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God Sent Snakes Because Israel Complained About the Manna

Israel called the manna disgusting after forty years. A heavenly voice answered by pointing to the serpent, who eats dust without complaint.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Forty Years of Perfect Bread
  2. The Heavenly Voice and the Serpent
  3. The Road That Went Backward
  4. The Manna That Was Prepared at Creation
  5. The Bronze Serpent and What It Required

Forty Years of Perfect Bread

It had tasted like whatever the eater desired. Dew fell first, then the manna descended on top of the dew, then more dew covered it from above, arriving delivered like food between two layers of packaging. It came every morning except the seventh day. Before the Sabbath it came double. In forty years of wilderness travel it had never missed its appointed time.

In Numbers 21, Israel looked at this food and called it disgusting. Their exact words, as the Hebrew has them, are that their soul had become sick with this miserable bread. The description of what they were eating as bread was already contemptuous. The word for miserable in the Torah is the word for lightweight, thin, trivial. They were dismissing the food God had stored for them since creation as not worth their continuing attention.

The Heavenly Voice and the Serpent

Targum Jonathan on Numbers 21, the Aramaic Torah paraphrase shaped in Palestine between the second and seventh centuries CE, inserts a bat kol, a heavenly voice, between the complaint and the punishment. This voice says something remarkable before the snakes arrive. It compares Israel to the serpent.

God cursed the serpent in Eden to eat dust all the days of its life (Genesis 3:14). Dust is the serpent's permanent diet, imposed as punishment after the garden, and the serpent does not complain. It does not speak against God. It does not describe its food as miserable or trivial. The serpent eats what it was given and goes about its existence. Israel, by contrast, received bread from heaven, food no empire could grow, food made for them personally before the world was fully assembled, and called it contemptible.

The comparison works because the serpent is not innocent in Jewish memory. It is the creature of Eden who drew humanity toward the first transgression. It is the lowest of animals, cursed above all cattle. And here, in the Targum's reading, the cursed serpent stands as the witness against Israel. Even the creature that lost everything in the garden accepts its portion without complaint. Israel, given the portion of angels, refuses to.

The Road That Went Backward

The Targum adds geography to the situation. Before the snake complaint, Israel had been wandering a circuit between Rekem and Motseroth for decades. After Aaron died and the protective Cloud of Glory vanished, Amalek disguised himself by taking the throne of Arad and attacked. When Israel tried to take a different route, they returned to a path they had taken before, and the Targum names where that path led: to the place where they had rebelled against the Lord of the world. Their route was not random. It was a decades-long circle back to the site of their original failure. The snakes were not the first punishment. They were the completion of a pattern that had been building since the people first turned against God in the wilderness.

The Manna That Was Prepared at Creation

The manna had not been improvised when the people needed food in the wilderness. Targum Jonathan on Exodus 16 specifies what the plain Hebrew does not: the manna was bread laid up from the beginning, prepared at creation and stored in the heavens, waiting for the exact moment it would be needed. The logistics the Targum provides are precise: holy dew fell and prepared a surface around the camp, then the clouds rose and caused the manna to descend on the dew, and the dew then fell again on top of it. The manna was sandwiched between two layers of dew so that it would arrive clean and intact.

For Israel to look at food that had been prepared before Adam named the animals and call it miserable was a specific kind of ingratitude, the kind that comes from having been protected so thoroughly for so long that protection begins to feel like its own kind of imprisonment.

The Bronze Serpent and What It Required

God told Moses to make a serpent of bronze and lift it on a pole. Anyone bitten who looked at it would live. The midrash asks the obvious question: did the bronze serpent kill or heal? Of course not. Bronze has no power over venom. What the action required was the upward look. The same Israel that had complained about its food from heaven now had to look up at a made thing and trust that the One who commanded it to be made would send the healing.

The midrash in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8 makes the logic plain: when Israel looked up at the bronze serpent and directed their hearts toward God, they were healed. The same logic runs through the night of the first Passover. The blood on the doorposts did nothing magical. It was not a barrier to the Angel of Death. As long as Israel marked their doors in trust, God revealed Himself and had compassion. Objects do not save. The direction of the heart that uses them does.

