The serpents of Exodus

DR. FRANK HEYNICK SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

The traditional symbol of the medical profession, the serpent on a pole, is commonly known as the staff of Asklepios. This was the name of a semi-divine Greek physician of the ninth- or eighth-century BCE. Yet the roots of the serpent and pole symbol go back farther - to the Exodus from Egypt around 1200 BCE. And it involved one of the most anomalous events in the Bible: Jehovah's apparent violation of His own commandments.

The Book of Numbers tells us how, during the gruelling hardships of the Hebrews on the Exodus, "the people spake against God and against Moses, 'Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water and our soul loatheth this light bread.' " (Certainly their bodies were at a disadvantage, for leavening would have reduced the bread's phytate content and thereby facilitated the absorption of minerals from the wheat.)

Jehovah resorted to some stern punishment to keep his children in line: "And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people; and many people of Israel died."

In the face of this plague, the unleavened matzot didn't seem to taste so bad after all: "Therefore the people came to Moses and said, 'We have sinned for we have spoken against the Lord and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.' So Moses prayed for the people."

What came next was strange indeed. "And the Lord said unto Moses, 'Make thee a fiery serpent and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass that everyone that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.' And Moses made a serpent of brass and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."

How to explain such an order from the same God who, earlier in Exodus, had given Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, the second of which read: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth...."

Recall also the fury that Jehovah visited upon those Hebrews who violated the commandment by worshipping the golden calf. Monotheism is one of Judaism's greatest contributions to civilization.

There's a possible medical-epidemiological explanation for the anomaly of Moses' effigy of a serpent upon a pole. The "fiery serpents" which plagued the people may well have been the worms Dracunculus medinesis, which even today still infest large areas of the globe, especially Africa and India. These threadlike parasites bore under people's skin - especially the legs - and can grow to well over a foot in length. They exude a toxin which causes fever and vomiting.
The theory goes that the Hebrews on the Exodus developed a way of removing the worm from under the skin by means of a peg. Moses' brass serpent upon the pole was a visual aid for instructing the people in this technique - so in this sense it may have been permissible, although the biblical account is rather cryptic.

What happened to the brass serpent after this incident? As proof of just how easily such images indeed lent themselves to idol worship, the Bible tells us how the Jews in the eighth century BCE - a half millennium later - were burning incense to it in the Jerusalem Temple. Finally, King Hezekiah "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord ... and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made."

But the icon of the serpent upon a pole lived on in the Mediterranean area as it became a symbol of the medical profession in ancient Greece. According to legend, the semi-divine Greek physician Asklepios even assumed the form of a snake when, in the beginning of the third century BCE, he brought Greek medical learning to Rome to halt a plague there. With the rise of Christianity, Moses' brass serpent on a pole was in fact given preference over the Hellenic version of the snake and staff - after all, the former was part of the biblical tradition while the latter was pagan. But with the coming of the Renaissance, renewed interest in classical civilization brought the Greek version into favor.

Today, the medical symbol of the serpent and pole is universally known as the staff of Asklepios (or, in Latin, Aesculapius). Few doctors - Jewish or gentile - are aware of the ironic roots of this icon on the Exodus from Egypt.

Dr. Frank Heynick is the N.Y.-based author of the forthcoming book Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga.

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