SERPENT — the ordinary Hebrew noun, from the crafty one of Genesis 3:1 to the bronze one Moses raises at Numbers 21:9. ⚠ Not to be confused with the identically-spelled verb nachash, ‘to practise divination’, which has its own entry — two words that share every consonant, exactly the situation this dictionary keeps separate rather than lumping (compare qin’ah jealousy and qinah lament). ⭐ The bronze serpent turns the noun into a pun that decides the object’s material: nachash, serpent, and nechoshet, bronze, are near-twins in sound and unrelated in origin, so Moses is told to make a saraf and produces a nechash nechoshet. That exact phrase occurs in two verses of the Bible and the other is 2 Kings 18:4, where Hezekiah smashes it because Israel had been burning incense to it, and nicknames the wreckage Nechushtan — the same pun a third time. → first discussed at Num 21:9