Numbers 21:5-8
The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food & no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, & set it on a pole; &everyone who is bitten shall look at it & live.”
The people of Israel have become impatient with God & Moses, saying that they would rather had never been freed from Egypt & forced to undergo such a terrible journey. Their most recent occasion for “murmuring” is the rather benign complaint about what provisions have been given them. They were merely grumbling about the food: manna yesterday, manna today & more manna tomorrow. God is angered by their attitude & sends a plague of poisonous serpents to visit them.
Commenting on this story, even the ancient rabbis noted the irony. From the very beginning of creation, the rabbis commented, the snake has eaten only dust, & did so without a word of complaint. Therefore: “Let the serpent which does not murmur concerning its food come & rule over the people which has murmured concerning their food.” Targum Neofiti
Repentant, the people come to Moses asking him to intercede with Yahweh. Yahweh relents, but God doesn’t cancel the plague of snakes. God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and raise it on a rod; anyone who is bitten & looks at the bronze serpent will be healed.
The real problem is the solution itself: one glance at a snake on a stick & all is restored. That sounds like the primitive magic of a talisman.
But at least for the followers of Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing, who used snakes as part of healing ceremonies, the snake may have had more than symbolic value. It has been suggested that snakes tied to a stick (the caduceus of medical art) may have been a way of inoculating patients with nonlethal does of snake venom – a primitive hypodermic injection.
But for the ancient rabbis it’s not the snake, but rather what looking at the ‘raised’ snake causes us to do: “Rather whenever Israel looked upward and submitted their heart to their Father in heaven, they were healed”. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah
Looking upward, we discover the source of our healing. As the Evangelist John has it, the Son of Man is lifted up on a cross so that we might behold the healing love of God.
