Look and live: the bronze serpent and the road to the Jordan

Numbers is the fourth book of the Torah. Its Hebrew title, bemidbar, means 'in the wilderness', and the book follows Israel from Sinai to the plains of Moab across about forty years. Jewish and Christian tradition has ascribed the Torah to Moses. Many critical scholars hold that the Pentateuch grew through several sources and editors, with the final shape reached later. Both groups agree that Numbers presents itself as a record of the wilderness generation, and this class reads it that way. The date of the exodus is also disputed: an early date of about 1446 BC follows 1 Kings 6:1, and a thirteenth-century date is argued by others from the archaeology of Egypt and Canaan.

Chapter 21 stands at a turning point. At Kadesh the first generation had refused to enter the land (Numbers 14) and God sentenced them to die in the wilderness. Miriam and Aaron have now died (20:1, 22-29), and Moses has been told he will not lead Israel into the land (20:12). The people leave Mount Hor and march toward the Jordan. Edom has refused them passage (20:14-21), so they must go the long way round. The readers addressed are the new generation camped on the plains of Moab, listed in the census of chapter 26, who are about to cross the Jordan. For them the chapter is both warning and encouragement: the parents' pattern of complaint is still alive, yet God gives victory and leads on.

The geography matters. Arad lay in the Negev, the dry south of Canaan. Hormah, 'devoted to destruction', is a name that recalls Israel's earlier defeat at the same region (14:45). The route 'along the route to the Red Sea' (verse 4) runs south toward the Gulf of Aqaba before turning east around Edom. The later stations, the Arnon valley and the King's Highway, belong to Transjordan, the land east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where the Amorite kings Sihon and Og ruled.

Numbers 21 combines four kinds of writing: battle report, a short story of sin and rescue, a travel itinerary, and Hebrew poetry. The poems in verses 14-15, 17-18 and 27-30 are quotations of older songs, and verse 14 names a source, the Book of the Wars of the LORD, that does not survive. The narrator is using documents, and says so. The story in verses 4-9 is told with few words, so the weight falls on the verbs: the people speak, God sends, they confess, Moses prays, God commands, Moses makes, the bitten look, and they live.

The chapter is part of a pattern the book repeats. Israel complains in Numbers 11, 12, 14, 16, 17 and 20, and again here. Each time the sequence includes sin, divine judgment, and some mercy. What is new in 21:7 is that the people themselves confess and ask for Moses to intercede, rather than Moses having to plead for them against the people's will. That change is part of what marks the new generation.

Two cautions apply.

• First, the account of Israel 'devoting' cities to destruction (the Hebrew word is herem) belongs to a specific time, a specific land and a specific divine commission. It is not carried over to the church in the New Testament.
• Second, typology, the Bible's habit of treating earlier events as patterns of later ones, should be anchored in what the New Testament says. Here it says a good deal, because Jesus himself draws the connection.

Verses 1–3

The Canaanite king of Arad hears that Israel is coming and attacks, taking some captives. The earlier defeat in this region (14:39-45) stands behind the scene. Israel responds as it did not before: it makes a vow to the LORD and asks him to deliver the enemy. The vow, to 'devote their cities to destruction', uses the verb from which Hormah takes its name. God 'heard Israel's plea' and gave the victory. The point of the short report is that the new generation already looks different. They turn to the LORD first, and the earlier failure at this same place is reversed.

Verses 4–5

Edom closed its road, so Israel must bypass it. The Hebrew says their 'soul grew short' on the way, an idiom for impatience. Their complaint is the sharpest in Numbers. They speak 'against God and against Moses', and they say there is 'no bread or water' and in the same breath that they 'detest this wretched food'. The food is manna, which God had provided daily for decades. The Hebrew word for 'wretched' (qelokel) occurs only here and means something like worthless or light. The speech contradicts itself, and the narrator lets that stand.

Verse 6

God sends 'venomous snakes'. The Hebrew calls them nechashim seraphim, 'burning' or 'fiery' serpents, probably because of the burning pain of their bite. The judgment fits the sin. Those who complained that God had brought them out to die now find death among them.

Verse 7

The people say 'We have sinned' and ask Moses to pray for them. Moses 'interceded', the same role he had taken at Sinai and Kadesh. God does not remove the snakes. He provides a way through them.

