Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The story of the Brazen Serpent is weird. So after you are bitten by a snake, why on earth would the solution to that be looking at a bronze serpent? Interestingly, it appears that artifacts in the ancient near east and details in the Book of Mormon highlight why this is actually the perfect symbol to use to convey the message of this story. Welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine. We've got Neil and Stephen, and today we are talking about a paper written by Neil entitled Serpents of Fire and Brass, A contextual study of the Brazen Serpent tradition in the Book of Mormon. So. So this is a pretty comprehensive. It's a honking paper going through all sorts of ancient Near Eastern traditions and even new world a little bit around serpent imagery and iconography and what that can tell us to, like, help us inform this story. So what's going on in numbers 21?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think for a lot of readers, it is a little confusing. Part of the confusion is just how far removed we are from, like, the ancient Near Eastern world and this worldview that Israelites would have participated in. And once you start digging into some of that context and some of the artifacts and some of the other things that are out there and what we can learn from other religious texts and things like that, it starts to make a lot more sense as to what's going on.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: You know that famous and popular gif from community of Joel McHale's character walking into the room and everything's on fire, you know, or no, sorry, it's Donald Glover walking with the pizza. That's how I imagine has a cup.
Walking into the temple and seeing the Nehushtan. Right. Like, everything's just gonna. It is a very strange story, but I think it's good that we can kind of pick apart the. The intricacies here and relate it to our Book of Mormon. It's really funny the fact that the Book of Mormon people love the bronze snake. They. They talk about it a lot different times. They talk about the Moses raising the brass serpent. So it's good to pick this apart a little bit.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the best place to start is numbers 21 itself. And then we can get into what's going on in the Book of Mormon and stuff like that. But it's helpful to just have the story in mind and to know what that context is. So the Israelites have.
They're on the way to the Red Sea is what it says. And they were just turned away by Edom. They asked permission to pass Through. I think this is.
They asked permission. I can't remember if this was before or after, but they asked permission to go through Edom. And they're like, no, we don't want you going through our territory. So those details kind of give us some context and situate us, you know, on the border of Edom by the Red Sea. So they're probably around the Gulf of Aqaba in that area, which it's worth noting, that's, you know, that's where Lehi and his family go. Right. When they come out of Jerusalem. So this is kind of the setting. And then it says that the Lord sent fiery serpents and the Hebrew there. Maybe I should have one of you two actually do the Hebrew.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: I mean, I could read it for you if you want.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: What's the Hebrew for fiery serpents there, Stephen?
[00:02:54] Speaker C: It's ha nachashim ha seferim.
Yes.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
Literally fiery. But we'll have to talk about what that means. Exactly.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: The seraphim.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: The seraphim, like from Isaiah?
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. English readers of the Book of Mormon, or not the book. Well, of the Book of Mormon, too, but English readers of the Bible, if you've never read Hebrew, you have probably heard seraphim before. Right.
But anyway, these fiery serpents, they bite the people and many die. So some of them come back kind of repentant. The people were murmuring. That's why the fiery serpents came out in the first place. Right. And they asked Moses to pray to the Lord to make the serpents go away. Instead of having the serpents go away, what the Lord tells him to do is to make the. A fiery serpent and set it upon a pole. And here, fiery serpent, it's. It's just seraph here. Right. In the Hebrew, you know, Stephen can check me if I'm wrong.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: So my understanding of seraphim is that there's some kind of angelic being, but here they're not.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: So.
[00:03:54] Speaker C: So we gotta talk about that.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: We'll get there.
[00:03:56] Speaker C: Because I have opened the nrsv, and they have poisonous serpents.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Poisonous serpents.
[00:04:02] Speaker C: So that might cause some confusion. Are they. And it's fun when you see Schizo posting on Instagram about, like, fiery serpents or dragons that, you know, survived the Mesozoic period or whatever. Right. Like, all the legends about dragons are true because the Bible has fiery serpents. So we gotta talk about what fiery means here in this context.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then the other key word there for the Hebrew that I want to highlight is the word for pole, which I believe is ness.
And that's a key word because in other places in the Hebrew Bible that's translated as like ensign or standard.
It's often used for a battle standard.
