Covenant Breaking
Numbers 21:4-9
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Key Verse: Numbers 21:9 –
So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
Many people have a favorite snake story, usually related to a personal encounter with an unexpected serpent. I was bitten by a ground rattler when I was four years old and could tell stories about my first trip to the hospital, but my favorite snake tale involves my grandmother, whom we called “Bubba” (my uncle’s version of “mother,” which stuck).
Bubba lived alone in a creaky old house and slept with a small .22 rifle loaded with rat shot beside her bed. One night she was awakened by a scratching noise on the mantelpiece above the wood stove. She turned on a light to find a large black snake crawling across the mantle, and calmly shot it. A large, gold-framed copy of Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” also sat on the mantel. Today I have that portrait, complete with a peppering of rat shot in the frame.
The Bible has several famous snake stories of its own, and we find one of the most interesting in Numbers 21:4-9.
An impatient people (vv. 4-5)
The story is intriguing in part because of its context. The first three verses of Numbers 21 describe how the entire people united in a faithful and successful engagement with God. When threatened by the Canaanite king of Arad, they collectively made a vow to Yahweh, promising to “utterly destroy” the enemy’s property and take no plunder if Yahweh would fight for them and grant them victory.
The story says God heard their corporate prayer and gave the victory. The people kept their end of the bargain as “they utterly destroyed their towns” and named the place “Hormah,” a reflection of the word for putting the enemy under the ban. [DD]
Why did the narrator choose to insert the fascinating but unhappy story of Israel’s next rebellion immediately after the happy story of Israel’s successful interaction with God? You might think the people would have been impressed enough to remain in a trustful mood, but the next few verses portray the people as reverting to their old ways.
They had time to grow impatient – the narrator says they had traveled “by the way of the Red Sea” to go around the eastern border of Edom, a move made necessary when the King of Edom refused to allow them to pass through his land (Num. 20:14-20). [DD]
Edom occupied the land immediately east of the Dead Sea, so the Israelites had to turn south, then go further east and north to bypass the desert kingdom. The land is rugged and barren, marked by red sandstone mountains. The hot wind burns and the sun bears down without mercy. It is the sort of land that might inspire travelers to gripe and groan, and that is exactly what the people did.
To translate literally, they became “short in spirit” (v. 4). The people criticized both God and Moses, crying “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” We might extend sympathy to people who had been subsisting on manna for years, but the narrator perceived their complaint as rebellious – fortunately the last of multiple rebellions to be related during the wilderness wandering. To facilitate an attitude adjustment, the narrator believed, God decided to send a message by a host of legless messengers.
A plague and a plea (vv. 6-7)
How did it begin? Imagine a snake slithering from the shade of a rock and into the complaining crowd, where it soon bit somebody. Imagine another snake, then another, and another. Like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, Israel seemed to have wandered into the middle of a huge nest of snakes. Poisonous serpents emerged on every side. More people were bitten. Victims became profoundly sick and experienced severe, burning pain. Many of the Israelites died (v. 6).
The text describes the snakes as ha-nehashîm ha-serapîm, or “fiery serpents,” often translated as “poisonous snakes.” The first word, translated as “serpents,” is very similar to the word for bronze (nehoshet). The second word means “burning ones” – the same word Isaiah used to describe the winged seraphim who appeared in the vision leading to his prophetic call (Isa. 6:2). I can testify that the bite of a poisonous snake causes an intense burning sensation, and many of the Israelites felt the burn. No matter what they did, they couldn’t get away from the slithering plague.
At some point, the people seem to have recognized the outbreak of snakes as divine punishment for their impatient and ungrateful criticism of God’s care. The people came to Moses and confessed their errant behavior: “We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us” (v. 7).
Moses agreed to intercede, and prayed earnestly for the people.
A hope for healing (vv. 8-9)
God heard the prayer and responded, instructing Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and fasten it to a pole in a public place. Then, anyone who had been bitten could look upon it and be healed (v. 8). “So,” the text says, “Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live” (v. 9).
