The Fallible · Synthetic · Study Bible
Moses Separates the People
Numbers 16:23–27 — Moses Separates the People. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
23Then the LORD said to Moses,
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
Yah·weh way·ḏab·bêr ’el- mō·šeh lê·mōr
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-spoke YHWH to Moses, saying —”
Where the English smooths the original
Jehovah then instructed Moses, that the congregation was to remove away (עלה, to get up and away) from about the dwelling-place of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram
No direct answer was apparently vouchsafed to the remonstrance of Moses and Aaron, but it was tacitly allowed.
And the Lord spake unto Moses,.... When on his face in prayer, and bid him rise up, and told him he had granted his request, and then spoke to him: saying; as follows.Gill ties this speech directly to the intercession of v. 22 — the word comes as answer to prayer.
24“Tell the congregation to move away from the dwellings of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.”
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
dab·bêr ’el- hā·‘ê·ḏāh lê·mōr hê·‘ā·lū mis·sā·ḇîḇ lə·miš·kan- qō·raḥ dā·ṯān wa·’ă·ḇî·rām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“Speak to the congregation, saying — Get-you-up from-round-about the-dwelling-place of-Korah, Dathan, and-Abiram.”
Where the English smooths the original
It is certainly the natural conclusion, from the use of this expression here and in verse 27, that this mishcan was something different from the "tents" ( אָהָלֵי ) mentioned in verses 26, 27 , and was some habitation common to the three rebels
The word ‘tabernacle’ ( mishkân ) is never used of ordinary human dwellingsCambridge represents the critical view that the original reading was “the tabernacle of Jehovah”; weigh it, do not assume it.
it may denote in this and in the 27th verse a rival tabernacle which had been erected by Korah and the other conspirators
Speak unto the congregation — Whom, for your sakes, I will spare upon the condition following.
25So Moses got up and went to Dathan and Abiram, and the elders of Israel followed him.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
mō·šeh way·yā·qām way·yê·leḵ ’el- dā·ṯān wa·’ă·ḇî·rām ziq·nê yiś·rā·’êl way·yê·lə·ḵū ’a·ḥă·rāw
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-rose-up Moses and-went to Dathan and-Abiram; and-went the-elders-of Israel after-him.”
Where the English smooths the original
Because they refused to come to him, he goes to them to their cost.
and went unto Dathan and Abiram; to endeavour to convince them of their evil, and bring them to repentance for it, and to reclaim them from their folly
The united and urgent entreaties of so many dignified personages produced the desired effect of convincing the people of their crime, and of withdrawing them from the company of men who were doomed to destructionJFB reads vv. 24–26 as one mission: the eldership’s weight, not Moses’ alone, turns the crowd from the doomed men.
It is our duty to do what we can to countenance and support lawful authority when it is opposed.Henry reads the elders’ presence as a model of standing with rightful authority under attack.
26And he warned the congregation, “Move away now from the tents of these wicked men. Do not touch anything that belongs to them, or you will be swept away because of all their sins.”
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·ḏab·bêr ’el- hā·‘ê·ḏāh lê·mōr sū·rū nā mê·‘al ’ā·ho·lê hā·’êl·leh hā·rə·šā·‘îm hā·’ă·nā·šîm wə·’al- tig·gə·‘ū bə·ḵāl ’ă·šer lā·hem pen- tis·sā·p̄ū bə·ḵāl ḥaṭ·ṭō·ṯām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-he-spoke to the-congregation, saying — Turn-aside, I-pray, from-over the-tents of-these wicked men, and-do-not touch anything that is-theirs, lest you-be-swept-away in-all their-sins.”
Where the English smooths the original
those who would not perish with sinners, must come out from among them, and be separate.
Touch nothing of theirs; because they and all that was theirs was under a curse, and therefore not to be touched.
Because they, and all that belonged to them, were anathema , devoted to destruction. Compare the case of Achan ( Joshua 7:1 ).
Perhaps an allusion to the form of death which awaited them. In Numbers 16:21 ‘consume’ represents a different Heb. word.Cambridge notes the verb here (çâphâh) differs from the verb of v. 21 — the parses bear this out.
27So they moved away from the dwellings of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Meanwhile, Dathan and Abiram had come out and stood at the entrances to their tents with their wives and children and infants.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·yê·‘ā·lū mê·‘al miš·kan- qō·rɛḥ dā·ṯān wa·’ă·ḇî·rām mis·sā·ḇîḇ wə·ḏā·ṯān wa·’ă·ḇî·rām yā·ṣə·’ū niṣ·ṣā·ḇîm pe·ṯaḥ ’ā·ho·lê·hem ū·nə·šê·hem ū·ḇə·nê·hem wə·ṭap·pām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-they-went-up from-over the-dwelling-place of-Korah, Dathan, and-Abiram, from-round-about; and-Dathan and-Abiram came-out, standing-firm at-the-entrance of-their-tents, with-their-wives and-their-sons and-their-little-ones.”
Where the English smooths the original
Stood in the door of their tents - Apparently in contumacious defiance.
