“And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not.”
Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. The catastrophe that follows immediately the glory of the divine fire is one of the most jarring transitions in the Torah. Nadab and Abihu — the same sons who were with Moses and the seventy elders at the covenant meal of Exodus 24:9–11, who saw God and ate and drank — offer unauthorized fire before the Lord. The Hebrew zar means strange, foreign, unauthorized — fire that was not commanded, fire from a source other than the altar fire that God Himself had lit in Leviticus 9:24. The offense is the violation of the specific and the sacred with the general and the unauthorized.
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