Monday, June 27, 2005

Posts so far for parshat Korach

Year 1:
Year 2

to be continued...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nadav and Avihu vs. Korach's Edah

There may be a compared contrast here on the level of the text. On one hand, Bamidbar 16:35 "ve-eish yatzah mei-eis Hashem" (subject-verb: x-qatal) syntactically opposes vayikra 10:2: "Vateitzei eish milifnei HaShem" (verb-subject: wayiqtol) (which reverses 10:1: "vayakrivu LIFNEI HASHEM EISH zarah"), yet 10:2 echoes 9:24: ""Vateitzei eish milifnei HaShem" which in context means that the sacrifice (of Aharon)was accepted. (The Lubavitcher Rebbe argues that this echo is the reason Rashi must bring extraneous Midrashic reasons for their deaths if "vateitzei eish" retains the contextualized sense it had two pesukim before of the Korban itself being accepted.)

On the level of wordplay, despite the parallels of fire going out and "Vatochal", Machtos, etc., in Bamidbar 17:2 "Ve-es Ha-eish zereih haleah ki kadeishu": "eish zereih" (an unsuual enough verb)is spelled as "eish zarah" in the clause explaining that the reason for this is: "ki kadeishu", suggesting an inherent ambiguousness.

Nachman Levine

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