פּירוש אויף במדבר 17:27

אבדנו, a reference to 15,33 when the people swallowed by the earth during Korach’s uprising had been described by the Torah as ויאבדו, “they became lost.” The people now felt that a similar fate might befall them on any day if the Tabernacle was so inaccessible to them.

הן גוענו, אבדנו, כולנו אבדנו, “behold we perish, we are lost, we are all lost.” They meant that they were all lost as anyone approaching the sacred precincts of the Tabernacle would die. The reason the Torah repeats the expression קריבה, “approaching” in verse 28 is that if anyone who approaches the Tabernacle more closely than his neighbor is subject to death just like the 250 men who had been burned they wished they would die now [seeing they had nothing to look forward to except death in the desert. Ed.]. The question: “will we ever stop perishing?” (verse 28) suggested that the Israelites viewed the Levites as the cause of their deaths. This is why G’d told Aaron in his capacity as the tribal head of the tribe of Levi to take care that the Levites should not become the cause of Israelites dying through any error they would commit (compare Ibn Ezra on verse 27).

There is also another approach to these words הן גוענו אבדנו כלנו אבדנו; this statement by the Israelites was a reference to the three penalties that had struck the people who had challenged the existing order in Jewish society. The words הן גוענו, “here we have perished,” refer to the people who suffered death by being burned; the word אבדנו, “we are lost,” refers to the people who had been swallowed up by the earth. The final expression: כלנו אבדנו, “we have all perished,” referred to the plague which had cost 14,700 victims. (verse 14). Onkelos reflects this approach in his translation. He writes: הא מננא קטלת חרבא הא מננא בלעת ארעא, והא מננא דמיתו במותנא, i.e. he mentions the three kinds of death which struck these three groups of people by name instead of speaking in generalities as does our verse in its original. The translation of גוענו as קטלת חרבא, “death by the sword,” is quite appropriate for a description of the attribute of Justice as it is found in Isaiah 27,1.