Stood in the door — An argument of their foolish confidence, obstinacy, and impenitence, whereby they declared that they neither feared God nor reverenced man.
Their attitude of defiance indicated their daring and impenitent character, equally regardless of God and man.
neither is any mention made of his sons, who, as we learn from Numbers 26:11 , “died not” when the company of Korah died. His descendants are mentioned in 1Chronicles 6:22-38 , and mention is made of “the sons of Korah” in the titles of eleven of the Psalms.Ellicott guards against reading the judgment as blanket annihilation of Korah’s line — the Korahite Psalms outlive the rebellion.
The congregation obeyed; but Dathan and Abiram came and placed themselves in front of the tents, along with their wives and children, to see what Moses would do.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The unit opens not with a thunderclap but with a measured divine sentence: way·ḏab·bêr YHWH, “and-spoke the LORD” (v. 23), in the weighty Piel of dâbar. It follows immediately on the intercession of v. 22, where Moses and Aaron fell on their faces. Gill reads the sequence tightly — God “bid him rise up, and told him he had granted his request, and then spoke to him.” Pulpit adds that no direct answer was given to the remonstrance, “but it was tacitly allowed.” The first word of judgment, then, is also the first word of mercy: the congregation is to go up (hê·‘ā·lū, v. 24) from the doomed ground. Keil & Delitzsch render the verb plainly — “to get up and away.” A textual honesty must be marked here: the singular mishkân, “dwelling-place,” ascribed to three men of two tribes, is genuinely contested. Cambridge insists “the word ‘tabernacle’ (mishkân) is never used of ordinary human dwellings” and proposes the original read “the tabernacle of Jehovah”; Ellicott and Pulpit defend a literal habitation common to the rebels. The synthesis does not adjudicate; it reports the dispute.
Moses rose up and went (way·yā·qām … way·yê·leḵ) — twin verbs of obedient motion. He does not summon Dathan and Abiram; he goes to them. Poole catches the irony with one stroke: “Because they refused to come to him, he goes to them to their cost.” Gill softens the errand toward mercy — Moses goes “to endeavour to convince them of their evil, and bring them to repentance.” Behind him range the elders, walking ’a·ḥă·rāw, “after him” — a public, bodily endorsement of the authority the rebels had slandered. Henry draws the rule: “It is our duty to do what we can to countenance and support lawful authority when it is opposed.” The mediator who has just interceded for the rebels now walks toward them.
The verse is built on three imperatives of separation. Sū·rū (root çûwr) is not mere relocation but moral turning-away; Gill hears in it a call to “show your dislike of them and their wicked ways.” The goods are not to be touched, for — so Poole — “they and all that was theirs was under a curse”; Pulpit reaches forward to Achan (Josh 7:1), the man who touched the devoted thing and died for it. And the threat itself, tis·sā·p̄ū (root çâphâh, “be swept away”), is a rare verb; Cambridge notes it is “perhaps an allusion to the form of death which awaited them” and differs from the verb of v. 21. Henry gathers the whole into gospel doctrine: “those who would not perish with sinners, must come out from among them, and be separate.”
The congregation obeys — way·yê·‘ā·lū, the imperative of v. 24 now fulfilled. But Dathan and Abiram came out and took their stand, niṣ·ṣā·ḇîm — planted, firm-footed, at their tent-doors. Barnes: “apparently in contumacious defiance.” Benson: an argument of “foolish confidence, obstinacy, and impenitence.” They stand with wives, sons, and ṭaph — the littlest children. Here Henry refuses to flinch or to flatter: “The children perished with their parents… of this we are sure, that Infinite Justice did them no wrong.” Yet judgment is not blind extinction of a clan: Ellicott guards the record — the sons of Korah “died not” (Num 26:11), and the Korahite Psalms outlive the rebellion. Keil & Delitzsch close the scene: the rebels placed themselves before the tents “to see what Moses would do.” The earth would answer in the next verse.
Read on its own terms, this passage is a doctrine of separation set inside a story of intercession. The same Moses who fell on his face to plead “shall one man sin, and wilt thou be wroth with all the congregation?” (v. 22) now walks to the rebels’ tents and commands the people: turn aside. Mercy and severity are not opposites here; they are one motion. God’s answer to the prayer for the many is the command to part from the few who will not repent. The rare verb çâphâh, “be swept away,” deliberately echoes Lot at Sodom (Gen 19:15, 17): in both, salvation is not passive — it requires going up and out, not lingering, not looking back, not reaching for the doomed thing. The hardest line, the children at the tent-doors, the synthesis will not explain away; with Henry it confesses only that “Infinite Justice did them no wrong,” and with Ellicott it notes that even Korah’s line was not erased. This reading is fallible and is offered to be tested against the whole counsel of Scripture.
Salvation has feet: to be spared the judgment, you must walk out of the camp of the condemned — and not look back.