Verses 8–9

God commands Moses to make a seraph, a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole. Moses makes a bronze one. The Hebrew sounds like a pun, nechash nechoshet, 'serpent of bronze'. The pole (nes) is a standard or signal-post lifted where everyone can see it. The promise is simple: whoever is bitten, looks, and lives. The cure is not in the bronze. It is in the word that God attached to it, and the people receive it by looking at what he has lifted up. Healing comes to the helpless by the act of seeing.

Verses 10–20

The list of stations marks the march past Moab. The Arnon is the border between Moab and the Amorites. The quotation from the Book of the Wars of the LORD shows that Israel kept written records of its battles. Then the story reaches Beer, 'well', where God says 'Gather the people so that I may give them water.' The people sing 'Spring up, O well, all of you sing to it!' The song gives credit to the princes and nobles who dug with their scepters and staffs, but the water was promised by the LORD. The contrast with 20:2-13, where Israel quarrelled over water and Moses struck the rock, is deliberate: here there is only a song.

Verses 21–26

Israel asks Sihon for passage on the King's Highway with the same promise made to Edom: they will not touch field, vineyard or well. Sihon refuses and attacks at Jahaz. Israel wins and takes the land between the Arnon and the Jabbok, stopping at the Ammonite border. Deuteronomy 2:26-37 records that God had told Israel to engage Sihon. Verses 27-30 quote a taunt-song which first celebrates Sihon's earlier victory over Moab and then Israel's over him; it speaks of Chemosh, the national god of Moab, as unable to save his people.

Verses 31–35

Israel takes Jazer and then moves toward Bashan, where Og comes out to meet them at Edrei. God tells Moses, 'Do not fear him, for I have delivered him into your hand.' The conquest east of the Jordan ends with no survivors, a point the book of Deuteronomy later recalls (Deuteronomy 3:1-11). Israel later sings of both victories (Psalm 135:10-12; 136:17-22).

Numbers 21 shows several lasting themes of Scripture.

• The first is the seriousness of sin. To despise the food God supplies is to despise the giver, and the text makes no softer claim. Paul draws the connection in 1 Corinthians 10:9, reading the snakes as a warning against putting Christ to the test.
• The second is that God's judgment is not his last word. He sends the serpents, and he also supplies the means of healing.

• The third theme is intercession. Moses' prayer in verse 7 is one of the chief ways Scripture speaks of mediation between God and his people. Later texts remember Moses together with Samuel as the great intercessors (Psalm 99:6; Jeremiah 15:1).
• The fourth is the shape of salvation by gift. The bitten person does nothing to earn healing, makes no payment, and performs no ritual. The only work is to look in trust at what God has set up. Isaiah 45:22 calls the ends of the earth to look to the LORD and be saved.

The chapter also belongs to the larger story of the land. The victories over Sihon and Og show God fulfilling his promise to bring Israel to Canaan's doorstep, and Israel later recites them in worship.

• Finally, the later history is a warning.
• Second Kings 18:4 tells how Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent in pieces, because Israelites had been burning incense to it and calling it Nehushtan. A true sign had become an idol. Even God's gifts can be put in God's place.

The clearest connection is one Jesus makes himself. In John 3:14-15 he says that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. This is a type fulfilled in the New Testament: an event in Israel's history used by Jesus to explain his own death. The points of contact are plain. In both cases the people are dying from a deadly bite, God himself provides the remedy, the remedy is lifted up in public, and the one who looks, and for John believes, lives. John uses the same verb for 'lifted up' (hypsoo) of the cross in 8:28 and 12:32-34, where the crowd hears that Jesus will be lifted up and asks who this Son of Man is.

John 6:40 makes the same pairing of looking and believing: everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him has eternal life. The Mishnah, an early Jewish text, says healing came when Israel looked upward and turned their hearts to their Father in heaven. John goes further by tying the sign to a person.

Some Christian writers also see the serpent itself as a picture of Christ taking the shape of what harms the people. The idea has an echo in 2 Corinthians 5:21, where God made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, and in Galatians 3:13, where Christ becomes a curse for us. This is a suggestive echo and not a point John makes. Hezekiah's act, meanwhile, shows that even the true sign must never replace the one it points to.