Korah in the Midrash: The Hairless Heretic as Hero

Abstract

Perhaps the least likely hero in the Bible is Korah, the Levite who challenges Moses’s leadership in Numbers 16 and whom later tradition regarded as an archvillain. This article examines how the rabbinic, Christian, and Islamic traditions appropriated this figure and turned him, if not into a full-fledged hero, then at least into a kind of trickster whose challenge to Moses reinforces the authority of Orthodox tradition. An example of this transmutation is the way rabbinic Midrash turns Korah into a kind of hyperlegalistic rabbi. He poses typical rabbinic questions to Moses that are intended to undermine the law, but by drawing limits around his questions the Midrash constructs the boundaries of rabbinic dissension. Another set of themes puts women at the center of the Korah story and also plays with Korah as bald: in these stories, sexuality and power are linked to hair. In patristic writings, Korah becomes the exemplar of a heretical bishop and is also made fabulously wealthy (a theme common also to Jewish and Muslim traditions). Korah’s wealth symbolizes the Israel of the flesh: this biblical villain now comes to stand for the Jewish people as a whole. In Muslim sources, he is also transmuted into “the enlightened one.”