Five-minute study · Day 55 · Numbers 21
Numbers 21:8
A word worth stopping on: serpent נָחָשׁ nachash
Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole. Everyone who is bitten, when they look at it, shall live. The remedy for snakebite in the wilderness was a bronze snake on a stick. That sounds bizarre until you realize two things. First, archaeologists found a bronze serpent at a tent shrine in Timna, dating to the twelfth century BC. Second, Jesus pointed to this exact story in John 3:14 and said it was about him. A strange Old Testament healing narrative turns out to be one of the clearest previews of the cross in the entire Bible.
Word study: serpent
- Hebrew
- נָחָשׁ
- Pronounced
- nachash
- Strong's
- H5175
- Definition
- A serpent, a snake. From a root meaning to hiss, to whisper, to practice divination.
Nachash first appears in Genesis 3:1. The same word for the creature in Eden is the creature on the pole in the wilderness. BDB connects the root to hissing and, by extension, to enchantment and divination (nachash in its verbal form means to practice omens, as in Genesis 44:5). The serpent carried associations of both danger and supernatural knowledge across the ancient Near East.
God's instruction to Moses is striking: make a nachash and put it on a nes (pole or standard). The remedy for the serpent's bite is a representation of the serpent itself, lifted up where everyone can see it. The looking is the point. No ritual, no sacrifice, no priestly intermediary. Look and live.
Jesus draws the direct parallel in John 3:14-15: 'as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.' The verb for 'lifted up' (hypsoo) works on two levels in John. It means both physical elevation (on the cross) and exaltation (to glory). The bronze serpent foreshadows a death that is simultaneously an enthronement.
Historical context · Twelfth century BC
The Bronze Serpent in the Desert
In the 1960s, archaeologist Beno Rothenberg excavated a small tent shrine at Timna, in the Arabah desert south of the Dead Sea. Timna was an Egyptian copper mining site. After the Egyptians abandoned it, Midianite workers converted the Egyptian temple into their own shrine. Among the artifacts inside, Rothenberg found a small bronze serpent, about twelve centimeters long, with a gilded head.
The Midianite tent shrine dates to the twelfth century BC, placing it in the same general period as the wilderness wanderings. A bronze serpent inside a tent sanctuary in the desert is exactly the kind of object Numbers 21 describes. Rothenberg's discovery confirmed that bronze serpent imagery existed in the region during the right time period and in the right cultural context.
The bronze serpent Moses made had a long afterlife. 2 Kings 18:4 records that King Hezekiah destroyed it around 715 BC because the Israelites had been burning incense to it. They called it Nehushtan, a name that puns on both nachash (serpent) and nechoshet (bronze). An object God intended as a one-time act of deliverance had become an idol. Seven centuries of veneration, ended by a reformer king who recognized that the symbol had replaced what it symbolized.
Jesus' reference in John 3:14 reclaims the original meaning. The serpent on the pole was always a picture of looking in faith at something God lifted up. It pointed forward to the cross.
For reflection
The people bitten by serpents had to do one thing: look. The cure required trust expressed through the simplest possible action. Is there an area of your life where you keep adding complexity to what God has made straightforward? Where you keep constructing solutions when he has said, look here?
The bronze serpent required no expertise, no money, no status. Just eyes lifted in the right direction.
Sources: BDB Lexicon; Rothenberg, 'The Egyptian Mining Temple at Timna'; Milgrom, 'Numbers' (JPS Torah Commentary)