Numbers 21:9

The whole of Numbers 20 leads up to this road, with its water from the rock, Edom’s refusal and the death of Aaron. The journey begins at Mount Hor, where Aaron had just died (Numbers 20:28), so the people set out having lost their high priest. Moses had asked the king of Edom to let Israel pass through his land, and Edom came out against them with a strong army and refused (Numbers 20:18–21). The Edomites were descendants of Esau and so were Israel’s distant kin, and God had told Israel to leave them in peace (Deuteronomy 2:4–6).

So the people had “to compass the land of Edom”, which means to go all the way around it. “By the way of the Red sea” most likely means the road toward the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea, which took them south, then east, and then north again through dry, mountainous country. After nearly forty years in the wilderness, a long detour that led away from the land before it led toward it was hard to bear.

The Hebrew behind “much discouraged” is qâtsar, a verb that means to be short or to cut short, and also to reap a harvest. Here it is said of the nephesh, the soul, a word that first means a breathing creature and is used for life, the self, the whole person and even appetite. Put together, the phrase says that the soul of the people became short. Their patience and endurance had run out. The cause stands at the end of the verse: “because of the way”. The word derek means a road, a track that feet have trodden, and it is also used for a course of life or a way of acting. Here it is first of all the long road around Edom, and with it the whole hard journey that the road stood for.

In the wilderness, weariness of this kind often turned into complaint. The people murmured for food soon after leaving Egypt (Exodus 16:2–3), complained at Taberah and wept for meat (Numbers 11:1–6), and rose up with Korah against Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16:1–3). Hebrews takes up this wilderness history to warn believers against hardening their hearts as Israel did (Hebrews 3:7–11). Verse 4 shows the trouble starting in the soul before it reaches the mouth. Even under God’s own leading the road can be long and hard, and the God who led Israel around Edom was still bringing them to the land he had promised.

“And the people spake against God, and against Moses.” The verb is dâbar, the ordinary word for speaking, and the word “against” gives it its edge. These words were spoken in opposition, aimed at Moses and, above him, at God himself. Their question, “Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”, turns the deliverance from Egypt into a trap, as if God had set them free only to let them perish. They had talked this way before, when they longed for the flesh pots of Egypt (Exodus 16:3), and when they murmured against Moses at Marah (Exodus 15:24). This time the complaint came soon after the LORD had given them victory over the Canaanite king of Arad, earlier in this same chapter.

“For there is no bread, neither is there any water” overstates their plight. God had given bread from heaven since Exodus 16:4, and he kept giving it for forty years (Exodus 16:35). He had given water from the rock at Rephidim (Exodus 17:6) and again at Meribah, in the chapter just before this one (Numbers 20:11).

The last clause shows what lay under the complaint: “our soul loatheth this light bread.” The same word nephesh stands here as in verse 4, now with a verb of disgust. Qûwts means to loathe, to be sick of something. “Light” is qᵉlôqêl, from a root meaning to be light or slight, and it is used here with contempt for something worthless and despised. The bread God sent every morning, which had kept a whole nation alive in the desert, they called worthless. Psalm 78 looks back on this same spirit of rebellion in the desert (Psalm 78:17–20).

“And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people.” The name here is Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, the LORD who had bound himself to Israel. The verb shâlach means to send or to stretch out, and it makes the LORD the one who acted. The serpents came at his sending. The wilderness was a place of snakes, and Moses later reminds Israel of “that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions” (Deuteronomy 8:15–16), yet this plague came from God’s hand as his judgment on their words, to humble them and bring them back.

“Fiery” is sârâph, from a root meaning to burn. These were burning ones, named most likely for the burning pain of their venomous bite, or possibly for a fiery colour. The seraphim that Isaiah saw above the throne of the LORD bear the same name (Isaiah 6:2). Serpents carry a long shadow in Scripture, back to the serpent in Eden (Genesis 3), and here God makes creatures of that kind the instrument of his judgment. “They bit the people; and much people of Israel died.” The verb mûwth is the plain word for dying, and “much people” tells us the loss was heavy.

