I. Strictly speaking, the tribe of Levi was not more appointed or called by God than the tribe of Reuben or Judah. The family of Aaron was not more called by God than any Israelitish family. Each tribe was to occupy its own place in the host; each family had some work to do which God had fixed for it, and not for any other. But it would have been a most minute and mischievous legislation which attempted to define the tasks that should be performed by each family or person. The Mosaic legislation attempted nothing of the kind; it affirmed a principle of universal and individual application; it established an order which embodied that principle, and showed how all departures from it must necessarily lead to confusion; it enforced its own decrees against that order more solemnly, more tremendously, than against any other parts of the society.
II. The Mosaic history is a continual witness to the tendency which there was in the Divinely appointed order to become a caste, a perpetual record of the ways in which God was counterworking that tendency. The Aaronic family was appointed to offer the sacrifices; it was to show that God Himself was the Inventor of them. Woe to it if it tried to persuade the people that it was the inventor of them or could make them more acceptable!
III. Korah and his company were the assertors of a popular maxim. But unhappily that popular maxim would have been destructive of the people, would have been fatal to their moral, political, spiritual, freedom. Korah would have asserted for himself and the other families of the tribe of Levi the privilege and right of offering sacrifices. Dathan and Abiram would have claimed that privilege and right for all the tribes. There was a lie in the words. They at once introduced the principle of which sacrifice is the renunciation, the principle against which the family of Aaron was the permanent protest.
IV. Since it is the tendency of a mere national organisation to become exclusive, to assert the dignity of birth or the sacredness of property above the dignity and sacredness of humanity, the business of the priest in each land will be especially to protect it against this danger. The priest presents Christ's finished sacrifice for the whole human race for rich and poor, high and low. He must expect to go down alive into a deeper pit than that which received Korah and his company if he shows that wealth, honours, distinctions of any kind, are the objects of his search, not remembering that "he that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."
F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 204.