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Japanese In the Bible, copper stands for strength, for stubborn hardness, for something worth less than gold and, when polished, for the shining of heaven, each meaning set by its own verse. The metal has no power of its own. Older English Bibles call it brass, but the Hebrew nechosheth means copper or bronze.
One bronze object matters more than the rest. In the wilderness, when the people were dying of snakebite, God told Moses to make a serpent and set it on a pole, “and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived” (Numbers 21:9). Centuries later Jesus said to Nicodemus, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). The healing was never in the metal. It was in the God who told his people to look up.
Is the brass in the Bible really copper?
Yes. In the King James Version “brass” comes 126 times and “brasen” 29 times, and behind most of them stands nechosheth. The Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs defines it as “copper, bronze,” and adds that the metal was “doubtless hardened with alloy, probably tin, making bronze.” Today we call copper mixed with zinc brass and copper mixed with tin bronze, so most modern translations write “bronze”: the New American Standard Bible renders nechosheth that way 130 times. In Daniel the Aramaic word is nechash, and in the New Testament the Greek is chalkos, copper, which Thayer’s lexicon notes could also mean “money, coins of brass.”
The word “copper” itself appears once in the King James Bible. Ezra, setting out for Jerusalem with gifts for the house of God, weighed out to the priests “twenty basons of gold, of a thousand drams; and two vessels of fine copper, precious as gold,” and told them, “Ye are holy unto the Lord; the vessels are holy also” (Ezra 8:27–28). Paul mentions one coppersmith by trade: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil” (2 Timothy 4:14).
Where is copper mentioned in the Bible?
It comes in the Bible’s first pages. Tubalcain was “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron” (Genesis 4:22). Moses promised Israel a land “whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass” (Deuteronomy 8:9), and Job knew how the metal was won: “Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone” (Job 28:2).
God asked for it for his dwelling. The offering for the tabernacle was “gold, and silver, and brass,” brought by “whosoever is of a willing heart” (Exodus 35:5), and God filled Bezaleel “with the spirit of God… To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass” (Exodus 31:3–4). The altar of burnt offering was overlaid with brass, with all its pans and shovels and firepans (Exodus 27:2–3). The laver where the priests washed their hands and feet was made “of the lookingglasses of the women assembling, which assembled at the door of the tabernacle” (Exodus 38:8). The women gave up their bronze mirrors, and the priests washed at the basin made from them.
Solomon’s temple used bronze on a scale no one could weigh. The bronze-worker Hiram, a widow’s son whose father was from Tyre, was “filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass.” He cast two pillars “of eighteen cubits high apiece” and named them Jachin and Boaz (1 Kings 7:14–15, 21). He cast a great basin, the “molten sea,” that stood on twelve oxen and held two thousand baths (7:23–26). “Solomon left all the vessels unweighed, because they were exceeding many: neither was the weight of the brass found out” (7:47). Long afterward the Babylonians broke the pillars and the sea in pieces “and carried the brass of them to Babylon” (2 Kings 25:13).
Bronze was also the metal of war and of chains. Goliath came out with “an helmet of brass upon his head,” a coat of mail weighing “five thousand shekels of brass,” and “greaves of brass upon his legs” (1 Samuel 17:5–6). The Philistines put out Samson’s eyes and “bound him with fetters of brass” (Judges 16:21). In the Gospels it is small change. Jesus sent the twelve out with “neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses” (Matthew 10:9). The poor widow at the temple “threw in two mites” (Mark 12:42), tiny coins the New American Standard Bible calls “small copper coins,” and Jesus said she had cast in more than all the others.
What does copper symbolize in Scripture?
The Bible uses the metal in several ways, and each verse sets its own meaning. Often it stands for strength. Job, worn out, asks, “Is my strength the strength of stones? or is my flesh of brass?” (Job 6:12). God makes Jeremiah “an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land” (Jeremiah 1:18), and promises Zion, “I will make thy hoofs brass” (Micah 4:13).
The same hardness can be a fault. “I knew that thou art obstinate,” God tells Israel, “and thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass” (Isaiah 48:4). A sky of brass is a sky that will not rain: “thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron” (Deuteronomy 28:23), the curse on a land that turns from God, which is traced further in what rain symbolizes in the Bible.
Bronze is also worth less than gold, and Scripture ranks it so. “For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver” (Isaiah 60:17) is a promise that the poor things will be replaced by rich ones. In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream the statue has a head of gold, arms of silver, and “his belly and his thighs of brass” (Daniel 2:32), and Daniel explains that after Babylon would come “another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth” (2:39). How the precious metals compare is told in what gold means in the Bible. In the furnace bronze is the mixed metal left with the dross: “they are brass and iron; they are all corrupters” (Jeremiah 6:28), and through Ezekiel God says, “all they are brass, and tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace” (Ezekiel 22:18).
And polished bronze shines. The living creatures in Ezekiel’s vision “sparkled like the colour of burnished brass” (Ezekiel 1:7), and the man in Daniel’s vision had “arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass” (Daniel 10:6). When John saw the risen Christ, he saw that his feet were “like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace” (Revelation 1:15). The commentator Matthew Henry read those feet as “strong and stedfast, supporting his own interest, subduing his enemies, treading them to powder.”
Some Bible teachers go further and read brass as a sign of judgment. The nineteenth-century writer C. H. Mackintosh called it “the symbol of righteousness, demanding judgment of sin, as in the brazen altar; or the judgment of uncleanness, as in the brazen laver.” His reason was where the metal stood in the tabernacle: inside the tent all was gold, and outside all was brass, the altar where sin was burned and the laver where the priests washed. The reading fits the altar and the laver well. It fits less well elsewhere, because Scripture also uses the same metal for Jeremiah’s walls, for the coins in the widow’s hand and for the serpent that healed. Each verse sets its own meaning.
Why did Moses lift up a bronze serpent?
The people had spoken against God and Moses, and “the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died” (Numbers 21:6). They confessed, “We have sinned,” and Moses prayed for them. God did not take the serpents away. He gave them something to look at: “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live” (21:8).
Christians read the serpent through Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. Matthew Henry put the likeness in one line: “That which cured was shaped in the likeness of that which wounded.” God sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3), he was lifted up on the cross, and whoever looks to him in faith lives.
The serpent had a second, sadder life. Israel kept it, and in time the people began to burn incense to it. King Hezekiah “brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan” (2 Kings 18:4). The name comes from nechosheth and means, in the words of Strong’s dictionary, “something made of copper.” Hezekiah called it what it was. The bronze God once used was only bronze, and it had become a thing that stood between the people and God.
Does copper have spiritual power?
Scripture gives copper no power to heal, protect or bless, and Hezekiah’s broken serpent is its plainest word on the subject. People sometimes wear copper bracelets for pain. In a 2013 trial in Yorkshire, published in PLOS ONE, 70 people with rheumatoid arthritis each wore a copper bracelet and magnetic straps for five weeks at a time. The researchers found the bracelet “did not appear to have any meaningful therapeutic effect, beyond that of a placebo.”
Nor does the Bible teach us to read copper in a dream. When Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a statue with a belly of brass, no dream book explained it. “The secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the soothsayers, shew unto the king; But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:27–28).
In Scripture bronze bars the gate and binds the prisoner. Psalm 107 remembers prisoners who “sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron,” who “cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses.” Then it sings of what no bronze can hold: “For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder” (Psalm 107:10, 13, 16).
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