That plays a role in how some people have contextualized this in the ancient Near East. I think that word, I personally think, and this is in my paper, that word plays a role in how Nephi ends up interpreting the brazen serpent story.
Because, well, the first time Nephi talks about it is in first Nephi 17, but then the second time he mentions it in second Nephi 25. What is he commenting on?
He's commenting on the Isaiah chapters he just quoted. Right?
[00:05:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: And there are several, there are several passages there where Isaiah talks about an ensign or standard. And the word is the same. It's ness.
[00:05:13] Speaker C: Maybe. Let's also just point out real quick, we call it a brazen serpent. Make sure you know what that means. Yeah, so it means a bronze serpent, right?
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Bronze serpent.
The Hebrew there for serpent of brass or brazen serpent.
[00:05:27] Speaker C: It's a tongue twister. It's a tongue twister. Yeah, it's a nachash nehoshet.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Nehash nehoshet.
[00:05:32] Speaker C: It's a pun kind of pun, Right, exactly.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: And nehoshet, as I understand, can be brass, but it can also just be copper itself. It can be bronze, right? Any sort of copper based metal alloy or something.
[00:05:47] Speaker C: That's where it gets the name, the Nehushtan later in 2 Kings, which we can get to the like the bronze thing, right, Is kind of what it comes to be called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, still playing on the play on words with nahash for snake, right?
Same word for in the Garden of Eden. That's the same kind of snake, right? But eventually it's just like the bronze thing is what they call it.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: I like, I like James Charlesworth's suggestion that we could translate it as copper cobra. That's pretty good to replicate the phonetic wordplay going on there. Even though it's maybe not strictly speaking a copper or a cobra. He makes this nahash nehoshet, this serpent of brass or bronze or copper. And anyone who looks upon it, right, is it says will, will live, right? They'll. If they look upon it, they'll live.
That's the story, right? And like I said, it can be, it can seem kind of weird, but there is, I think, just a lot of cool ancient Near Eastern context and precedent for what's going on here.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: So if you consult modern translations, you're going to see a discrepancy, they're going to render it as like poisonous snakes instead of fiery snakes. What the heck is going on here? So the word in Hebrew is literally fiery, right? Seraph, to burn, to fire, to be fired, to ignite.
Neil, you can correct me because you're the expert here, but my understanding from what I've read on this is it's fiery in the sense of it's poisonous in the sense of it's the effect that it has on the body when the poison is in your veins, eg, it gives you a fever and makes you sick and you burn up and it kills.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: It's burning, right?
[00:07:20] Speaker C: It's burning.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: It's got a burning bite, right?
[00:07:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: So like literal like flaming darts from the sky, Right.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: It seems to be. I mean, unless if you want to go like it really is all mythological with literal dragons. If you want to take it that way, I guess you can. But like on a more mundane or kind of quote realistic level, it may very well just be describing poisonous serpents who bite people and you get a fever and you're fiery. Right. And if you don't know how poisons work or how venom works and like, you know, Iron Age or Bronze Age, Israel, the ancient near east and. Yeah. You're going to assume that it's a, a literal, you know, ignition or fiery blaze of your body in some sense.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. And that's like. So scholars, when they've, when they've tried to like identify what the likely species is that that is involved or being identified, that's one of the things they'll talk about is the kind of bite that it has. Does it have a poison that causes like a burning, fiery, fevery sensation? There is, it is worth noting that like in Egypt, things like that, you certainly do have like fire breathing serpents in their myths and traditions. And I.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Most people have seen it when you see like King Tut's golden face mask and stuff, right. From National Geographic documentaries. He's got a little cobra up there on the top, right? The Uraeus.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: The Uraeus, yeah.
[00:08:39] Speaker C: Wadjet, the cobra who spits fire on the enemies of the king.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Exactly.
And so I certainly think that that that kind of stuff is within the background and context of what's going on. Right.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: So we've got these fiery serpents and then Moses comes out and brings a staff with a snake on it. What's with that?
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think what we can do here is there's some other like ancient Near Eastern artifacts that we can contextualize this with. And Stephen may know a bit about some of this stuff because a lot of it is Egyptian.
But one of the things that they have in Egypt are these bronze. So the right material, bronze serpent wands. Okay. And wands, as in like, Harry Potter ones, like wand or like a scepter, something like that. I think. I mean, I think they're like, a foot long.
