Yes, God buried them alive.
Cited passages
So they went away from the tent of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, on every side. Dathan and Abiram came out, and stood at the door of their tents with their wives, their sons, and their little ones. Moses said, “Hereby you shall know that Yahweh has sent me to do all these works; for they are not from my own mind. If these men die the common death of all men, or if they experience what all men experience, then Yahweh hasn’t sent me. But if Yahweh makes a new thing, and the ground opens its mouth, and swallows them up with all that belong to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall understand that these men have despised Yahweh.” As he finished speaking all these words, the ground that was under them split apart. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their households, all of Korah’s men, and all their goods. So they, and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol. The earth closed on them, and they perished from among the assembly.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Numbers 16 narrates a fearsome judgment: the ground opens and 'they, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit' — Korah, Dathan, Abiram, with their households, 'their wives, and their sons, and their little children' standing at their tent doors (16:27, 32-33). Ten chapters later a terse notice intrudes into the census: 'Notwithstanding the children of Korah died not' (26:11). The two statements appear to cancel.
The conservative harmonization (Archer, Keil and Delitzsch, and most evangelical commentaries) holds that the swallowing claimed in chapter 16 took those physically present in the rebel encampment, while Korah's own sons — ancestors of the later Korahite temple singers — were not in their father's company at the moment of judgment and so survived. This preserves the Levitical lineage the Chronicler and the psalm superscriptions treat as legitimate, and 26:11 is read as confirming exactly that.
The surface objection is that 16:27 explicitly stages 'their sons' at the tent doors and 16:32 has the earth swallow 'all the men that pertained unto Korah.' Taken flatly, the household of Korah perishes entire, leaving no room for surviving sons. The harmonization must suppose Korah's sons were elsewhere — which the narrative does not say.
The decisive context, however, is that Numbers 16 is itself a redactional fusion of at least two rebellion stories, a point on which Noth, Milgrom, Levine, and Knohl broadly converge. One strand is the Dathan-Abiram revolt (Reubenites contesting Moses' civil authority, older non-Priestly material), in which the rebels are swallowed by the earth at their tents (16:25-34). The other is the Korah revolt (a Priestly account of a Levitical-priestly challenge over cultic prerogative), in which the 250 censer-bearers are consumed by fire from Yahweh (16:35). The text has interwoven a 'swallowing' death belonging to Dathan and Abiram with a 'fire' death belonging to Korah's faction; the seams are visible in the doubled locations and the shifting cast. On this reading, the death of Korah's household is not the single, unambiguous datum the question assumes — the composite narrative is precisely where ambiguity about Korah's own fate and that of his sons enters.
The 26:11 clause then functions as a Priestly notice safeguarding the Korahite guild, whose descendants controlled a major share of the temple's musical liturgy — the 'sons of Korah' psalms (42, 44-49, 84-85, 87-88). The Chronicler relies on the same legitimacy (1 Chronicles 6:22-38; 9:19). Mark Leuchter's work on Levitical identity situates such notices within the inner-Israelite politics of priestly and Levitical lineage. So the clause is doing real ideological work, not merely correcting an oversight.
Where does this leave the contradiction? On the text's own composite terms it is internally reconcilable: the Korahite line survives because the sons of Korah were not part of their father's doomed company — a reading the canonical form actively asserts in 26:11 and the genealogies presuppose. The tension is therefore not a flat self-contradiction so much as a seam between traditions that the redactors have smoothed with an explicit clause. What it does NOT support is a harmonization that pretends 16:27's 'their sons' and 26:11 sit together without strain; the smoothing is audible.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable on the canonical text via the explicit 26:11 notice and the composite source history, while clearly bearing the marks of redactional layering.
Sources for this reading