Our father died in the desert, and was not in the sedition, that was raised against the Lord under Core, but he died in his own sin: and he had no male children. Why is his name taken away out of his family, because he had no son? Give us a possession among the kinsmen of our father.

Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not in the band of them that banded themselves together against Jehovah in the band of Korah; but he died in his own sin, and he had no sons.

Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not in the company of them that assembled themselves against the LORD in the company of Korah; but died in his own sin, and had no sons.

Our father died in the wilderness, and he, he was not in the midst of the company who were met together against Jehovah in the company of Korah, but for his own sin he died, and had no sons;

Death overtook our father in the waste land; he was not among those who were banded together with Korah against the Lord; but death came to him in his sin; and he had no sons.

"Our father died in the desert, and was not with the sedition, which was stirred up against the Lord under Korah, but he died in his own sin; he had no male sons. Why is his name taken away from his family, because he had no son? Give us a possession among the kinsmen of our father."

Pater noster mortuus est in deserto, qui tamen non fuit in congregatione qum congregata fuit adversus Jehovam, in congregatione Core: quia in peccato mortuus est, et filii non fuerunt el.

Our father died in the wilderness. The plea they allege is no contemptible one, i.e., that their father died after God had called His people to the immediate possession of the promised land; for, if the question had been carried back to an earlier period, it might have originated many quarrels. This restriction with respect to time, therefore, aided their cause. In the second place, they plead that their father had committed no crime whereby he might have been excepted from the general allotment of the land; for in the conspiracy of Dathan and Abiram, they include by synecdoche, in my opinion, the other sins, whose punishment affected the posterity of the criminals. His private sin is, therefore, contrasted with public ignominy; for so I interpret what they say of his having "died in his own sin." And surely it is mere childish nonsense which the Jews [1] affirm of his having been the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath-day, or one of the number of those who were slain by the bite of the serpents; and it is unnatural, too, to refer it to the curse under which the whole human race is laid. They distinguish, then, his private sin from any public crime, which would have caused him to deserve to be disinherited, lest the condition of their father should be worse than that of any other person. At the same time, they hold fast to the principle which is dictated to us by the common feelings of religion, that death, as being the curse of God, is the wages of sin.

Footnotes

1 - S.M. refers to this Rabbinical gloss. R. Sal. Jarchi tells us: "R. Akiba says, that he collected the wood; but R. Simeon says that he was one of those who were contumacious." -- Edit. Breihthaupt, in loco, p. 1243, and notes.

But died in his own sin - i. e., perished under the general sentence of exclusion from the land of promise passed on all the older generation, but limited to that generation alone. By virtue of the declaration in Numbers 14:31 the daughters of Zelophehad claim that their father's sin should not be visited upon them.

Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not in the company of them that gathered themselves together against the LORD in the company of Korah; but died in his own (a) sin, and had no sons.
(a) According as all men die, for as much as they are sinners.

Our father died in the wilderness,.... As all the generation of the children of Israel did, that came out of Egypt, who were twenty years old and upwards, excepting Joshua and Caleb:
and he was not in the company of them that gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah; which is observed, not so much to obtain the favour and good will of Moses as to clear the memory of their father from any reproach upon it, he dying in the wilderness; and chiefly to show that the claim of his posterity to a share in the land was not forfeited, he not being in that rebellion, nor in any other; so that he and his were never under any attainder:
but died in his own sin; which though common to all men, every man has his own peculiar way of sinning, and is himself only answerable for it, Isaiah 53:6 he sinned alone, had no partner or confederate, whom he had drawn into any notorious and public sin, as mutiny, &c. to the prejudice of the state, and the rulers in it; so the Targum of Jonathan adds,"and he did not cause others to sin,''so Jarchi; some take him to be the sabbath breaker, Numbers 15:32, others that he was one of those that went up the hill, Numbers 14:44, most likely his sin was that of unbelief, disbelieving the spies that brought the good report of the land, and giving credit to those that brought an ill report of it; and so with the rest of the people murmured, for which his carcass, with others, fell in the wilderness, and entered not into the good land, through unbelief: a sin not punished in their children:
and had no sons. which was the reason of this application.

THE DAUGHTERS OF ZELOPHEHAD ASK FOR AN INHERITANCE. (Numbers 27:1-11)
Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not . . . in the company of . . . Korah--This declaration might be necessary because his death might have occurred about the time of that rebellion; and especially because, as the children of these conspirators were involved along with their fathers in the awful punishment, their plea appeared the more proper and forcible that their father did not die for any cause that doomed his family to lose their lives or their inheritance.
died in his own sin--that is, by the common law of mortality to which men, through sin, are subject.

In his own sin - For his own personal sins. It was a truth, and that believed by the Jews that death was a punishment for mens own sins.