1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“Say to Eleazar son of Aaron the priest that he should lift up the fire-pans from the midst of the burnt-out zone and scatter the fire abroad, for they have become holy—3the fire-pans of these offenders at the cost of their lives. And they shall make of them hammered sheets as plating for the altar, for they brought them forward before the LORD and they have become holy, and they will become a sign for the Israelites.” 4And Eleazar the priest took the bronze fire-pans that those burned to death had brought forward, and they hammered them into a plating for the altar, 5a remembrance for the Israelites, so that no stranger, who was not of the seed of Aaron, should come forward to burn incense before the LORD, and none should be like Korah and his community, as the LORD had spoken to him in the hand of Moses. 6And all the community of Israelites murmured on the next day against Moses and against Aaron, saying, “You, you have put to death the LORD’s people.” 7And it happened when the community assembled against Moses and against Aaron, that they turned to the Tent of Meeting, and, look, the cloud had covered it and the LORD’s glory appeared. 8And Moses, and Aaron with him, came before the Tent of Meeting. 9And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 10“Lift yourselves up from the midst of this community and I will put an end to them in an instant.” And they fell on their faces. 11And Moses said to Aaron, “Take the fire-pan and place fire upon it from the altar and put in incense and carry it quickly to the community and atone for them, for the fury has gone out from before the LORD, the scourge has begun.” 12And Aaron took as Moses had spoken, and he ran into the midst of the assembly, and, look, the scourge had begun against the people, and he put in incense and atoned for the people. 13And he stood between the dead and the living, and the scourge was held back. 14And those who died by the scourge came to fourteen thousand and seven hundred, besides those who died because of Korah. 15And Aaron returned to Moses at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and the scourge was held back.
16And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 17“Speak to the Israelites, and take from them a staff for every father’s house from all their chieftains, according to their fathers’ houses, twelve staffs—each man’s name you shall write on his staff. 18And Aaron’s name you shall write on the staff of Levi, for one staff there is for the head of their father’s house. 19And you shall lay them down in the Tent of Meeting before the Ark of the Covenant where I meet with you. 20And it will happen that the man whom I choose, his staff will flower. And I shall cause to subside from Me the murmurings of the Israelites which they murmur against you.” 21And Moses spoke to the Israelites, and all their chieftains gave him a staff for every single chieftain, according to their fathers’ houses, twelve staffs, and Aaron’s staff was among their staffs. 22And Moses laid down the staffs before the LORD in the Tent of the Covenant. 23And it happened on the next day that Moses came into the Tent of the Covenant, and, look, Aaron’s staff of the house of Levi had flowered, and it had brought forth flower and had burgeoned in blossom and had born almonds. 24And Moses brought out all the staffs from before the LORD to the Israelites, and they saw, and each man took his staff. 25And the LORD said to Moses: “Bring back Aaron’s staff before the Ark of the Covenant as a safekeeping, as a sign for rebels, and let there be an end to their murmurings against Me, and they shall not die.” 26And Moses did as the LORD had charged him, thus did he do. 27And the Israelites said to Moses, saying, “Look, we perish, we are lost, all of us are lost. 28Whoever so much as comes near the LORD’s Tabernacle will die. Are we done with perishing?”
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
2. lift up. The idiomatic sense of this verb in context is “remove.” burnt-out zone. Literally, “the burning,” but the fire of course has now died down. scatter the fire. “Fire,” ’esh, sometimes can mean, as here, hot ashes.
3. for they brought them forward before the LORD and they have become holy. The first clause explains the second: the fire-pans, by virtue of having been carried into sacred space, even though by unauthorized persons who paid for the encroachment with their lives, have become holy.
they will become a sign for the Israelites. Again and again in the Book of Numbers, the narrative is concerned with collective mnemonic devices: ritual apparatus is meant to recall monitory events in the Wilderness wanderings—here, the bronze plating of the altar and, below, Aaron’s staff, set before the altar in “safekeeping.”
