The human ability to speak dissent against the Lord.
Old Testament Reading: Numbers 21:4-9
For Sunday, March 18, 2012—Lent 4
It is an all-new generation of grumblers. All the original members of the band have died—except Moses (its best to have at least one original member if you want to play the casinos)—but they know the material just as well as their parents.
The Grumblers
Here’s the refrain—“Why did you bring us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread and no water, and we loathe the wretched bread.”
“We loathe the wretched bread.” One of my personal favorites, but it seems the Lord does not agree. The Lord will listen to: you brought us up from Egypt to die—on repeat. But don’t dis the bread.
The bread is a gift, a divine gift and the loathing of it pushes the Lord past the point of tolerance. The Lord immediately sends fiery serpents to bite the people and many of them die.
The (should have been more) Grateful (about to be) Dead
The bit, but not yet dead, go to Moses and repent.
They ask very nicely if Moses would go to the Lord and pass along their apology, intercede for them. Moses does and the Lord tells him how to save the people. Moses makes a bronze serpent and puts it on a stick, he raises it up, if a serpent bit a man, he looked up at the serpent of bronze and lived.
Poison
This is bizarre. Saving the people in response to their repentance is one thing, but why does the Lord choose the bronze serpent to save people? It seems to be some kind of sympathetic magic, where a model of a thing is used to effect that thing in the natural world, like pouring water on an alter to produce rain, or using a voodoo doll to afflict the actual person.
So, looking up at the bronze serpent draws the very real serpents poison from the people? These are pagan practices, not usually employed by the Creator.
The Next Idol?
Further, what is the difference between a bronze serpent and a golden calf? God really didn’t like the people worshiping the golden calf right away, making them melt it down and drink the molten gold to punish them for their idolatry.
The bronze serpent, ordered by the Lord to heal the snake bite as kind of a one-hit wonder, continues to be worshiped until King Hezekiah destroyed it. Why did the Lord let them continue to make offerings to the bronze serpent for hundreds and hundreds of years?
The Lord could have chosen any way to heal the people, why use pagan magic? The Lord could have just healed them all instantly or made them eat the bread they said they loathed, to be healed. Of course, the Lord could have just chastised them for complaining about the food and not sent all the serpents to kill them in the first place.
The Original Grumbler
The choice of the serpent, itself, as weapon and healer is a curious. The serpent is the original grumbler, or at least the first to use words to sow dissent against the Lord.
R. Israel Meirha-Kohen says this is precisely why the serpent was chosen by the Lord to punish the grumbling people. Speech is a gift of God uniquely given to humans (with the exception of the serpent in Genesis and the ass in Numbers). So to sin against the Lord in speech is the gravest of sins, greater even than murder or adultery, which are sins of the passions and the flesh. The sin of speaking against the Lord, of sowing dissent against the Lord with words, is punished by the serpent, the one who first brought this sin into the world, infecting Eve and Adam. It was the first sin from which all others come.
That’s a possible reason for choosing the serpent to punish Israel, but what is up with commanding Moses to put one on a stick for the people to look to healing?
The Hardest Question
Is this text a hold over from a pre-monotheistic pagan practice of magic or is there some significant dialectical relationship between the human ability to speak dissent against the Lord that condemns and separates the created and the Creator and that same abilities power to heal, to reconcile?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