The remedy sounds so much like sympathetic magic that later Hebrew writers reinterpreted the text to insist that the people were required not just to look upon the serpent, but to look upon it with faith that God could heal (Wisdom of Solomon 16:5-7, Pseudo-Jonathan targum).
Now, here’s an interesting thing. The people had prayed for Yahweh to get rid of the snakes, but that didn’t happen. Instead, God offered a means of healing for those who were snake-bitten.
Why do you think God chose that response?
The idea of a world devoid of every evil and hurtful thing may seem appealing, but God could not delete every possibility of evil and leave our free will intact. Instead, God did something better, offering healing to those who were hurt and hope to those who were dying. Whether we think of the serpent on the pole as a symbol of evil incarnate or as a sign of divine hope, its function was the same. It turned people’s hearts toward God, and they found healing.
We might think the story of the bronze serpent would end there, but it did not. Would you dispose of an artifact that had proven so valuable? The Israelites didn’t, either. They kept the bronze serpent with them, probably in the custody of the priests. At some point, according to the author of 2 Kings, they began to display and worship the image in idolatrous ways, making offerings to it, calling it “Nehushtan” (an alternate form of the word meaning “bronze”). [DD] During a religious reform late in the eighth century, BCE, King Hezekiah ordered that the revered image be broken into pieces (2 Kgs 18:4).
But that was not the end of the story, either. The image lived on in memory as a symbol of healing. Jesus knew the story, and used it as a way of describing his own life and death and atoning work. While some might see this story in Numbers as an illustration of the wrath of God, Jesus saw it as a story about the love of God.
In one of our most familiar gospel accounts, when Nicodemus struggled to understand what Jesus had to say about being born again (or born “from above”), Jesus called up this story from Israel’s history, one that Nicodemus would surely remember and understand. [DD]
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him” (John 3:14-21, NET).
When the snake-bitten people of Israel looked at the bronze serpent that Moses had made and lifted up on a pole, they found hope and healing. Just so, Jesus said he would be lifted up in public view. When Jesus died on the cross, he demonstrated the remarkable depth and breadth of God’s love, “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Just as God did not remove the threat of snakes from Israel, but offered them healing, Jesus did not come to remove the threat of sin and death, but to offer healing and hope and life to those who fall victim to sin and its consequences.
That includes every one of us who lives long enough to understand what sin is. Sooner or later, all of us fall. All of us get snake-bitten. None of us are immune to the tempting tune of the wrong song. That is the way the world is. God cannot remove the possibility of evil from the world and leave us fully human at the same time. But God can offer healing and hope and life to those who look to him in faith.
That is what Jesus was doing on that cruel cross that stood on a rugged hill before a ragged group of people. Like the snake in the wilderness, Jesus was lifted up as an emblem of what our sin can do, and of what God’s love can do.
Now, the question is, what are we going to do?
Adult Teaching Resources
Download the PDF of teaching resources for this lesson.
This PDF contains the Teaching Guide, Digging Deeper, and Hardest Question pages.
Read Scripture online: Numbers 21:4-9
Youth Teaching Resources
Parent Prep
As much as we would like, we can not take all the pitfalls away from our students. But, if our goals is to help them to grow into mature adults, should we take away all their pitfalls. In Numbers 21 the people pray for the snakes to be taken away but God doesn’t take them away. Instead, God provides a way for the people to be healed after being bit. What can this tell us about our parenting? What if we didn’t take away the pitfalls, but helped our students realize how they can overcome what has happened to them? Maybe next time they won’t make the same mistake.
Additional Links/Resources
Read Scripture online: Numbers 21:4-9
Download the PDF for youth teaching resources using the button below. This PDF contains the Teaching Guide for this lesson:
Video
Encourage youth to check out this video ahead of the lesson.
“Why did it have to be snakes?” From Indiana Jones
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