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Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

BRONZE SERPENT, BRONZE SNAKE

Piece of sculpture that God commanded Moses to make when the Israelites were being bitten by “fiery serpents” (Nm 21:4-9). The serpents had been sent as a judgment because the people were grumbling against God and against Moses. When the people repented, God ordered the replica made; those who looked at it were healed.

Some connect the theological meaning of the scene with an episode in which Moses’ rod became a serpent, swallowed up the serpent-rods of the Pharaoh’s magicians, and then became a rod again (Ex 7:8-12; cf. 4:2-5, 28-30). The serpent was a deified figure in both the Egyptian and Canaanite religions. Therefore, the triumph of God’s serpent figure typified the superiority of the Lord over the pagan gods. In Numbers 21, however, such a realization must have been secondary. That event was the last of a number of “apostasies” in the wilderness (cf. 1 Cor 10:9), all of which included four elements: complaints against God, judgment, repentance, and forgiveness or deliverance. The major theological theme is not the Lord’s superiority but his provision of salvation. The stress was not on a magical formula for healing, but rather on the serpent as a symbol of salvation offered to all who would focus on it.

The bronze serpent appears again in 2 Kings 18:4. In the intervening centuries it had become an idolatrous object, and King Hezekiah (716–686 BC) of the southern kingdom of Judah abolished it in his reform movement. The final reference to it in pre-Christian literature is in the apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon, which supports the above interpretation: salvation came not through the serpent but through God’s provision. “He who turned towards it was healed, not by what he saw, but by you, the Savior of all” (Wisd of Sol 16:7).

Against this background, Christ said that he, like Moses’ serpent, must be lifted up (Jn 3:14). The “lifting up” of the “Son of Man” is a definite reference to Christ’s death and has two foci. One is a “death as salvation” theme, seen in the Mosaic serpent imagery and the divine imperative “must” (in Jn referring to the necessity of God’s ordained plan of salvation). The other is a “death as exaltation” theme, seen in the verb itself (containing the idea of majesty) and in John’s stress on the glory of Jesus’ earthly ministry and of his resurrected status.