Mutiny in the Bible

For this week’s reading about the mutiny of Koraḥ (Numbers 16:1 – 18:32), we take you first not to Judea or the Sinai desert but to medieval England and the opening of Shakespeare’s Richard II. There the divinely anointed ruler of the land is accosted by two quarrelling noblemen, one of whom is his cousin Bolingbroke. Richard reassuringly addresses the other, Mowbray, who is threatening the kingdom through this dispute:

Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears:
Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir,
As he is but my father’s brother’s son,
Now, by my sceptre’s awe, I make a vow,
Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him, nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.

That phrase “my father’s brother’s son” came back to me when viewing an illustration that accompanies this week’s reading in the Daat Mikra edition of Yeḥiel Moskovitz. It is a family tree. On it, you can see that the patriarch Jacob’s son Levi had three sons and eight grandsons; one of the grandsons begat Aaron and Moses, another begat Koraḥ. And that leads us to the questions that stand at the crux of this reading: does greatness depend on blood line, or is it innate to the individual person and his particular qualities? How should the Jews be ruled, and what on earth does the Lord want?