Paul draws the lesson for the church: “Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents” (1 Corinthians 10:9). Psalm 78 tells how judgments like this one turned Israel back to seek God (Psalm 78:34–35), and that is what happens in the very next verse.

“Therefore the people came to Moses.” The judgment did its work. The people who had spoken against Moses now came to him as the one who could carry their case to God. Their confession is direct: “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee”. The verb châṭâʼ means to miss the mark or to go astray, and so to sin, and they name their sin exactly. “Spoken” is dâbar, the same verb as “spake” in verse 5, so their confession takes up the very charge of that verse and owns it. They had spoken against the LORD and against his servant, and now they say so.

“Pray unto the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us.” They asked for the plague to end, knowing they were helpless to end it. “And Moses prayed for the people.” The verb pâlal means to pray or to intercede, and its root sense is probably to intervene or to step in between. Moses was one of the two they had wronged, and he prayed for them at once. He had done the same after the golden calf, when he pleaded with the LORD for Israel and the LORD turned from the harm he had spoken of (Exodus 32:11–14).

Confession and forgiveness belong together all through Scripture. David confessed his sin to the LORD and was forgiven (Psalm 32:5), and John promises that when we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us (1 John 1:9).

God answered Moses’ prayer in a way no one expected. “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.” The word for “fiery serpent” is sârâph again, the name of the serpents that were killing them. God tells Moses to make an image of the very thing that brought death and makes it the means of life. The command came from God, so the remedy was his provision from first to last.

Moses obeyed: “Moses made a serpent of brass”. The metal the KJV calls brass is bronze. In Hebrew the word for serpent is nâchâsh and the word for bronze is nᵉchôsheth, so “serpent of brass” is nekhash nekhoshet, two words that sound alike. The wordplay ties the instrument of judgment to the means of healing.

He “put it upon a pole”. The word is nêç, a standard, banner or signal pole, something raised high so that it can be seen from far off, used to rally troops or mark a place. The name Jehovah-nissi, which Moses gave the altar at Rephidim, is built on this word. Set on a nêç, the serpent stood where every bitten person in the great camp could see it, wherever they lay.

“Every one that is bitten... shall live.” The promise was for anyone at all who had been bitten. The verb for live is châyay, to live, and in its causative form to revive, and here it means a person at the edge of death restored to life and health. Verse 9 records that God did exactly what he said: “if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.”

Jesus himself explains this passage: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). The next verse gives the reason: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). The bitten Israelites looked to the serpent on the pole and lived in the body, and we look to Christ lifted up on the cross and receive eternal life.

The likeness runs through the whole story. The serpents’ venom brought death, as “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The serpent was lifted high for all to see, and Christ was lifted up in public view, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The Israelites had only to look, and we are saved by believing, “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). The remedy came to people who had just been speaking against God, and “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The bronze serpent met one plague for a time, and Christ is God’s full and final provision for sin.

The bread Israel despised also points to him. Jesus called himself the true bread from heaven, which gives life to the world (John 6:32–33), and said, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). The manna was a shadow of him, and many in his own day turned away from him as their fathers had turned away from the manna.

Christ also walked a hard road, the one Israel grumbled on and far harder. He “stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), knowing what waited there. He endured temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11), and in Gethsemane he said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” (Matthew 26:38), and still he went on to the cross. Because he walked that road, we have a high priest who is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15), and he says to the weary, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

This passage sets God’s holiness and his mercy side by side. He took the grumbling of his people seriously enough to send death among them, and when they confessed, he answered his servant’s prayer with a remedy that any dying person in the camp could use. All it asked of the bitten was a look.

It also shows us ourselves. The people’s patience ran short on a long road, and their weariness turned into contempt for the bread God gave them every morning. Mercies that come every day are easily despised, and the passage holds up that danger plainly.

Above all it shows us Christ. The God who told Moses to lift up the serpent has lifted up his Son, and everyone who looks to him in faith lives. The road may still be long, and the one we look to has already walked the hardest road of all.