Moses sets aside words. He doesn’t pray to God, or lecture the people, or explain what he is doing and what it means. Words would get in the way. They’ve been used to complain, blame, justify, take sides. Perhaps they would offer a sense of certainty, but it would be temporary, a promise he couldn’t keep.

An image can hold what words cannot. The serpent can be read as making visible not only the literal pain of the snake bites, but the deeper emotional and spiritual suffering that had been accumulating in the wilderness: the longing, the fear, the uncertainty. In a moment of both personal and communal crisis, the image meets the people inside their own experience of suffering and then draws them toward something shared – something larger than their individual pain.

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