The Nechushtan

Parshat Chukat

This week we have one of the more bizarre stories in the Torah.  One that is bizarre to modern academics and traditional interpretations.  It is the story of the bronze serpent that Moshe (Moses) erects to cure a plague of snake bites that has broke out among the Israelites.  While we can glean some more information from archaeology, we're still left with a lot of speculation.


The Biblical Story

The story fits a trope in the biblical narrative.  The Israelites are wandering in the desert and they complain about something and god punishes them for their insolence.  In this case, they are complaining about a lack of water.  A reasonable complaint, in my opinion.  But anyway, it's not so reasonable to God, so he sends nechashim seraphim (literally, burning snakes).  The people immediately associate the plague of snakes as a consequence of their own complaints and seek penance from Moshe.  Then God gives the following command (Num 21:8-9):

8 And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live.' 9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the pole; and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived.

So why is this problematic?  Because of this commandment, one of the most fundamental in Judaism (Exod. 20:3)

Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;

Here, God commands Moshe to transgress the commandment that the Torah says everyone heard at Har Sinai.  Not only that, but he then imbues this "idol" with healing powers.  Is God deliberately messing with the Israelites at this point?  I seem to remember something about putting a stumbling block in front of the blind, and how this was something you shouldn't do.  Surely, the expectation would be that some of the people would get the idea that it was really this bronze serpent that was powerful and not God.  They might even start worshiping it.  In fact...(2 Kings 18:4):

[Hezekiah] removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah; and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did offer to it; and it was called Nehushtan.

Traditional commentaries trip over themselves trying to resolve the problem here.  A common route they take is that the expectation was that people wouldn't pray to the serpent, but it was just be a conduit to God.  In the process, they don't really recognize that this is exactly what polytheistic idols do also.  They are reminders of the deities, not actual deities themselves.  No traditional commentaries that I know really offer a good explanation about why God would specifically command making something that clearly looks and seems like an idol.  If you have any that you think adequately explain it, I'd be glad to hear it.

Archaeology to the Rescue?

So, what can we learn from archaeology.  In a 1968 paper title "The Bronze Serpent in the Israelite Cult," Karen Joines describes various places in Israel where it appears that there was some sort of snake worship going on.  She says:

The Israelite cult at Jerusalem was not unique in its utilization of a bronze serpent, for at least seven such serpents have come from various pre-Israelite Palestinian cities. Two were uncovered at Megiddo, one at Gezer, two in the "holy of holies" of the Area H temple at
Hazor, and two at Shechem. Most of them lay in Late Bronze Age cultic areas, but the phenomenon of the cultic bronze serpent was limited neither to Palestine nor to the second millennium B.C.

And later on, with regard to this biblical story:

Although the serpent was associated in the Ancient Near East with the restoration of life, the most prominent element in the tradition of Moses and the bronze serpent seems to be that of sympathetic magic- the belief that the fate of an object or person can be governed by the manipulation of its exact image. Thereby a representation of a noxious creature could best drive off that creature, and an adversary could most effectively be controlled by the manipulation of his exact image.

The Egyptians frequently defended themselves against the serpent by the use of its image... In Egypt a serpent-shaped amulet often was placed on mummies to prevent their being attacked by serpents and other reptiles of the underworld...

She does remark that such sympathetic usage seems to be confined only to Egypt, and similarly, the use of the serpent as a kind of fertility cult is local to the Israelite locations.  Perhaps the worship of the Nechushtan at the time of Hizkiyahu (Hezekiah) was some sort of amalgamation of the two?

Speculation on What Really Happened

Using what we know about the snake cults of the Ancient Near East, we can begin to hypothesize on what's actually going on in this story.  We start, not with Moshe but at the time of Hizkiyahu.  Here, there is a group of people worshiping a bronze serpent that they call the Nechushtan, or possibly using it for some sort of fertility rite.  This bothers Hizkiyahu, who as a king, is all about the sole worship of YHWH, the Israelite God.  And specifically he favors aniconic worship, no images or statues allowed.  He views worship of this serpent as idolatry, so he removes it.


But why was it allowed in the first place?  Because there was an older story written about the serpent, possibly by the cultists themselves, possibly by someone else, that this serpent was somehow different from the other snake cults in the region.  This serpent was made by Moshe the hero of the Israelites.  And not only that, it was made by divine command.  Now we can understand one possibility about how this biblical story came to being.  It existed as a justification for the establishment of the snake cult in Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).

The early Israelites were a lot more willing to engage in iconic worship.  There are several references to Yahweh and his Ahserah in old inscriptions.  Some people say Asherah was the consort of God, others (including Mark Smith) think it's more likely that Asherah was in reference to the cultic tree that was often used for worship in the area.  This would be the same type of Asherah that the Torah repeatedly tells the Israelites to burn down.  Somewhere in the history of Judaism, likely alongside the move to sole worship of Yahweh, there was a move towards removing iconic worship.  No more Asherot, no more Nechushtan.  According to the Tanach, Hezekiah was one of the key figures in this movement.