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3.Our father died in the wilderness. The plea they allege is no contemptible one, i.e., that their father died after God had called His people to the immediate possession of the promised land; for, if the question had been carried back to an earlier period, it might have originated many quarrels. This restriction with respect to time, therefore, aided their cause. In the second place, they plead that their father had committed no crime whereby he might have been excepted from the general allotment of the land; for in the conspiracy of Dathan and Abiram, they include by synecdoche, in my opinion, the other sins, whose punishment affected the posterity of the criminals. His private sin is, therefore, contrasted with public ignominy; for so I interpret what they say of his having “ in his own sin.” And surely it is mere childish nonsense which the Jews (199) affirm of his having been the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath-day, or one of the number of those who were slain by the bite of the serpents; and it is unnatural, too, to refer it to the curse under which the whole human race is laid. They distinguish, then, his private sin from any public crime, which would have caused him to deserve to be disinherited, lest the condition of their father should be worse than that of any other person. At the same time, they hold fast to the principle which is dictated to us by the common feelings of religion, that death, as being the curse of God, is the wages of sin.
(199) S.M. refers to this Rabbinical gloss. R. Sal. Jarchi tells us: “ Akiba says, that he collected the wood; but R. Simeon says that he was one of those who were contumacious.” — Edit. Breihthaupt, in loco, p. 1243, and notes.