In Numbers 16:32 we read that all of Korah’s people were swallowed up by the earth, yet here we are informed that his descendants survived. There are further biblical attestations to the survival of Korah’s descendants. For example, 11 of the 150 psalms are attributed to the descendants of Korah. Indeed, Samuel is a descendant of Korah.
Were it not for the verse in this week’s portion, we might assume that these later attestations relate to children of a different Korah . After all, the fact that Taylor Swift shares a surname with the author of Gulliver’s Travels is not evidence that they share DNA. Here, however, the text goes out of its way to tell us that the descendants of Korah the rebel lived on.
Did the descendants of Korah die or didn’t they? Devotees of source critical approaches to the biblical text argue that our verse preserves an alternative tradition or a revision to the one found in chapter 16. Jacob Milgrom, for example, suggests that our verse was included “in order to account for the Korahite Levites who played a significant role in the Temple service”.
One might suggest that those who died with Korah were not his blood relatives but rather his faction.
Rabbinic readings of the episode offer a different approach. They suggest that while the children of Korah did indeed descend, they did not die there. According to the Babylonian Talmud, a special place was prepared for them in Gehenna where they continued to sing songs of praise (Sanhedrin 110a). In Numbers Rabbah 18:15, it is suggested that Korah’s wife extinguished the fires to which she and her children had been consigned due to the actions of her husband.
We might consider the verse in light of this current moment in Jewish life, where those who dare to challenge the consensus are swallowed up by disapproval. We should not be surprised if the “descendants” of opinions deemed anathema come back and play a constructive role in coming generations.
Take Israel, for example. Rather than see the fierce debates currently raging in absolute terms, might it be that passionate opinions expressed in good faith, including those to which we object, may yet become part of an expanding Jewish conversation in the future? Such views, like the descendants of Korah, do not die. They may yet produce new psalms.
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