Numbers 21:4-5
Our soul loatheth this light bread
The journey is round about the land of Edom and the people are much discouraged because of the way. The complaint names the manna as the grievance.
Objects of the Bible
The bronze serpent
The cure was a model of the thing that was killing them, and you had to look at it.
The complaint that starts it is the old one with a new edge: our soul loatheth this light bread. Fiery serpents come among the people and many die, and the confession that follows is unusually direct: we have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against thee. Moses prays, and the answer is not the removal of the snakes. 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 looketh upon it, shall live.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The bronze serpent
- 01
- 02
Numbers 21:6-7
We have sinned
The admission is immediate and complete, and the request is that the serpents be taken away, which is not what happens.
- 03
Numbers 21:8-9
When he looketh upon it, shall live
The remedy is visible, public and passive. A man too weak to walk can still turn his head, which appears to be the design.
- 04
2 Kings 18:4
He called it Nehushtan
Hezekiah destroys it because it had become an object of incense. A genuine relic of a genuine rescue turns into the thing it once cured.
- 05
John 3:14-15
Even so must the Son of man be lifted up
The comparison is made to a man who came at night, and it puts the whole logic of looking rather than achieving at the centre of the conversation.
Why it matters
Nothing is asked of the bitten except a look, and what they have to look at is an image of their own affliction lifted up where everyone can see it. The serpents are not taken away; the dying is. Then the object has a long and bad afterlife. Seven centuries later Hezekiah breaks in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made, for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it, and he called it Nehushtan, a piece of brass. And Jesus, talking to Nicodemus at night, reaches for exactly this: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.
5 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
