Sermon: On Statues – Tearing down the Copper Serpent

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 19 June 2021

Whether it is the question of where the statue of Edward Colston that was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbour last June should end up;
or the future of the statue of slave ship owner Robert Geffrye at the now renamed Museum of the Home in East London;
or ‘anger’ over the removal of portraits of former governors at the Bank of England;
or the legacy of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University
one of the live issues of our time is what do we do with artefacts from our past when they represent ideas, behaviours that no longer match our values.

In a pair of stories in our Torah portion and Haftarah this morning, we encounter a not unrelated dilemma.
Our Torah portion contains a short narrative, just six verses long, in which the Israelites, not unusually, complain, this time against God and Moses. In punishment, they encounter fiery serpents, which bite the people with fatal bites. Recognising their wrongdoing, they entreat Moses to intercede on their behalf with God. And – and now it gets very strange – in response God instructs Moses to make the image of a serpent and mount it on a standard. ‘Va’ya’as Moshe n’chash n’choshet’ – it states, ‘and Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard, and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, they would look at the copper serpent and recover.

Fast forward 500 years in the biblical chronology, and in our haftarah, we read about Hezekiah, king of Judah in the late eighth century BCE. Biblically, Hezekiah was a good king – as we read ‘there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those before him’. Among the good things that Hezekiah did in his obedience to God, we are told: ‘v’chitat n’chash ha-n’choshet asher asah Moshe’ – and ‘chitat’ – he beat (the same verb as beating your swords into ploughshares, to beat with hammers) n’chash n’choshet – the very copper serpent that was made in our Torah portion, now an item with its own identity, referred to as Nehushtan.

A couple of observations about these texts.
The first is that from very early on, rabbinic tradition flags that there is a problem here. The Mishnah, the earliest code of Jewish Law, is keen to clarify what is happening in our Torah portion.
In a halakhah about the requirement for kavannah – for intent – in our religious life, it asks – ‘v’chi nachash memit o nachash m’chayeih?’ ‘Is it that the serpent kills, or the serpent causes life?’ Rather, the Mishnah continues, ‘when the Israelites turned their eyes upward and subjected their hearts to God, they were healed, but if not, they died from their wounds’. It is directing the heart to heaven that is efficacious.

The second century CE Targum Yonatan – an Aramaic translation of the biblical text – translates our difficult verse as “when a serpent had bitten someone, and they looked at the serpent of copper, their heart was directed to memra d’Adonai – the name or manifestation – of God, and they lived”.

Theologically, our story in the Torah is potentially deeply problematic – the efficacy of an image here comes perilously close to the idolatry described in our haftarah. It is thus hugely important to the rabbis to establish that this absolutely, categorically isn’t what is going on here.

But – observation number 2 – when we read the bible with an eye to what else is going on in ancient near eastern religion and culture at that time, it’s hard not to think that this is exactly what was going on here.

We know that there was use of snake imagery in cultic practice in the ancient near east. This was certainly true in ancient Egypt – think of the uraeus, the serpent head sometimes seen portrayed on the foreheads of Egyptian gods and rulers. And it was also true in ancient Canaan – bronze serpents have been discovered in late Bronze Age findings at a number of places in the land of Israel. It is very likely that idol worship including snake imagery was a part of common cultic practice in eighth and seventh century Israel – at about the time of Hezekiah.

One – perhaps the best – explanation for our odd story is that we are reading it the wrong way round. We should have read the haftarah first. That is, a snake image was being worshipped by Israelites at the time of Hezekiah, possibly as a fertility symbol, in relationship with the goddess Asherah, and – the suggestion goes – the story of Moses and its creation emerged at that time as an etiological narrative – an explanation of how it came to be there in the first place – possibly in order to legitimise its worship, maybe even to save it from those who wished it removed.

All of which brings us back to our question of statues. Because, if these two observations tell us anything, it is that history, story is messy. Our narratives don’t always look like we want them, don’t always say what we want them to. Sometimes, like the Targum, we want to rewrite them to say what we need them to say. Our narratives are not always straightforward. Those who seek to protect or to remove statues often ignore this complexity. The defenders often argue that they are protecting a cultural legacy – but cultural legacies can be very complicated indeed.

The example of the n’chash n’choshet is also that things do not always mean the same thing forever – that we can’t always trace a simple, linear journey. Nor can we fix a moment, and a meaning, in time. Objects can change their valence – something can mean one thing at one point, in one story, and mean something else in a different story – even within Torah.

We can imagine the defenders of the serpent in the 8th Century BCE arguing that it should be protected – a part of our history to be preserved, while those against it focused on its problematic meaning at that moment in time.

Now, I’m not making a case for or against removal of specific statues. A recent article on the composer Handel’s links to the slave trade by the historian Ben Macintyre reminds us of how complicated heritage can be. But I would argue that our Torah and Haftarah this morning strongly suggest that we should not view any artefact, any image, as sacred, as untouchable.

Longevity is certainly not a good enough argument in itself. If we accept the biblical chronology, the n’chash n’choshet lasted for 500 years, but its removal was the right thing to do, by one of the greatest of kings.

The Talmud asks why the preceding kings left the copper serpent standing. The answer it gives is that they left it so that Hezekiah should have the merit of removing it. That is, it was his privilege, his purpose, his task.
And let’s remember, this was an image which – if only in back story – was created at divine instruction; saved people from the generation in the wilderness as part of the formative story of People Israel. And even so when its meaning shifted its removal was understood to be the right thing to do by the very best of kings.

There is, I think, one final lesson from this complicated story of the copper serpent.
It is a general warning to be cautious about objects. We should recognise their limitation – that ultimately they are not what is really important. That, as Gary Younge has observed, there is something deeply problematic in the attempt to create a fixed moment in the public domain, “with eternity in mind” as he put it, while “societies evolve, norms change, attitudes progress’.

The danger, if we ignore this truth, is that – be it copper serpents, or Colston, or Geffrye, or Rhodes – if we are not careful, we can end up fighting for things, sanctifying things which are not really worthy of being sanctified.