The Bronze Serpent

Skirting the land of Edom, the people lost heart again: why did you bring us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness—there is no bread and no water, and our soul loathes this insubstantial bread. The complaint contradicted itself: there is no bread, and we are sick of it. Fiery serpents came into the camp and people died of the bites. The nation confessed—we have sinned in speaking against the Lord and against you—and asked Moses to pray. The answer was unusual: make yourself a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone bitten who looks at it shall live. Moses made it of bronze, a pun in Hebrew between nachash and nechoshet. Seven centuries later the object survived and became an idol receiving incense, until King Hezekiah smashed it, an act the Bible praises. The same thing served as a cure and as an idol; the difference lay not in the bronze but in where the viewer was looking.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.