Then Moses said to Aaron and to his sons Eleazar and Ithamar, "Do not uncover your heads nor tear your clothes, so that you will not die and that He will not become wrathful against all the congregation. But your kinsmen, the whole house of Israel, shall bewail the burning which the Lord has brought about.I almost wish this had stopped at the first sentence. It would have been very easy to make a statement about not being sorry for the suffering of someone who sins. But the end of this verse means that that is not necessarily the correct meaning.
Apparently, the priests were not to mourn their dead family, because what they had done was a very serious sin, and God had punished it in the only way he really could. However, the people as a whole were permitted to mourn. These were still deaths of members of the people, and therefore should be remembered. But were they mourning the people lost, or was it the sin they had committed that caused them to wail?
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