2. lift up. The idiomatic sense of this verb in context is “remove.” burnt-out zone. Literally, “the burning,” but the fire of course has now died down. scatter the fire. “Fire,” ’esh, sometimes can mean, as here, hot ashes.

3. for they brought them forward before the LORD and they have become holy. The first clause explains the second: the fire-pans, by virtue of having been carried into sacred space, even though by unauthorized persons who paid for the encroachment with their lives, have become holy.

they will become a sign for the Israelites. Again and again in the Book of Numbers, the narrative is concerned with collective mnemonic devices: ritual apparatus is meant to recall monitory events in the Wilderness wanderings—here, the bronze plating of the altar and, below, Aaron’s staff, set before the altar in “safekeeping.”

5. stranger. The general sense of zar is “alien” or “outsider.” As always in ritual contexts, the term refers not to an ethnic foreigner but to anyone not a member of the consecrated priesthood.

to him. The ambiguous antecedent is plausibly identified by Abraham ibn Ezra as Aaron.

6. all the community of Israelites. Given the people’s refractory nature, the violent suppression of a small band of rebels only triggers a general expression of resentment against Moses’s leadership. The repeated pattern of these stories is a study in collective malcontent, in the psychology of resistance to authority.

You, you have put to death the LORD’s people. The insertion of the emphatic second-person plural pronoun ʾatem vividly expresses the accusatory tone of the Israelites’ angry words to Moses and Aaron. As Richard Elliott Friedman aptly notes, the accusation turns everything around in the story: the Israelites are “the LORD’s people” and Moses and Aaron are thus lined up against them and God, saddled with the responsibility for the death of the rebels whom in fact God killed.

10. Lift yourselves up. This idiom for “remove yourselves” pointedly picks up the verb used for the removal of the fire-pans in verse 2. We have here a reiterated theme of the episodes of “murmuring”: God’s “fury”—literally, “foaming wrath,” qetsef—is on the point of consuming the whole rebellious people so that He can start all over with Moses and Aaron, but they intercede on behalf of the people.

12. he put in incense and atoned for the people. The burning of incense to drive off a plague should not be thought of as a sanitary technique. Since incense in ancient Near Eastern religions was imagined, like the burnt offerings it accompanied, as a fragrant odor in the nostrils of the gods, there would have been an expectation that the burning of incense had the power to assuage an angry deity. It is notable that this act of intervention to save the people is not dictated by God but is a device Moses on his own initiative orders Aaron to implement.

17. a staff for every father’s house. The social unit “father’s house” is used rather loosely here to designate “tribe,” perhaps because the two Hebrew words for “tribe,” mateh and shevet, both mean “staff,” and hence the use of either in this context would have introduced confusion. In any case, we are made conscious that the staff, the tribal emblem, is a metonymy for tribe.

20. I shall cause to subside from Me. The unusual Hebrew verb (the same root is used for the receding waters of the Deluge) suggests that the murmurings of complaint are imagined as a kind of flood that rises up around the deity. In this sentence, God clearly aligns Himself with Moses and Aaron as object of the complaints—in precise antithesis to the people’s attempt to put God on their side by identifying the two brothers as enemies of “the LORD’s people.”

21. Aaron’s staff was among their staffs. The tribe of Levi would not have been reckoned among the twelve tribes. Thus, there are twelve staffs representing the ten tribes and the two half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, and Aaron’s staff is placed together with them in this trial.

23. it had brought forth flower and had burgeoned in blossom and had born almonds. The chronology of these stages of vegetal growth is a little obscure because either “flower,” peraḥ, and “blossom,” tsits, are synonyms, or tsits may be an incipient peraḥ. Perhaps the parallel clauses are encouraged by the practice of synonymity in poetry, where the more unusual term (here, tsits) is always the second one. In any case, the bearing of fruit, the almonds, obviously follows in time the flowering, and this fast-forwarding of a slow process of growth spectacularly confirms the miraculous character of the event. Flowering staffs also make an appearance in Herodotus. The divine favor accorded the Levites is figured in this image of agricultural fertility linked with the tribe whose sacerdotal duties in fact removed them from the soil.

27. Look, we perish, we are lost, all of us are lost. Instead of embracing the monitory mnemonic of Aaron’s staff that has just been offered them and accepting God’s assurance that if they renounce their murmurings, “they shall not die,” the people conclude that they are about to be utterly destroyed. The panic they feel is etched in the stark simplicity and the repetitions of their expression of fear: in these two concluding verses, they say “perish” twice, “lost” twice, and (in the Hebrew) “approach” twice (kol haqarev haqarev). This whole story, like so many others in Numbers, marks out a borderline between the sacred and the profane, stressing that only the consecrated can cross into the zone of the sacred. The people, however, who live alongside the sacred precincts, are gripped with fear that at any time they might step over the line and be struck down.