[00:09:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Some of them. I mean, they're like giant poles or whatever. But, like. Yeah, you can definitely hold them right there, you know.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Yeah. We've got, like, figurines of people holding them, and they'll have, like, two in their hand and things like that. And that gives us kind of some sense of how they're used. But they found lots of examples of these going back to the Middle Kingdom period, which. Which is before, probably way before than the Exodus. Right.
And in some contexts, they've been found associated with healing spells.
So I don't know that we know exactly how it works, but we know that they're somehow associated with rituals for healing in some contexts. I don't know if this is specifically Egyptian. I know that there's also, in addition to the Egyptian examples, there's also a bunch of bronze serpent figurines that have been found in, like, the Levant in a bunch of archaeological sites that are in and around or near where Israel later would be, like Megiddo, Hazor, Shechem, Timnah, Gezer. All of those sites they found. They found these bronze serpent artifacts, those
[00:10:33] Speaker A: used for healing as well.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: And they are. They're all in cultic or ritual context, the worship context. Right.
And they're thought to be associated with the West Semitic deity for healing.
And there are spells specifically, like, for healing snake bites and things like that.
And so it all kind of seems to be a part of this broader ancient Near Eastern context. Specifically. Actually, all of those artifacts that I just mentioned from the Levantine sites are all dated between 1650 to 900 B.C.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: that's right in our time period.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: And so it's like. It's specifically like a Bronze Age to maybe the early Iron Age phenomenon. And then it kind of seems to disappear.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: So you're saying at the same time that Moses is bringing out this brazen serpent, There's a cultural milieu where in Egypt they've got staffs with serpents that are associated with healing and then serpent figurines in the area of Israel that are associated with healing.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Okay, so it gets even better because we also have, like, at Timna, which I mentioned earlier, There's a gilded or copper bronze serpent that was found in association with. That was dated to the 13th. Between the 13th and 11th century B.C. so this is like right in the same time period as the Exodus. Most scholars who accept a historical exodus would place it around the 13th century BC and it's specifically found in association with a tent shrine, like the tabernacle, for instance.
So now I'm not saying you're saying we found it.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Do we find the snake?
[00:12:05] Speaker B: I'm not saying we found Moses's bronze serpent, and I'm not saying we found the tabernacle. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a. There's a context where this is right in the same geographical area and it's the same kind of religious context of, you know, maybe a wandering nomadic group that has a tent shrine and they're. They're using the serpent somehow in worship practices. And in fact, I. Actually, there is one scholar who has argued that this tent shrine was a. Dedicated to the worship of Yahweh specifically. And so he doesn't think they're Israelites. He thinks they're maybe like what we'd maybe call Midianite or Canaanite people. But he does think when scholars debate the origins of Yahweh within an ancient Near Eastern context, he thinks that these were worshipers of Yahweh.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: So we have like an actual template or prototype or kind of very similar thing to exactly what we have in the Book of Numbers.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Serpent made of metal in the right time and place and associated with a tent shrine, a temple like, thing made out of a tent.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. You have all of these artifacts. And like I said, scholars generally think they are associated with healing, where we do have context. Like I said, like in a tomb in Egypt, some serpent wands were found, strictly like specifically with spells about healing and things like that. So we have context that suggests these are used in healing. There's like a whole paper from Karen Jonas that talks about the.
What's the word? Apotropic magic, I think.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: Apotropaic.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Apotropaic magic, which is.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Define that, please.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Protective.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: Protective.
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Something meant to protect you.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, these were like, in some sense, like charms, amulets, amulets that you would hold and you would maybe say these spells and you would be able to get the benefits. And the serpents and stuff were apparently associated with heal least one of the benefits.
And actually, that's actually kind of interesting. This is. I'm sorry, this is just gonna make it weirder for you guys for a second. But one scholar has actually argued that the text of Numbers four through nine itself was maybe. It has, like, a lot of phonetic sounds, a lot of like, like hissing, like sounds as you recite it in Hebrew. And so he's actually theorized that this was actually a spell of sorts or a prayer, an invocation, you might say, while approaching the brazen serpent in order to invoke, like, its healing powers and things.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: I have a quote here from the Anchor Bible dictionary, who talks about snake deities or deities associated with snakes or, you know, things like that.
