally punished it’s pretty safe to assume it was for a capital crime.