Charles Ellicott Commentary 2 Kings 18:4

"He removed the high places, and brake the pillars, and cut down the Asherah: and he brake in pieces the brazen 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 (ASV)

He removed. — It was he who removed. According to this statement, Hezekiah made the Temple of Jerusalem the only place where Jehovah might be publicly worshipped (Compare to 2 Kings 18:22, and the fuller account in 2 Chronicles 29:3–36).

Broke the images. — Shattered the pillars (1 Kings 14:23; Hosea 3:4; 2 Chronicles 14:2).

The groves. —Hebrew, the Asherah. It should probably be plural, the Asherim, as in 2 Chronicles 31:1, and all the versions here (See Note on 2 Kings 17:16).

Broke in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made. —The attempt of Bähr and others to evade the obvious force of this simple statement is quite futile.

It is clear that the compiler of Kings believed that the brasen serpent which Hezekiah destroyed was a relic of the Mosaic times (See the narrative in Numbers 21:4-9, and the allusion to the fiery serpents in Deuteronomy 8:15).

His authority may have been oral tradition or a written document.

In ancient Egypt the serpent symbolised the healing power of Deity; a symbolism which is repeated in the Greco-Roman myth of Asclepius.

When Moses set up the Brasen Serpent, he taught the people by means suited to their capacity at that time that the power of healing lay in the God whose prophet he was—namely, Jehovah. He taught that they must look to Him, rather than to any of the gods of Egypt, for help and healing.

Kuenen does not believe in the great antiquity of this relic. Yet, the Egyptian and Babylonian remains that have come down to our time have lasted many centuries more than the interval between Moses and Hezekiah; indeed, some of them were already ancient in the Mosaic age.

Our own Domesday Book is at least as old as the brasen serpent was when it was destroyed. There is really no tangible historical ground for this extreme unwillingness to admit the authenticity of anything attributed by tradition to the authorship and handiwork of Moses.

And he called it. —Rather, and it was called. Literally, and one called it. This is the impersonal construction, like the German man nannte.

Nehushtan. —The popular name of the serpent-idol. It is vocalised as a derivative from nĕ’hôsheth, “brass,” or “copper”; but it may really be formed from nâ‘hâsh, “serpent,” and denote “great serpent” rather than “brass-god” (Compare to the term Leviathan, Job 3:8).

Furthermore, although the word is certainly not a compound of nĕ‘h ô sheth, “copper,” and tân (that is, tannîn), “serpent,” this may have been the popular etymology of the word (Compare to the proper name, Nehushta, 2 Kings 24:8).