Let me read the quote here.
Says in Numbers 21, the story of the fashioning of the images recorded. The story is alluded to in the Hezekiah passage. So it is clear that the cult, meaning the temple cult at Jerusalem, assumed that there was a relationship between Yahweh and this God.
According to the Numbers narrative, the image was created to cure snake bites. This intermediary between God and the people reflects the divine world of the ancient near east, where an important deity would produce a lesser deity to handle mundane matters such as curing the sick. And he gives some examples here just to continue going on. He says this God, meaning the. The bronze snake, had a very specialized sphere of expertise curing poisonous snake bites and therefore would have been a lower level of divine rank than most deities.
This deity appears to be the only biblical example of a Judean God of this level of deities. So what that is all saying, ladies and gentlemen, is according to this scholar in the anchor Bible dictionary, there seems to be some kind of association between the bronze snake with Yahweh, the God of Israel, because they bring it into the temple in Jerusalem.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: I mean, there's this idea that ancient Israelites were monotheistic and there was one God, only one God from, you know, modern Judaism today to the beginning of time. But, I mean, we've already talked about in some of our episodes how clearly there was maybe a more complicated, complicated picture. But now this is quite complicated, even more complicating.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah, so let's.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: So. So let's maybe put that in context this way. Right? So when it's talking about a pantheon of Judean gods that might, you know, cause some people, especially some of our Christian brothers and sisters, to panic because it's not. It doesn't sound very monotheistic, but it is very well accepted at this point. Right. That Israel had what was called what's often called the divine council or the divine assembly. And we don't usually hear you know, people use the word pantheon for it, but it's more or less the same concept as the pantheon of deities you might see in Mesopotamia or Egypt or at Ugarit and things like that. Right. Or Greece and Rome and whatever else you want to compare it to. But the idea was that Yahweh, or the Lord ruled in the heavens and he had a heavenly court. Right. And he had these lesser divine beings. Some people are maybe more comfortable if you call them angels rather than deities.
The, the Bible itself calls them gods at various points, or sons of God. And that's a title that I think is important to understand that, that members of this divine council could be called the sons of God or, you know, B' Nai Elohim.
And, and they had different roles and functions. Right? And. And yeah, some scholars have said, yeah, this brazen serpent appears to represent a member of the Judean pantheon. Or other scholars have said, like Yahweh's entourage. And here's where Isaiah starts to come into play.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Okay, tell us about Isaiah.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: So in Isaiah 6, right, you have Isaiah has this vision where he sees the heavenly throne. He sees the Lord on the throne, and he's flanked on either side by what Isaiah describes as seraphim. Okay, now that's the same word. So are they angels or are they serpents?
And, and you'll hear some people say, oh, that means the fiery ones, things like that. But a lot of scholars, because of this, all of this other ancient Near Eastern background, a lot of scholars think that. And, and, and he describes the seraphim, I think it's important to context here as having wings and like six wings, right. Or something.
A lot of scholars think those are, they are angelic beings.
Beings. They're members of the divine council, but they're maybe serpentine in form or in some way. Shape or form. And we actually have, for an Israelite context, specifically, we have Judean and Israelite seals from like the 9th to 7th century BC that depict serpents, usually like a cobra. They appear to be Egyptian inspired. I was going to say.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Where are they getting them from, Neil?
[00:19:06] Speaker B: They're basing them on the Egypt, right. The Egyptian cobra.
And then they have wings. Okay. And so scholars have found these seals and they've said, this appears to be the seraphim. This is the seraphim or a seraph, I should say, in singular. Right? These are. This is a seraph. And so, and in fact, I mean, we can jump ahead to this. I wasn't going to talk about this just yet, but They've even found these bronze bowls that have these intricate designs on them, including. There will be a symbol that is usually associated with either royalty or divinity. Something like the tree of life, for instance, or I think like a scarab beetle, which is again, a very Egyptian. But these were found. I think they were actually found in Mesopotamia, but they're believed to be loot, basically, that was taken from.
From.
[00:19:59] Speaker C: From Judea when Babylonians got rid of
[00:20:01] Speaker B: either Judea or Israel. And they have.
