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On Moses and His Serpent

Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko

The biblical story “Of the Brazen Serpent” is no more than a minor episode in the forty years’ wandering of the Jewish people. Yet if one rereads the Book of Numbers attentively, it becomes clear that this story runs counter to the logic of the biblical narrative.

Let us recall what it says:

“6. And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, 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. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived” (Numbers 21:6–9).

Peter Paul Rubens, The Brazen Serpent, c. 1635–1640. National Gallery, London
Peter Paul Rubens, The Brazen Serpent, c. 1635–1640. National Gallery, London

So God commanded Moses to make a brazen serpent. That is, in essence, a kind of idol meant to protect the chosen people. Here the logic of the biblical narrative is plainly broken. After all, the commandments have already been given; more than that, there has already been occasion to see for oneself that breaking the commandments brings death upon the one who breaks them, and suddenly Moses is told outright that he must break this very commandment. What is the reason?

I venture to suggest that the reason lies not only in our own failure to understand, but also in the failure to understand on the part of those who, in the reign of King Josiah (about 620 BC), were engaged in writing down and correcting the biblical text. More than 50 years had already passed since King Hezekiah destroyed Nehushtan (as Moses’ Brazen Serpent came to be called) (see 2 Kings 18:4), so the editor of the Sacred Text did not have before his eyes the original to which this text refers.

As a result, we are left with an example of an extremely strange situation, in which Moses breaks a commandment and then, for more than 600 years, the “object” of the transgression is kept by the priests and serves as an object of worship. What sort of object could this be?

Michelangelo, The Brazen Serpent, 1511. Pendentive of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican
Michelangelo, The Brazen Serpent, 1511. Pendentive of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican

In our view, the simplest answer to this question is the following: what we have before us is an anagram. A letter that symbolizes a word. What should that word be? We suppose that it is the word God (Elohim, אלוהים) or He Who Is (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh (‏אהיה אשר אהיה‏)

In Hebrew both words begin with the letter “Aleph”, so to an illiterate person this letter should outwardly look rather like a slanting cross? But the square script came into use in Hebrew only after the Babylonian captivity. Nor is the Phoenician alphabet known yet; so which one is known? For on Mount Sinai Moses received tablets with a text carved on them (the first tablets), and on the second ones he himself wrote down the words of the covenant (see Exodus 34:28).

Rembrandt, Moses with the Tablets of the Law, 1659. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Rembrandt, Moses with the Tablets of the Law, 1659. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

What alphabet, then, could Moses have used? The simplest assumption is that he must have used Egyptian writing. After all, that is where he spent his youth, where he himself was taught. But in Egypt hieroglyphs are in use. And the sign for the unpronounced “aleph” is by no means a serpent but a falcon…

Is that so? No, it is not.

Hieratic script: the Edwin Smith Papyrus, c. 1600 BC
Hieratic script: the Edwin Smith Papyrus, c. 1600 BC

Around 1500 BC the so-called hieratic script begins to spread in Egypt, meant to simplify the writing of texts. These are not yet letters in the full sense of the word, but they are no longer hieroglyphs either. And this is what “aleph” looks like in this form:

The hieratic “aleph”
The hieratic “aleph”
Egyptian signs beside the Semitic letters: a table of letterforms
Egyptian signs beside the Semitic letters: a table of letterforms

If we accept this hypothesis, the whole story becomes perfectly logical.

Faced with a fearsome natural phenomenon (an attack of snakes), Moses makes an anagram that is at once an icon and a banner. The Name of God protects his people. This banner is kept for a long time, but as hieratic writing is lost, its original meaning is gradually pushed out of the people’s consciousness, though a dim messianic (saving) prefiguration remains. Compare: “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).

Fyodor Bruni, The Brazen Serpent, 1841. Oil on canvas, 565 × 852. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Fyodor Bruni, The Brazen Serpent, 1841. Oil on canvas, 565 × 852. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

In conclusion, I should like to point out the remarkable coincidence between the very image of the Brazen Serpent in Bruni’s painting and the letter, the hieratic symbol, that we find in ancient documents. Coincidence? Insight? Knowledge? This, it seems, could be the subject of a separate and fascinating study.

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First published: nestoriana.wordpress.com