Numbers 16:28

28 Moses continued to address the community: "This is how you'll know that it was God who sent me to do all these things and that it wasn't anything I cooked up on my own.

Numbers 16:28 Meaning and Commentary

Numbers 16:28

And Moses said, hereby ye shall know that the Lord hath sent
me to do all these works
To bring the people of Israel out of Egypt, to exchange the firstborn for the Levites, to make Aaron and his sons priests, to give the Levites to them, and to set Elizaphan over the Kohathites, things which these men found fault with, and questioned his authority for doing them:

for [I have] not [done them] of my own mind;
or "not out of my heart" {q}; he had not devised them himself, and done them of his own head, and in any arbitrary way, without the will of God or any authority from him, as these men suggested.

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FOOTNOTES:

F17 (yblm al yk) "quod non de corde meo", Pagninus, Montanus.

Numbers 16:28 In-Context

26 He then spoke to the community: "Back off from the tents of these bad men; don't touch a thing that belongs to them lest you be carried off on the flood of their sins."

27 So they all backed away from the tents of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Dathan and Abiram by now had come out and were standing at the entrance to their tents with their wives, children, and babies.

28 Moses continued to address the community: "This is how you'll know that it was God who sent me to do all these things and that it wasn't anything I cooked up on my own.

29 If these men die a natural death like all the rest of us, you'll know that it wasn't God who sent me.

30 But if God does something unprecedented - if the ground opens up and swallows the lot of them and they are pitched alive into Sheol - then you'll know that these men have been insolent with God."