Re: Naked Bible 103: Moses and the Bronze Serpent
I’m a little irritated by this podcast; the reason will seem obscure to some folks. Bear with me.
Lots of believers today appear to find the fiery serpent narrative in Numbers 21 disconcerting. He wastes the first third of the hour-long discussion on something that was totally unnecessary. He attacks the notion that Moses produced Genesis as a way of suggesting that the people of Israel weren’t aware of any part of Genesis. In doing so, he comes dangerously close to the Straw Man fallacy.
Heiser confuses conservative biblical scholarship with fundamentalism. Let’s be clear: I’ve been a fundamentalist and I’m still somewhat conservative, and there’s a huge difference between the two. Heiser describes a position that is closer to fundamentalism than the conservative scholarship I still tend to agree with. His primary purpose is to assert that the nation of Israel was likely ignorant of the material in Genesis, particularly chapter 3. I’m not sure why he reads a modern western confusion back into the Nation of Israel.
I’m often just a little saddened that Heiser doesn’t give credit to people like Moses, whom I assume would be just as clear-headed and scholarly as people like Heiser, and maybe more so. Heiser builds an argument that doesn’t hold water. He talks about how we today look back with the knowledge of Genesis 3 in our heads about the Serpent in the Garden when we come to Numbers 21 and the Bronze Serpent. To be honest, among the thousands of church folks I’ve known, not one of them suffered the confusion he seems to think is so common today. Then he proceeds to insist that the people of Israel weren’t likely to know that story.
He doubts that Moses would have had access to the material in Genesis. He has no problem with the likelihood of some kind of oral lore, but he would exclude Genesis 3 in particular. This becomes a poor excuse for choosing to believe that Genesis was written in Babylon during the Exile, that Moses didn’t compose it. He adds that there is no hint of the very recent Egyptian experience in the writing of Genesis. Does he imagine Moses was unable to distinguish between his early education in Egypt versus his later education in the home of Jethro? Jethro’s religion was distinctly Mesopotamian and he was a descendant of Abraham.
I don’t have trouble with the idea that Genesis was edited later; I’m quite certain we do not have what Moses originally produced. However, I believe Moses was responsible for the substance of the narrative. At least a part of what happened on the mountain with God over the forty days was to help Moses sort out his oral background from both Egypt and Babylon. For that matter, I am fully convinced Moses was a scholar whose intellect was at least on par with anyone living since then (except Solomon). It is silly to raise doubts about Mosaic authorship in the first place to explain how people are confused today. This is needless background discussion that serves little purpose, and in the end he waffles after ripping into conservatives.
I never had trouble with Jesus’ use of the Bronze Serpent narrative as a symbol of His crucifixion. I agree lots of ordinary church folks choke on that, but my explanation has not changed in a couple of decades. We should not see the image of serpents as unmitigated evil; the idea of using an image of a serpent in healing snake bites and warding off snakes (and other evil) was common across the ANE. That had nothing to do with what Jesus said.
Further, that God would command Moses to use what skeptics call “sympathetic magic” (using symbols of the thing you want or want to avoid) is poorly addressed in this podcast. Yes, it sounds like he comes out on a good side, asserting that if God commands it, your faith and obedience makes it work. I’ve known for most of my life that we don’t need to explain how it worked. I agree such practices would have been familiar to the Israelites and anyone else in the ANE. But he makes it sound like God is falling back on something merely cultural to get people to follow Him, as if God Himself was humoring them in their ignorance. I find that rather insulting to God and His revelation.
Jesus didn’t command the sea to calm down simply because His disciples were used to such an idea. Indeed, they were stunned. No, it’s because it touches on something fundamental to the nature of reality itself. Heiser would never understand that because he remained an essentially western man with western assumptions about reality. He didn’t embrace the Hebrew outlook he seems to have understood. But the Hebrew understanding of reality is all the more true in Jesus’ teaching about how the Bronze Serpent is symbolic of His final act as a human.
Having a better, more elite western viewpoint doesn’t solve the problem of ignorance about the Bible. It wasn’t merely a question of throwing Genesis 3 into a blender with Numbers 21 and making a mess. It’s not that hard to understand if you take the time to explain it to church folks. Hezekiah destroyed the Bronze Serpent because his people were confused about the symbolism for an entirely different reason. We need to take action about the source of confusion that our own people have.
The rather prolonged ending of the podcast is relating some of the goofy notions about the meaning of Melchizedek and the symbolism of Jerusalem as the center of the world. We should hardly be surprised when secular minded people get that stuff wrong. We should also be disappointed when someone like Heiser rejected ancient wisdom.
