Thread by @JoelBaden

#Numbers 16:4-11

Moses responds to Korah

Essentially a single continuous speech from Moses, entirely ignoring Dathan and Abiram, no surprise there, and focusing on Korah and his band of 250 Israelites. And Moses poses a challenge that should be all too familiar.

You think all Israelites are the same when it comes to matters of holiness? Why don't you come by the sanctuary with some coals and incense and try offering it? I don't remember what happended the last time someone tried offering incense just for funsies, do you?

At this point, we the readers should know pretty much exactly what's going to happen here. (We also know for sure that we're in P, if somehow we didn't realize it already.)

The last line of Moses's speech lays out the main P argument: the priests didn't set the rules that they should be holier than the rest of Israel, Yahweh did. So don't complain to us! (A convenient line of reasoning, to be sure...)

But in the middle of the speech, something slightly weird happens. Korah's initial complaint is really on behalf of the 250 laypeople: why does Aaron alone get to be holy? And Moses's challenge agrees: all y'all bring incense, and Yahweh will choose the holy ones.

Why, then, does Moses start railing against the Levites specifically? It's not a band of 250 Levites, after all. What's more, the particular interest in the Levites that Moses shows here, in 16:7b-10, won't come up again in the story.

It's as if someone shifted the story from being about whether laypeople can be holy to whether Levites can be priests. Which is somewhat reasonable, if it's read as an attempt to soften the story a little. After all, Levites being priests is a smaller step than Israel being holy.

It's also maybe the case that this is the sort of change that might be made in service of a position that all Israel actually could be holy, or should at least strive for it - the position of, say, an H layer.

P, in this reading, had a story condemning the idea that all Israel could be holy. H, which at least gestures toward Israel's holiness aspirationally, changed it to a story about non-Aaronid Levites desiring the priesthood, which both P and H agree is a no-go.