They'll have the symbol like the tree of life or the. The scarab. And then on either side of them, it has a pole with a winged serpent flanking each side of that divine symbol.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: And you can also maybe think of like the cherubim in the temple are a similar kind of concept, but they're a different. Cherubim are different from seraphim. Right. But there are these divine beings that are part of the heavenly realm in. In this Israelite worldview who are kind of guardians of the throne. And. And are you. You see what they do in Isaiah, right? Is Isaiah sees what's going on, and he says, woe is me, for I have unclean lips. Right? He's not worthy to enter. And they are acting as kind of these guardians, these intermediaries.
One of them comes, grabs a coal. Coal, right. Purge it, you know, puts it on his mouth, which burns his tongue, and then he is. He's purged. He's cleansed of his sins, and now he is able to enter worthily into the presence of God. Okay, so you have this idea that these. That seraphim are somehow part of the heavenly court and are somehow intermediaries between human beings and God.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: I was always taught that the brazen serpent was a foreshadowing symbol of Jesus Christ, but now we've been talking about how this is actually a symbol for these, like, lower deities of healing. So which. Which is it?
[00:21:30] Speaker C: Porque no los dos. That's always our favorite response.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Well, so I think to answer that question, it's helpful to consider some of the functions that we just talked about, that we've already talked about. Okay. So for one thing, we've already established that the brazen serpent, the seraph, that, to strictly use the Hebrew, right. The seraph that Moses makes and puts on a pole symbolizes healing. Okay. That's an attribute of Jesus Christ, right?
The seraph in Isaiah's vision, what does he do? He. He is an intermediary between God and man who cleanses Isaiah of his sins, right? That's an attribute of Jesus Christ. Right. As we understand it, Isaiah 14. There's another reference that I think has Get. Got. Gets missed a lot, but Isaiah 14:20. Let's see, what verse is it?
[00:22:22] Speaker A: It
[00:22:25] Speaker B: 28 and 29 has this prophecy where King Ahaz has died and the Philistines are rejoicing his death, apparently. And so Isaiah says, rejoice not thou, O whole Philistia or Palestinia. But it's. It's Philistine. Because of the rod of him that smote thee is broken. For out of the serpent's root, so a serpent. And there's a root. The serpent's root is thought to be the dead king. Right. Past generation shall come forth a cockatrice. That's a bad translation from the King James. Like an adder or a viper. Right. A serpent. Another kind of serpent.
And his fruit shall be a fiery, flying serpent. And there the words are again in the Hebrew.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Seraphim.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Seraphim. I think the full. I don't know the full phrase off the top of my head.
[00:23:21] Speaker C: I will look it up.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Stephen can pull it up here in the Hebrew.
But it is. It's a seraph. It's a fiery, flying seraph.
[00:23:29] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's literally a seraph, like with wings. A flying seraph, basically.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: Yeah. This is again, and I mentioned already, we have seals from this same time period that show serpents with wings, and some of those are from. From the Judean court.
And so this is a symbol. The flying serpent is thought to be associated with the monarchy, the Davidic monarchy, the anointed king, if you will. Right. The Messiah, the Messianic figure. And this is, I think, pretty clearly a Messianic prophecy. Right. This is predicting a future generation. A future king will come. And, you know, in this case, he's going to, you know, put down rebellion in Philistine or whatever. But it's a Messianic role here that this flying, firing sword serpent has. And that is not. That is not a Christianized interpretation. You actually can find in the Targums of Isaiah that it's interpreted as.
You know, the Targums are these Aramaic translations that are actually very.
Commentaries, paraphrases. They're very expansive. They reinterpret the passage in a lot of ways. But this is a Jewish. But they're Jewish. Right. They're not Christian.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Not Christian, Yep.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: And they take this passage, they say, because the ruler who was subjecting you is broken, for from the sons of. The sons of Jesse, the Messiah will come, and his deeds will be among you as A wounding serpent. So they're interpreting this as a messianic prophecy. Ancient Jews are actually interpreting this as a Messianic prophecy. And again, I think the context is pretty clear. It is a future royal figure that's coming.
So I think when you put all these pieces together, you start to have this sense of, okay, it is a divine being of some kind, one of the B' Nai Elohim, if you will, one of the sons of God.