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Jonathan on Numbers 21Targum Jonathan

After Aaron died, the protective Cloud of Glory vanished. Amalek, who had disguised himself by taking the throne of Arad, saw his opportunity. The Targum's version of (Numbers 21) reveals that Israel had been wandering back and forth for forty years across six encampments between Rekem and Motseroth, finally returning "by the way of the explorers to the place where they had rebelled against the Lord of the world." Their route was not random, it was a decades-long circle back to the scene of their original failure.

When the people complained about the manna, the Targum inserts an extraordinary speech that has no parallel in the Torah. A bat kol, a heavenly voice, fell from heaven and declared: "Come, all men, and see all the benefits which I have done to the people whom I brought up free out of Mizraim. I made manna come down for them from heaven, yet now they murmur against Me. But behold, the serpent, whom in the days of the beginning of the world I doomed to have dust for his food, has not murmured against Me." God compared Israel unfavorably to snakes. The creatures cursed to eat dust in Eden never complained. So God sent those very serpents, the ones who never protested their food, to bite the people who would not stop protesting theirs.

The bronze serpent's healing power came with a condition the Torah does not state. Gazing at it only worked "if his heart was directed to the Name of the Word of the Lord." The object itself had no power. It was a test of spiritual focus.

The Targum's retelling of the defeat of Og king of Bashan is wildly vivid. When Moses saw Og, he trembled in fear, until he remembered that this was the same Og who had once taunted Abraham and Sarah, calling them "trees that bear no fruit." God had kept Og alive through the generations specifically so he could witness Abraham's descendants multiply, then be destroyed by them. Og tore up a mountain six miles wide and hoisted it onto his head to hurl at the Israelite camp. But God sent a reptile that ate through the mountain, trapping Og's head inside it. His teeth locked in both directions. Moses took an axe ten cubits long, leaped ten cubits into the air, and struck Og on the ankle. And the giant fell dead.

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Targum Jonathan on Exodus 16Targum Jonathan

The manna story in (Exodus 16) raises an obvious question: where did this miracle food come from? The Hebrew Bible says God "rained bread from heaven." The Targum Jonathan gives a far more specific answer. The manna was "bread which hath been laid up for you from the beginning." It was prepared at creation and stored in the heavens, waiting for this exact moment.

The logistics of manna delivery get remarkably detailed in the Targum. First, "holy dew" fell and was "prepared as a table" around the camp. Then "the clouds ascended and caused manna to descend upon the dew." The manna landed on a tablecloth of dew. This is not rain from the sky. It is a catered meal from heaven.

When the Israelites first saw the manna, the Targum preserves their bewildered Aramaic reaction: "Man Hu?", "What is it?" Moses answered that this was the bread stored "from the beginning in the heavens on high." The Targum twice emphasizes the manna's primordial origin, a detail the Hebrew text never states.

The Targum names names when it comes to disobedience. Where the Hebrew says "some of them" hoarded manna overnight against Moses' instructions, the Targum identifies the offenders: Dathan and Abiram, "men of wickedness." These two troublemakers, who later appear in the Korah rebellion (Numbers 16), are retroactively inserted into the manna story as chronic agitators.

The Sabbath laws get expanded too. God tells Israel not only to stay home on the seventh day, but specifies: "not wander from one locality to another, beyond four yards; nor let any man go forth to walk beyond two thousand yards on the seventh day." The Targum transforms a general commandment to rest into the precise halakhic measurements of the Sabbath boundary, the techum Shabbat (the Sabbath), projecting rabbinic law back into the wilderness itself.

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 265:1Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

Likewise: "And the LORD said to Moses, Make for yourself a fiery serpent" (Numbers 21:8). Now does the serpent kill or give life? Rather, Israel would gaze upon it and believe in the One who commanded Moses to do so, and the Omnipresent would send them healing. Likewise: "And the blood shall be a sign for you" (Exodus 12:13). Now what benefit is the blood to the angel, or what benefit is it to Israel? Rather, as long as Israel placed some of the blood upon their doorways, the Omnipresent would reveal Himself and have compassion upon them, as it is said, "and the LORD will pass over the door" (Exodus 12:23).

Rabbi Eliezer says: What does Scripture teach by saying "and Israel prevailed," or what does it teach by saying "and Amalek prevailed"? Rather, as long as Moses raised his hands toward on high, the Holy One, blessed be He, would remember Israel, who are destined to prevail through the words of the Torah that are destined to be given by his hand; and when he lowered his hands, Israel were destined to be brought low in the words of the Torah.

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