2 Kings 18:3-4

4. High places See on 1 Kings 3:2.

Images… groves See note on 1 Kings 14:15; 1 Kings 14:23.

Brake in pieces the brazen serpent Compare Numbers 21:9. This ancient relic would naturally acquire, in the lapse of time, a mysterious sanctity, and would easily become an object of idolatry to a people so habituated to high places and images and groves as both Israel and Judah had now become; and Hezekiah was convinced that the only sure way to stop this form of idolatry was to break the brazen thing in pieces. It would seem great sacrilege to destroy a relic so ancient and so sacred, but it was idolatry to preserve it. Winer and Bahr think that this was not the identical brazen serpent that Moses had made, but one like it, which the sensuous people in a time of idolatry had made in remembrance of what Moses had done and commanded. But this exposition contradicts the text, and cannot therefore be sustained in the absence of any other notice of the brazen serpent since the time of Moses.

Unto those days That is, the days of Hezekiah. How long previously the children of Israel had been accustomed to burn incense to it does not appear, but probably from the beginning of idolatrous practices in the kingdom; certainly not from the days of Moses.

He called it Nehushtan Nehushtan means brazen, and hence many interpreters understand that when the king destroyed this idol he called it, by way of contempt, Nehushtan, “the brazen thing.” Others take the words he called indefinitely, in the sense of it was called, or they called it, indicating that Nehushtan was the title by which the brazen serpent was popularly called. So Bahr explains that the name originated in the glowing red or fiery colour of the brass, and is equivalent to the “Glowing-red One,” the “Consuming One,” the “Burning One.”