The Fiery Serpents Came Back for the Slanderers

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The First Scream at the Edge of Camp

A man went down at the edge of the camp with both hands locked around his calf. Then another one further in. Then a whole line of them, dropping between the tents while something moved through the sand faster than a man could turn around.

The bite burned. That was the part nobody was ready for. It went in cold and then it burned, all the way up, and the ones who took it did not die quietly. A great many of Israel died that day and the day after it.

Moses heard the noise of the camp change. For weeks it had been the same complaint in the same tone, about the bread that fell out of the sky and the road that would not end. Now the road had teeth.

The Mouth That Started It

The serpent had opened all of this. In the garden it spoke against its maker, put a lie about God into a woman's ear, and was cursed for it before anyone else was cursed.

Israel had carried that story out of Egypt and across the sand. They knew it by heart. They still stood around in the evenings taking God apart in conversation, and taking Moses apart after Him.

So let the one who began with slander, God said, come and collect from the slanderers.

Whoever breaks through a fence gets bitten by a snake. The fence around this camp was not built of thorns. It was built of miracles, and the hole in it was made with talk.

One Food and a Thousand Flavors

There was a second fit between the crime and the creature, and it was the crueler of the two.

A serpent can eat every delicacy in the world and taste dust. Whatever goes into its mouth turns to dust in its mouth, and it has been eating that sentence since the garden.

Israel ate one thing, every morning, for forty years, and tasted whatever they wanted. A man who craved meat found meat in it. Forty years, and they lacked nothing, and they still found room in their mouths to sneer at the bread.

Let the creature that eats a thousand things and tastes one, God said, collect from the people who eat one thing and taste a thousand.

Rabbi Yudan knew where these particular snakes had come from. The cloud that went in front of the camp used to burn them where they lay and pile the bodies into a wall around the tents. Israel had been sleeping for years behind a fence of dead serpents without once asking what it was made of. Everything built to keep them alive was standing right there, already the right shape for a weapon, and it was let loose on them.

The Bronze Went Up on a Pole

They came to Moses and they did not argue. We have sinned, because we spoke against God and against you. Pray, and get the serpent off us.

He had been the target of that talk for weeks. He prayed anyway, at once, without making them wait while he nursed it, because a man who is asked for forgiveness does not get to turn cruel.

God told him to make a serpent and set it up on a standard, and anyone bitten who looked at it would live. Moses cast one out of bronze and raised it, and it stood there in the heat saying nothing, while men who had used their mouths to tear the manna apart had to use their eyes to take healing off a pole.

Some looked up and stood up. Some stayed face down in the sand they had preferred all along.

Balak Counted Out the Silver

Off to the east of all this, Balak son of Tzipor was doing arithmetic. He had watched what Israel did to the Emorites. Sihon finished, Og finished, two kings and their cities gone, and nothing in Moab that could stand in front of that.

So he sent for a mouth. Bilam could take a nation apart with words the way the serpents had taken men apart with fangs, and the elders of Moab and Midian went out on the road to him with the fee for divination in their hands.

No nation could say afterward that heaven had left it in the dark. Kings, sages, and prophets had been set up for the other nations exactly as they had been set up for Israel, one for one. Solomon built a house for God and sang in it; Nebuchadnezzar pulled one down and announced he would climb above the clouds. David stacked silver for a Temple; Haman stacked silver to buy a whole people and kill it. Moses rose for Israel and Bilam rose for the nations.

What each man did with the gift was the difference. Israel's prophets were posted like sentries on a wall and spent their lives shouting at their own people to stop. Jeremiah's heart went like flutes over Moab. Ezekiel sat down and raised a lament for Tyre. Bilam took the same gift and used it to open a breach, meaning to sweep a nation off the earth, and nobody had done anything to him at all. After that the Divine Spirit was pulled back from the prophets of the nations, because one of theirs had stood up and everyone had seen what he did with it.

The bronze was still up on its pole while Balak's messengers were still on the road. A man who had looked at it and lived sat outside his tent that evening, started a story about a neighbor, and stopped himself halfway through.