Lesson 5 – 2 Kings 4

ND KINGS Week 5, chapter 4

As we continue in the Book of 2

nd ^{Kings, Elisha is now firmly entrenched as the most spirit-} filled and honored prophet in Israel. Even in the story in chapter 3 of Moab rebelling against Israel, and the subsequent attempt by Y’horam King of Israel to form an army along with Judah and Edom to put down this rebellion and retake Moab as a vassal state, we find the miraculous works of Elisha involved. Recall that the Israelite army decided to attack Moab from the southern approach, which was through desolate desert terrain. And that after 7 days of marching through the wilderness they had run out of water and the places that they expected to find springs and streams were dried up. Out of desperation the kings of Israel, Judah and Edom decided to humble themselves and seek the counsel of Yehoveh by means of his Prophet Elisha. Elisha told them that God would rescue them because He wanted Moab destroyed. They were to dig ditches to be used as reservoirs that God would then miraculously fill up with water to sustain them. A God-ordained flashflood occurred almost immediately upon completion of the trenches and there was more water for them than they could possibly use. But this same water that saved Israel’s army also proved to be a deadly trap for the Moabite army. The soil of Edom (where they were) was of a reddish hue; and so as the flood waters rumbled along from the distant mountains where the rain had fallen and the torrent was formed, the soil became mixed with the water. As the water gathered in the ditches, the Moab soldiers who were overlooking the Israelite encampment thought that what actually filled the trenches was blood. They assumed that the coalition army consisting of the leaders and men of 3 kingdoms had turned upon one another and a great slaughter had produced all of this blood. Such an assumption was by no means ignorant; although Y’horam and Jehoshaphat were relatives and fellow Hebrews, there was a well-known centuries-old animosity between Israel and Judah. Further the 3 rd party to the alliance, Edom, wasn’t a particularly willing partner as they were only there because they had been pressured by Judah and were only interested in collecting the spoils of war. The Moabite army rushed down to finish off those Israelites who had survived the supposed infighting only to find out the blood was merely a mirage and no such slaughter had taken place. Israel fought off their shocked attackers and pursed them until they cornered them in a fortified city inside of Moab. But something so terrible happened at that fortress that it was long remembered in Hebrew lore; even the prophet Amos spoke of it. Mesha King of Moab tried to break out from the siege 1 / 9 upon his city in the direction of the Edomite troops hoping to kill the King of Edom and in the ensuing chaos, escape certain death. The Moabites failed; but they were able to capture the King’s son and then return to the stronghold with him as a hostage. On the walls of that city, they offered the Edomite crown prince as a human sacrifice to their god Chemosh. It had the effect of emboldening the surviving remnant of Mesha’s army, but also demoralizing the Edomite troops and striking fear into the Israelite army who broke off the battle and abruptly retreated back to their homes. What makes this story so important is that it is not merely a record of a military defeat; rather it is that God had ordered the destruction of Moab, told Israel He would give them the victory, and thus ordained this expedition as a Holy War. But Israel was more fearful of the god of Moab than they were trusting in the God of Israel. Therefore the leaders of Israel snatched needless defeat from the jaws of certain victory, and Moab would now become a permanent foe and thorn for Israel rather than being eliminated as an enemy of God’s Kingdom. It was more than sad, it was sin. Let’s read 2 nd ^{Kings Chapter 4 together.} READ 2 ND ^{KINGS CHAPTER 4 all} Chapter 4 moves us back to a focus upon the life and works of the great Prophet Elijah’s replacement: Elisha. Up to now we have tended to see an Elisha that looked an awful lot like his former master, the stern, unyielding, and harsh Eliyahu . But in this chapter we have a series of vignettes that demonstrates Elisha’s softer and more compassionate side. He aids the destitute, rewards kindness, resurrects the dead, and feeds the hungry. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s as though for a moment we have jumped far ahead in our Bibles to the New Testament era Gospels and are reading stories taken from the life and works of Jesus the Messiah. In fact, especially here and in the next chapter we have records of what can be called nothing less than Gospel stories that prefigure the coming of Christ by at least 800 years. These several stories about Elisha are not in strict chronological order and could have taken place pretty much anytime within the approximately 55 years that Elisha served as Israel’s chief Prophet. We also need to notice that 2 nd ^{Kings Chapters 4 – 8 are without doubt taken} from some other ancient and long lost document that chronicled the works of the prophets from this era. Why this was inserted at this point by the author or editor of the Book of Kings can only be understood in the context of divine inspiration. No other rationale works. Since these stories are divinely inspired there are of course some interesting principles that come from them, and we’ll look closely at a few of them. The first story is a about a Hebrew widow who had become desperate. We’re told in verse 1 2 / 9 that she had been the wife of one of the many Israelite prophets. The rabbis say that she was the widow of Obadiah, the god-fearing member of Ahab’s royal court who acted to save as many as a hundred of the guild prophets from a massacre at the hands of the evil Queen Jezebel. And from this is told a rather elaborate story about how after he used the last of his money hiding these 100 prophets from arrest, he ran out of funds and died penniless and in debt leaving his wife and family in dire straits. I cannot say whether this is true or not; this is Jewish tradition. But being tradition does not automatically make the story false. There is far more NOT written in the Scriptures about the 1500 years or so that the Bible spans than IS written. So most of what we know today about the people, the society, and their everyday lives from the various Bible eras is taken from non-Biblical sources. On the other hand it cannot be denied that the rabbis were prone to exaggeration and hyperbole, if not outright fantasy, in order to fill in some historical gaps in ways that validated their particular doctrines and viewpoints. There doesn’t seem to be any need of making up a story about this woman being Obadiah’s widow to support some agenda, so I think it’s more likely than not that it is true. This Hebrew woman apparently had no son who was old enough, yet, to be seen as the man of the house and able to rescue the situation. So she turned to the chief prophet in Israel, Elisha, for help. Why turn to Elisha? Because he was the head of all the prophet guilds of which she was part. And she uses the typical colorful language of the prophets in telling Elisha that her husband feared Yehoveh; that was partly to help identify him as a prophet of the God of Israel and not one of the many prophets to the several other gods. Let me pause to remind you that in all Torah Class lessons past, present and future, when I use the term Yehoveh in a Biblical passage, I use it because that Hebrew word that represents God’s official name is actually and literally there in the original Hebrew texts. So I am not willy- nilly substituting the word Yehoveh for when our English translations typically say God or Lord, or the CJB says Adonai or HaShem. What I’m doing is reinserting what has always been there, but has sadly and wrongly been obliterated and obfuscated. The widowed woman tells Elisha that creditors are coming to take away her 2 sons to be house slaves. The situation is this: it is not correct to view them as slaves that have been purchased. Rather they are being taken as bond-servants. That is, their labor is the surety for a debt their father made but cannot pay. This system was common and everyday and completely allowable by the Torah. Once the debt was paid off by means of their working it off through their labors, or they were released on the year of Jubilee, the bond-servants could return to their normal lives as free men. They were NOT slaves; they were not humans owned by another human, because God did not permit Hebrews to make slaves of other Hebrews. In fact, the bond-servants were to be treated like neighbors. CJB Lev 25:39-43