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In Numbers, Korah and the other rebels go down alive into Sheol. Rabbinic tradition in tractate Sanhedrin says they remained alive underground, tortured in Gehenna and crying out that Moses and his Torah are truth.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Numbers 16:33
Hebrew Bible
32 and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, along with their households, and all Korah’s men, and all their goods. 33 They and all that they had went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed over them. So they perished from among the community. 34 All the Israelites who were around them fled at their cry, for they said, “What if the earth swallows us too?”
Sanhedrin 110a
Babylonian Talmud
Rabbinic
Rava taught: What is the meaning of that which is written: “But if the Lord creates a new creation and the earth opens its mouth” (Numbers 16:30)? Moses said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: If Gehenna is already created, good, but if not, God should create it now. The Gemara asks: For what was Moses asking? If we say that his request was for God to actually create Gehenna, but isn’t it written: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)? There are no new creations after the six days of Creation. Rather, Moses asked God to bring the opening of Gehenna close to there, so that the assembly of Korah would be buried alive. With regard to the verse: “And the sons of Korah did not die” (Numbers 26:11), it is taught in a baraita that in the name of our teacher, the Sages said: A place was fortified for them in Gehenna and they sat upon it and recited songs of praise. Rabba bar bar Ḥana said: One time I was walking on the path, and a certain Arab said to me: Come and I will show you those from the assembly of Korah who were swallowed. I went and I saw two fissures in the ground from which smoke was emerging. That Arab took a woolen fleece and dampened it with water and placed it on the tip of his spear and passed it over the fissures there. The fleece was singed, indicating the level of heat there. He said to me: Listen; what do you hear? And I heard that this is what they were saying: Moses and his Torah are truth, and they, referring to themselves, are liars.
Date: 450-550 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
... Gehinnom has three gates and seven names. Jeremiah ben Eliezer enumerated the gates. The first gate of Gehinnom is in the wilderness, as is clear from Numbers 16:33, where the earth swallowed Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the rebels who challenged the authority of Moses and Aaron. The biblical text reads, “So they and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol; and the earth closed over them.” What the Bible calls Sheol, the Talmud calls Gehinnom, an example of infernalization. … The case of Korah is a good example. This rebel from Numbers 16:1–40 and 26:9–11 is among the archetypal wicked in Judaism. Along with Dathan, Abiram, and On, Korah opposed the restriction of priestly authority to the progeny of Aaron by claiming, “All the congregation are holy!” To suppress this egalitarian challenge, God caused the earth to open beneath their feet. It is said of Korah and his company that they cook in Gehinnom for thirty days at a time (the Jewish calendar is lunar), but then come up to earth, where an Arab showed them to Rabbi bar Bar Hanah. These wicked souls get a monthly reprieve ...
Bernstein, Alan E.
Hell and Its Rivals: Death and Retribution among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Early Middle Ages
(p. 261, 264) Cornell University Press, 2017
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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