And it's a figure that is associated with healing, with intermediating between man and God. And it's a figure that is associated with the royal house, the Messiah, the messianic, a future messianic figure.
And so when you put all of those pieces together, well, that's Jesus Christ, right?
[00:25:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
Especially if you're a Nephite prophet like Lehi or Nephi, who have had visions and revelations explicitly, plainly testifying of the coming of the Messiah in First Nephi 1. Right, exactly. This is why Lehi's Jewish contemporaries are getting mad. So the math for them, the equation, it fits right in. If you already know the Messiah will come as Jesus Christ and you have the imagery that they're already circulating, this messianic imagery, associating it with fiery serpents, it's really easy to link them together.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: So how does the Book of Mormon's passages color this conversation?
[00:26:12] Speaker B: So, yeah, the Book of Mormon makes several references to it, as Stephen mentioned. The very first one is first Nephi 1741, which is an interesting reference because this one adds wings right where there isn't.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: This is when Nephi's building the boat.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: This is when Nephi's building the boat. They're in Bountiful and his brothers are kind of rebelling. Right. And he tells this story about the fiery serpents, but he doesn't just say fiery serpents. He says fiery flying serpents. As we noted, that phrase does appear in Isaiah, but it doesn't appear in numbers 21. But a lot of scholars, because we have the winged serpent iconography coming from both Israel and Egypt and Israel. Right. Contemporary with this time period, a lot of scholars actually think that this, this episode with the brazen serpent would have been flying serpents in, in their ideology, their, their mythos, kind of their imagination,
[00:27:03] Speaker C: how they're kind of their baked in description and of what these things do, what they are, would have included some sense of flying, meaning, movement, swiftness, if not mythologically actual wings.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Well, in fact, like I mentioned, there's those bronze bowls that people think might have been associated with the temple that have the two serpents on a pole flanking a symbol that is usually associated with like ruleship or divinity. And they're winged. Right. And there are that. And then there's the seals that I've already talked about. And then there's the Isaiah setting where the, the seraphim around the throne of God are winged. And this has actually led some commentators to suggest that the brazen serpent itself may have actually been winged. But in that story, he doesn't talk about the bronze serpent itself, he just talks about the fiery flying serpents. He does add the detail that some people would not look, which is not in numbers. There are some early Jewish traditions about people refusing to look and things like that. So, you know, there's something interesting going on.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: It's got a cool ancient connection to the Book of Mormon.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. But then the next time Nephi mentions the passage or this story is in second Nephi 25, he says, now my brethren, I have spoken plainly that ye cannot err. And as the Lord God liveth that brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt and gave unto Moses power that he should heal the nations. Kind of interesting that he says, yeah, not people.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: It's not people.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Nations after they had been bitten by the poisonous serpents, if they had cast their eyes unto the serpent which he did raise up before them and also gave them power that they might, you know. And then he talks about this other story and then he says, y behold, I say unto you that as these things are true and as the Lord God liveth, there is none other name given under heaven, save it be this Jesus Christ of which I have spoken, whereby man can be saved. And then you get with Alma and later Nephi son of.
Well, I think it's Nephi son of Nephi or Nephi son of helaman. In helaman 8 you get the later prophet Nephi. They more explicitly equate the brazen serpent with Jesus Christ.
But Nephi kind of makes that first move here, but it's not quite as explicit. But what I do think is interesting about what Nephi is doing here is second, Nephi25 is not his commentary on the Exodus, Right. It's his commentary on Isaiah.
And this is where I think some interesting passages from Isaiah that get overlooked come into play. We already talked about the, the, the, the Seraphim passages, Isaiah 6, coal burning the tongue, the Isaiah 6 and Isaiah 14, which are both quoted by Nephi here.
But he also quotes Isaiah 11:12, which is also about a future ruler, mind you.
And Isaiah 13:2, which all mention an ensign or standard being raised up. Right. And like I mentioned, the word for pole in Numbers is the same Hebrew word that's used in these passages.
Here's what's kind of interesting about that, that especially with Isaiah 5, the, the banner, the battle standard that's being raised up and the army that's. That's coming is most commentators say what's being envisioned. It's, it may be apocalyptic on some level, but what Isaiah would be envisioning is the Assyrian army. Right. This big imposing imperial army is coming from the north and they're gathering all nations. I think, in fact, the phrase, you have the phrase ensign to the nations. Right.