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The later census-narrative recalls this very scene as a fixed memory of judgment: Dathan and Abiram, “who strove against Moses and against Aaron in the company of Korah,” swallowed by the earth. The link is verbal, carried by the rare proper names Dâthân and ʼĂbîyrâm (each in fewer than ten verses of the whole Bible), together with the shared ʻêdâh (congregation).
Numbers 26:9
basis: shared rare lexemes H1885 Dâthân (in 8 vv) and H48 ʼĂbîyrâm (in 9 vv), plus H5712 ʻêdâh (in 140 vv) — the Verifier confirms the two names as low-frequency, hence verbal
Moses, recounting God’s mighty acts to a new generation, names “what he did unto Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab… how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up, and their households, and their tents.” The verbal tie is unmistakable — the same rare name-pair, and the shared word ʼôhel (tent), exactly the term of vv. 26–27. Korah is conspicuously absent here, consistent with the distinct fates noted by Barnes.
Deuteronomy 11:6
basis: shared rare lexemes H1885 Dâthân (in 8 vv) and H48 ʼĂbîyrâm (in 9 vv); also H168 ʼôhel (tent), the very word of Num 16:26–27
Psalm 106, the great confession of national rebellion, versifies the scene: “The earth opened and swallowed up Dathan, and covered the company of Abiram.” Again the rare name-pair and ʻêdâh (company) carry the link. The episode has become liturgy — the wilderness judgment rehearsed in worship as warning.
Psalm 106:17
basis: shared rare lexemes H1885 Dâthân (in 8 vv) and H48 ʼĂbîyrâm (in 9 vv), plus H5712 ʻêdâh (in 140 vv)
Moses’ threat in v. 26, “lest you be swept away,” reuses the rare verb çâphâh paired with pen- (“lest”) — the exact construction of the angels hastening Lot from Sodom: “lest thou be consumed” (Gen 19:15) and “escape… lest thou be consumed” (Gen 19:17). The motif is shared, not quoted: in both, deliverance demands immediate departure from a place under sentence, with no lingering and no looking back. Marked structural rather than verbal-quotation because there is no citation claim — only a shared verb and a shared pattern of escape.
Genesis 19:15 · Genesis 19:17
basis: shared lexemes H5595 çâphâh (in 19 vv) and H6435 pên (in 125 vv) — a shared escape-motif, not a quotation; tiered structural per the Verifier
The unit is the climax of the conspiracy named at the chapter’s head: Korah, Dathan, Abiram (and On) who “took men… and rose up before Moses.” The same three-name signature opens and closes the revolt, framing the whole as one narrative arc.
Numbers 16:1
basis: shared rare lexemes H7141 Qôrach (in 37 vv), H48 ʼĂbîyrâm (in 9 vv), H1885 Dâthân (in 8 vv) — the name-cluster is the explicit narrative spine
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
The command sū·rū — “turn aside, separate yourselves from the wicked, touch not the unclean thing” — is taken up almost word-for-word by Paul: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing” (2 Cor 6:17, itself drawing Isa 52:11). Henry already reads Numbers 16:26 in this gospel key: “those who would not perish with sinners, must come out from among them, and be separate.” The wilderness command prefigures the church’s call to holiness — to be a people parted from what is under judgment. Widely-held in the Reformed tradition; the cross-Testament tie is thematic, not a Hebrew-to-Greek verbal link.
Numbers 16:26 · 2 Corinthians 6:17
Moses, having interceded for the whole congregation (v. 22), rises and walks to the very tents of the rebels (v. 25) — Gill says, “to bring them to repentance.” The pattern points beyond itself to the greater Mediator who does not wait for sinners to come to Him but goes out to seek the lost (Luke 19:10), and who intercedes for transgressors even while bearing their judgment (Isa 53:12; Luke 23:34). The figure is the mediator-who-seeks; the fulfilment is Christ. Offered as a typological reading, ancient in the church’s habit of seeing Moses as a type of Christ (cf. Deut 18:15; Acts 3:22), though this particular scene is applied more by analogy than by explicit New-Testament citation.
Numbers 16:25 · Luke 19:10 · Isaiah 53:12
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
This unit rests on the Berean Standard Bible and the Strong’s/Berean parse supplied per word; the machine layer adds only synthesis, marked ⚙ and fallible. Three honest cautions: (1) The singular mishkân (“dwelling-place,” vv. 24, 27) ascribed to three men of two tribes is a genuine textual crux — Cambridge argues the original read “the tabernacle of Jehovah,” while Ellicott, Pulpit, and Gill defend a literal human habitation; the synthesis reports the dispute rather than settling it. (2) Several voices (Henry, Barnes, JFB, K&D) are pericope comments that BibleHub repeats across the verse range 16:23–34; each excerpt is a verbatim contiguous substring of the raw text supplied for that verse, but the reader should know these notes address the whole episode, not one verse alone. (3) The cross-Testament links to 2 Corinthians 6:17 and the Christ-readings are thematic/typological, not verbal — Greek and Hebrew share no Strong’s numbers, so no “verbal / quotation” tier is claimed for them. The death of the children (v. 27) is left as Henry left it: confessed, not explained.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)