Brazen Serpent

The brazen serpent (also bronze serpent or Nehushtan) was a bronze image made by Moses at God's command during the wilderness period, following a plague of fiery serpents sent against Israel as punishment for complaining against God and Moses (Numbers 21:5–9). God instructed Moses: Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live. Moses made a serpent of bronze (nechash nechoshet — a wordplay in Hebrew), set it on a pole, and anyone who looked at it after being bitten lived. This act of looking in faith at the elevated serpent became the paradigmatic Old Testament type of the atonement.

Jesus explicitly drew on this event in John 3:14–15: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. The physical serpent preserved in Israel after the wilderness period became an object of idolatrous veneration; Hezekiah destroyed it as part of his religious reformation, calling it Nehushtan (meaning a piece of bronze) — a name that demythologized it and stripped it of divine status (2 Kings 18:4). The ISBE notes that the incident illustrates the principle that divine healing comes through a specific God-ordained means, requiring active faith.