Nephi said the, the serpent was raised up to the nations.
Austin Henry Layard publishes the findings at Nineveh.
And there's this scene where there are two serpents on poles that scholars think are battle standards.
Cool.
So the battle standard that Isaiah is envisioning here is probably, or possibly at least serpentine. Okay.
And there's even some scholars will take the numbers reference and they interpret that in light of battle standards. There are Bronze Age Egyptian battle standards that will have serpents on them, among other. They're not exclusively serpent, but they've got like various kinds of deities and some of them have serpents on them.
And, and these battle standards, they're serpentine in form, they represent a deity. Right. Ancient Near Eastern ideas about war were that you were carrying your gods out to war when you brought these battle standards out. Right.
And so I think what you see going on, Nephi always, in fact, in the Book of Mormon, it's always the serpent that was raised up or lifted up. Right. Nephi is conflating these battle standards with the seraphim and the story from Numbers. But also some of the connotations you get about the seraphim in Isaiah, and you start putting all these pieces together and it represents a divine being, a messianic being, a son of God, who's healing, who has healing powers, who's healing in his wings. Healing in his wings, yeah. In fact, Nephi uses that example exact phrase a few verses earlier in verse 13.
Right. And so you're putting all these pieces together and Nephi has just had this panoramic vision where he learned about Jesus Christ and this he, you know, this messiah figure, this son of God who is going to be lifted up upon the cross. And this becomes just a very natural association for Nephi to make. Oh, the brazen serpent, the lift, the raised up serpent.
That's the raised up Messiah, divine Son
[00:32:47] Speaker A: of God, almost like a battle standard. I've never really conceptualized it in like militaristic terms. Not just a symbol for worship, but a symbol for triumph, for victory.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: That plays well into the motif of God as the divine warrior who destroys the forces of chaos and evil and disorder. Right. Jacob Nephi's brother. We'll pick up on that later in 2 Nephi chapter 9.
God defeating the chaos monster, as it were. That's a whole other conversation, but that ties in very nicely with that imagery as well, I think.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: Wow. So this symbol really is very multivalent, if you will. It's not just, it doesn't mean just one thing. There's all sorts of iconography from the ancient world and also symbolism from our own theology, things we get from the Book of Mormon that kind of feed into what this symbol might mean in that context.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: No, absolutely. And I think, I think that's an important thing to understand pretty much about all symbol that you see in Scripture or really anywhere. Right. There is no symbolism that is like an exact one to one correlation to something. Right. Symbolism by its very nature is multivalent. Right. And so our best, the best we can do in trying to understand when there's a symbol that seems strange to us in Scripture is we look at the cultural context and background and we're going to find a lot of different possibilities.
But like I said, when, I think when you add up all the pieces here, it really does point to a Christ like figure. And you can understand as like, you know, whether, whether you're everyday run of the mill Israelite would have understood like, oh, that's Jesus Christ who's going to come in several hundred years or whatever. You can see how that is. That is what's being communicated. That's maybe what the Lord was intending.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: And it's what certain prophets saw and
[00:34:27] Speaker B: it's what certain prophets saw. It's what someone like Nephi saw. Like I said, when he starts putting all these pieces together from Isaiah and from numbers and from his cultural milieu
[00:34:35] Speaker C: and from the visions he's had.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: From the visions he's had, literally the
[00:34:37] Speaker C: bigger picture he has.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: Right, exactly. And he has, has that advantage. He has this even though he's before, he kind of has hindsight because he's had these visions and he can see, oh, that's what this is really about. That's what this is ultimately pointing to. And I think that's kind of the message, I think that you can get out of it. And you can kind of. You can nuance it, and you can add richness and detail as you look at the broader ancient Near Eastern context. But. But when you zoom back out, you see once again all the pieces are pointing back to Christ.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Beautiful. Well, if anyone is interested in studying this more, you can look up the Interpreter foundation article by Neal Rapley entitled Serpents of Fire and A Contextual Study of the Brazen Serpent Tradition in the Book of Mormon. Remember, you can study deeply, believe boldly. We'll see you next time, Sam.