5. stranger. The general sense of zar is “alien” or “outsider.” As always in ritual contexts, the term refers not to an ethnic foreigner but to anyone not a member of the consecrated priesthood.
to him. The ambiguous antecedent is plausibly identified by Abraham ibn Ezra as Aaron.
6. all the community of Israelites. Given the people’s refractory nature, the violent suppression of a small band of rebels only triggers a general expression of resentment against Moses’s leadership. The repeated pattern of these stories is a study in collective malcontent, in the psychology of resistance to authority.
You, you have put to death the LORD’s people. The insertion of the emphatic second-person plural pronoun ʾatem vividly expresses the accusatory tone of the Israelites’ angry words to Moses and Aaron. As Richard Elliott Friedman aptly notes, the accusation turns everything around in the story: the Israelites are “the LORD’s people” and Moses and Aaron are thus lined up against them and God, saddled with the responsibility for the death of the rebels whom in fact God killed.
10. Lift yourselves up. This idiom for “remove yourselves” pointedly picks up the verb used for the removal of the fire-pans in verse 2. We have here a reiterated theme of the episodes of “murmuring”: God’s “fury”—literally, “foaming wrath,” qetsef—is on the point of consuming the whole rebellious people so that He can start all over with Moses and Aaron, but they intercede on behalf of the people.
12. he put in incense and atoned for the people. The burning of incense to drive off a plague should not be thought of as a sanitary technique. Since incense in ancient Near Eastern religions was imagined, like the burnt offerings it accompanied, as a fragrant odor in the nostrils of the gods, there would have been an expectation that the burning of incense had the power to assuage an angry deity. It is notable that this act of intervention to save the people is not dictated by God but is a device Moses on his own initiative orders Aaron to implement.
17. a staff for every father’s house. The social unit “father’s house” is used rather loosely here to designate “tribe,” perhaps because the two Hebrew words for “tribe,” mateh and shevet, both mean “staff,” and hence the use of either in this context would have introduced confusion. In any case, we are made conscious that the staff, the tribal emblem, is a metonymy for tribe.
20. I shall cause to subside from Me. The unusual Hebrew verb (the same root is used for the receding waters of the Deluge) suggests that the murmurings of complaint are imagined as a kind of flood that rises up around the deity. In this sentence, God clearly aligns Himself with Moses and Aaron as object of the complaints—in precise antithesis to the people’s attempt to put God on their side by identifying the two brothers as enemies of “the LORD’s people.”
21. Aaron’s staff was among their staffs. The tribe of Levi would not have been reckoned among the twelve tribes. Thus, there are twelve staffs representing the ten tribes and the two half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, and Aaron’s staff is placed together with them in this trial.
23. it had brought forth flower and had burgeoned in blossom and had born almonds. The chronology of these stages of vegetal growth is a little obscure because either “flower,” peraḥ, and “blossom,” tsits, are synonyms, or tsits may be an incipient peraḥ. Perhaps the parallel clauses are encouraged by the practice of synonymity in poetry, where the more unusual term (here, tsits) is always the second one. In any case, the bearing of fruit, the almonds, obviously follows in time the flowering, and this fast-forwarding of a slow process of growth spectacularly confirms the miraculous character of the event. Flowering staffs also make an appearance in Herodotus. The divine favor accorded the Levites is figured in this image of agricultural fertility linked with the tribe whose sacerdotal duties in fact removed them from the soil.
27. Look, we perish, we are lost, all of us are lost. Instead of embracing the monitory mnemonic of Aaron’s staff that has just been offered them and accepting God’s assurance that if they renounce their murmurings, “they shall not die,” the people conclude that they are about to be utterly destroyed. The panic they feel is etched in the stark simplicity and the repetitions of their expression of fear: in these two concluding verses, they say “perish” twice, “lost” twice, and (in the Hebrew) “approach” twice (kol haqarev haqarev). This whole story, like so many others in Numbers, marks out a borderline between the sacred and the profane, stressing that only the consecrated can cross into the zone of the sacred. The people, however, who live alongside the sacred precincts, are gripped with fear that at any time they might step over the line and be struck down.