NEHUSHTAN nĭ hoosh’ tən (נְחֻשְׁתָּֽן, bronze one). A Mosaic brazen serpent.

Though as yet unnamed, Nehushtan’s origin is described in Numbers 21:4-9. There, in the fall of 1407 b.c., Israel’s last year in the wilderness, as the nation was journeying to the S of the Dead Sea around the N end of Edom (cf. Y. Aharoni and M. Avi-Yonah, The Macmillan Bible Atlas, map 52), the people in their discouragement “spoke against God and against Moses, ‘why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?’” (Num 21:5). God, as a result, sent among them נְחָשִׁ֣ים שְׂרָפִ֔ים, fiery serpents, i.e., snakes with a burning venom (BDB, 977; cf. KB, 932); and these caused considerable death (v. 6).

Upon Israel’s repentance, Moses interceded with Yahweh who instructed him in turn to make out of copper or bronze a שָׂרָ֔ף, “burning serpent” (see Seraphim), perhaps so called because of its flashing in the light (KD, Pentateuch, III:139). It was, in any event, elevated upon a standard; and anyone who had been bitten, “when he sees it, shall live” (v. 8). To its contemporaries, Nehushtan therefore symbolized a looking to God in faith for salvation; and into the future it typified Christ’s being lifted up on the cross, “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:15; cf. Luke 23:42, 43).

With the passage of time, however, Israel lost sight of the symbolical and typical function of Nehushtan; and by the later eighth cent. b.c., were burning incense to it, as if it were in itself a deity (2 Kings 18:4). As a part, therefore, of Hezekiah’s overall campaign against the high places and their idolatrous objects, begun in the first year of his reign (2 Chron 29:1) in the spring of 725 (see [http://biblegateway/wiki/Chronology of the Old Testament CHRONOLOGY OF THE OT], IX. C. 6; BS, 126 [1969], 40-52), the king broke the serpent into pieces (2 Kings 18:4). The name Nehushtan was then assigned to it, prob. in disparagement: it was not נָחָשׁ֒, H5729, the “serpent,” but simply נְחֹ֫שֶׁת֒, H5733, a “bronze” something (on the -ān ending, cf. J. Montgomery, JAOS, 58 [1938], 131). Nehushtan thus exists as an example of how an originally good, redemptive ritualistic object may be perverted into its opposite and become detrimental to true saving faith.

Bibliography On associated theories of negative criticism: H. H. Rowley, “Zadok and Nehushtan,” JBL, 58 (1939), 132-141.