Beware the Angry Prophet: 2 Kings 2:23-25
copyrighted 2000 by Jim West, ThD

There was once a commercial on television for a certain margarine where Mother Nature was offered a taste of something she was told was butter. Instead of being butter, however, she actually ate margarine. When told of the deception, she replied, "it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature" at which point a storm erupts.

This rather humorous commercial serves as a useful introduction to the passage under consideration because in this passage we hear, apparently, a message which declares that "it’s not nice to make fun of a prophet". As a storm erupted when Mother Nature was deceived, so also a storm of terrible proportions is unleashed on some hapless children who happen to call Elisha a bald headed man. Why were these 42 children mauled or killed by two bears simply because they called Elisha a name? That is the question we shall attempt to address in what follows.

What makes this story interesting is the way that it is virtually ignored in the scholarly literature! In attempting to assemble a bibliography for this section I was able to find only the following: R.G. Messner’s "Elisha and the Bears", Grace Journal 3 (1962) 12-24. T.R. Hobb’s ignores the thorny issue of the cursing of the children completely in his 1985 commentary on 1 and 2 Kings in the Word Biblical Commentary. The new commentary published in 2000 by Robert L. Cohn, in the Berit Olam series, offers a tantalizingly incomplete explanation when he says "Their repeated taunt… hardly seems severe enough to warrant Elisha’s curse. On the other hand, if their jeer is intended as an invidious contrast between the hairless Elisha and the hirsute Elijah, his anger is perhaps understandable (!). In any case, the episode provides an occasion for the writer to show the fledgling prophet calling down divine curse as well as blessing, hurt as well as healing. The power at Elisha’s disposal is raw and amoral. Whether or not the bad boys of Beth-el got what was coming to them, the tale engenders in the reader a healthy respect for the authority of Elijah’s successor." In short, this very scintillating tale has evoked a few essays and a paragraph or two here and there. This is astonishing in light of the fact that other passages of lesser interest (at least to me) have generated monographs and articles and essays in the hundreds.

There is no reason, from a textual or translational perspective, that the passage should cause any problems. It is straightforward and textually certain (so far as that term can be used of any text). It is not the meaning of the words that causes problems but the meaning of the things those words say! The text follows and with it some textual and grammatical notes:

2 Kings 2:23-25

Textually the Septuagint adds a few clarifying remarks which make the actions of the young lads a tad more reprehensible. Note 1 is expanded by G^L with the phrase kai eliqazon auton, and note 2 adds here parabasewV kai argiaV. Interestingly, these Septuagintal expansions are not even mentioned by the editors of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. The Qumran manuscripts do not contain this passage, but it would certainly be interesting to see how they would have appeared there.

Grammatically the passage likewise offers nothing that is unusual or difficult. Gesenius uses verse 23 as an illustration of those noun clauses "which occur at the beginning of a period, and are intended to lay stress upon the fact that the first action still continues on the occurrence of the second" (Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, sec. 116u).

Contextual analysis allows us to see the pericope in its larger setting and may indeed offer us clues to its purpose and meaning in its present context. 2 Kings 2 is concerned with the appointment of Elisha as the successor of Elijah. Once appointed, Elisha sees his master removed and immediately moves to counsel action in the Moabite War (3:1-27). Next Elisha performs a series of six miracles (4:1-6:7). The following segment concerns itself with Elisha’s activity during the Aramean Wars (6:8-8:15). Once that has run its course, Elisha encourages Jehu’s purge of Baalism (8:16-10:36). The final mention of Elisha occurs in 13:1-25 where his last activities and death are recorded.

What we have, then, if we were to summarize the activity of Elisha is:

Calling and Cursing

Moabite War

Miracles of Healing

Aramean War

The Purge of Baalism

Death

This clearly oversimplified outline shows that the initial act of a bloody and strife filled ministry was followed by a nearly unbroken chain of destruction. This, I think, serves to highlight the miracles even more in the mind of the reader. The initial action of the cursing of the children sets the reader to expect Elisha to be a violent man with a violent temper, easily set off and more than willing to destroy any enemy- personal or otherwise. His compassionate concern for those in need strikes the reader as out of character and indeed, as almost surreal.

Does the story of the cursing of the children, then, set the stage for how the reader is to understand this Prophet? Or is it possible that the story is told to demonstrate that the Prophet was a cruel and vindictive soul who’s entire ministry was one of destruction and warfare? If this is so, then were the miracle stories added at a later stage of the tradition in order to ameliorate the perception of the reader regarding the violence of the man Elisha? These questions are, at least at this stage, not answerable. What we do have at hand is the final redaction of the story, and the introductory section where Elisha is called and immediately active in a violent series of events makes us wonder if the story is a positive assessment of the man or a negative one. In other words, is Elisha a hero or a villain and how does the redactor wish us to understand him?

Our story, I think, demonstrates him to be quite villainous. His unbelievable pettiness is striking and serves, I think, to paint him darkly in order to criticize the prophetic office. It’s as though the redactor wishes us to say to ourselves—"this is what prophets have become: vicious petty warlords". As a post exilic composition it serves the newly restored community as a warning against prophets and their kind. Post exilic prophecy, when compared to the pre-exilic sort, is stale and limp and colorless and quite uninspiring and powerless. Perhaps, then, in Judaism at that time, Prophecy’s decline was assisted by a story in which a prophet is portrayed as a curser of children and a violent warrior. Tired of war and its effects, the population was no longer interested in the "Hawkish" mentality of classical prophecy and instead became enamored of the "end time apocalyptic" sort of hope embodied in Daniel and Third Isaiah. The cursing of the children insures the cessation of prophecy. Soon after this story circulated classical prophecy died. In the story the children are mauled by the prophet’s curse; but in the end the curse returns to the head of prophecy and the bears of exile and restoration mauled prophecy and made it cease to function in any meaningful way.