The Fiery Serpents

After weeping for Aaron for 30 days, the Israelites began to move again. This time, the King of Arad, a Canaanite in the Negev, came against Israel and captured hostages. So Israel made a vow that if God delivered them into their hands, they would completely destroy their cities. So the LORD delivered the Canaanites into their hands. Then they utterly destroyed their cities.

They set out to go around Edom by the way of the Red Sea, a much longer journey to the south, then to the east, before turning north. The people became impatient and began to complain about the journey. They spoke against God and Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is not food and no water and we loathe this miserable food (the manna).’

The LORD heard their complaints and sent fiery serpents among the people. These serpents came and bit people so that many died. Their venom deadly, the people began to cry out confessing their sin! ‘We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD and you! Intercede that the LORD may remove the serpents from us,’ they begged.

Moses did intercede for the people. God told Moses to make a forty serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole. Whoever looking at this bronze serpent, when bitten, would live and not die. So Moses did this. Any man who looked at the serpent on the pole lived.

Jesus later used this incident to speak of His own crucifixion and death. He told Nicodemus, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

What about these serpent though? Were they normal snakes? Herodotus writing in 450 BC tells of flying serpents he went and looked at in Arabia, the same area the children of Israel travelled through. Isaiah 30:6 mentions the flying serpents as beasts living in the Negev. If these were the serpents which bit the Israelites, imagine the horror of that event. Thankfully God provided a way of salvation.