The Wonders of Elisha

Jehoshaphat had a good number of children, but he appointed his eldest son Joram as his successor. This Joram had the same name as his wife’s brother, the king of Israel, Ahab’s son. Now when the king of Israel came back from the land of Moab to Samaria, he had with him the prophet Elisha, whose acts I intend to go over in detail; for they were illustrious and worth relating, as we have them set down in the sacred books. [a]

They say that the widow of Obadiah, Ahab’s steward, came to him. She said he knew how her husband had saved the prophets who were to be killed by Jezebel, Ahab’s wife; for she said he had hidden a hundred of them and had borrowed money to keep them. After her husband’s death, she and her children were being carried off by the creditors to be made slaves. She begged him to have mercy on her for what her husband had done, and to give her some help. When he asked her what she had in the house, she said, “Nothing but a very little oil in a jar.” So the prophet told her to go and borrow a great many empty vessels from her neighbors, and when she had shut the door of her room, to pour the oil into them all, for God would fill them full. The woman did what she was told. She had her children bring every one of the vessels, and all were filled, and not one was left empty. Then she came to the prophet and told him they were all full. At this he advised her to go and sell the oil and pay the creditors what was owed them, for there would be something left over from the price of the oil, which she could use to support her children. And so Elisha paid off the woman’s debts and freed her from the harassment of her creditors. [c]

Elisha also sent an urgent message to Joram, warning him to be on guard about that place, for some Syrians were lying in ambush there to kill him. So the king did as the prophet urged him and gave up going hunting. When Ben-hadad’s ambush failed, he was angry with his own servants, as if they had betrayed his ambush to Joram. He sent for them and said they were the betrayers of his secret plans, and he threatened to put them to death, since their doing was obvious: he had entrusted this secret to no one but them, and yet it had been made known to his enemy. But one of those present told him not to deceive himself, nor suspect them of disclosing to his enemy that he had sent men to kill him, but to know that it was Elisha the prophet who disclosed everything to Joram and laid open all his plans. So he gave orders to send men to find out in what city Elisha lived. Those who were sent brought word that he was in Dothan. So Ben-hadad sent a great army to that city, with horses and chariots, to take Elisha. They surrounded the city by night and kept him shut up in it. [d]

In the morning the prophet’s servant noticed this, and saw that the enemy was seeking to take Elisha. He came running and crying out to him in a frantic way and told him of it. But Elisha encouraged him not to be afraid; he himself, with God as his ally, despised the enemy and was without fear. He asked God to make his power and presence plain to his servant, as far as was possible, to inspire him with hope and courage. God heard the prophet’s prayer and made the servant see a multitude of chariots and horses surrounding Elisha, until he put aside his fear, and his courage revived at the sight of what he supposed had come to help them.

After this Elisha prayed further that God would dim the eyes of their enemies and cast a mist before them, so that they could not recognize him. When this was done, he went into the middle of his enemies and asked them whom they had come to look for. When they replied, “The prophet Elisha,” he promised to hand him over to them if they would follow him to the city where he was. These men were so darkened by God in their sight and their minds that they followed him eagerly. When Elisha had brought them to Samaria, he ordered King Joram to shut the gates and station his own army all around them, and he prayed to God to clear the eyes of these enemies of theirs and take the mist from before them. When they were freed from the darkness they had been in, they saw themselves in the middle of their enemies. The Syrians were astonished and distressed, as was only natural, at an act so divine and surprising. When King Joram asked the prophet whether he would allow him to shoot them, Elisha forbade it, and said, “It is just to kill those who are taken in battle; but these men have done the country no harm, and have come here without knowing it, by the divine power.” His advice, then, was to treat them hospitably at the king’s table and send them away unharmed. Joram obeyed the prophet; and when he had feasted the Syrians splendidly and magnificently, he let them go to Ben-hadad their king.

When these men had come back and told Ben-hadad what a strange thing had happened to them, and what an appearance and power of the God of Israel they had experienced, he wondered at it, and at that prophet with whom God was so plainly present. So he decided to make no more secret attempts on the king of Israel, out of fear of Elisha, but resolved to make open war, supposing he could overpower his enemies by the size of his army and his strength. So he marched with a great army against Joram. Joram, not thinking himself a match for him, shut himself up in Samaria and relied on the strength of its walls. Ben-hadad supposed that he would take the city, if not by his siege engines, then by overcoming the people of Samaria through famine and the lack of necessities; so he brought his army against them and besieged the city. The supply of necessities ran so low for Joram that, from extreme want, a donkey’s head was sold in Samaria for eighty pieces of silver, and the Hebrews bought a pint of dove’s dung, to use instead of salt, for five pieces of silver. [g]

Joram was afraid that someone might betray the city to the enemy because of the famine, and went around the walls and the guards every day to see whether any such people were hidden among them. By being seen this way and taking such care, he deprived them of the chance of plotting anything of the kind; and if they had a mind to do it, he prevented them by this means. But once a woman cried out, “Have pity on me, my lord!” Thinking that she was about to ask for something to eat, he angrily called down God’s curse on her, and said he had neither threshing floor nor winepress from which he could give her anything she asked. She said she did not want his help with anything of that sort, nor was she troubling him about food, but she wanted him to give her justice against another woman. When he told her to go on and let him know what she wanted, she said she had made an agreement with the other woman, her neighbor and friend, that because the famine and want were unbearable, they would kill their children, since each of them had a son of her own: “‘And we will live on them ourselves for two days, one day on one son and the next day on the other.’ And I killed my son the first day, and yesterday we both lived on my son; but this other woman will not do the same. She has broken her agreement and has hidden her son.” This story grieved Joram deeply when he heard it. He tore his garment and cried out with a loud voice. He was filled with great anger against Elisha the prophet and was eager to have him killed, because he did not pray to God to provide them some way out and escape from the miseries surrounding them; and he at once sent a man to cut off his head, who hurried to kill the prophet.

But Elisha was not unaware of the king’s anger against him. As he sat in his house, alone but for his disciples around him, he told them that Joram, the son of a murderer, had sent a man to take off his head. “But when the man who has been ordered to do this comes, take care not to let him in. Press the door against him and hold him fast there, for the king himself will follow him and come to me, having changed his mind.” So they did as they were told when the man the king had sent to kill Elisha came. But Joram repented of his anger against the prophet; and for fear that the man he had ordered to kill him might do it before he arrived, he hurried to prevent the killing and save the prophet. When he came to him, he accused him of not praying to God for their deliverance from the miseries they now lay under, but watching them being so wretchedly destroyed by them.

At this Elisha promised that the very next day, at the very hour the king had come to him, they would have great plenty of food: about six gallons of barley would be sold in the market for a shekel, and about three gallons of fine flour for a shekel. This prediction made Joram and those present very joyful. They did not hesitate to believe what the prophet said, because of their experience of the truth of his earlier predictions, and the expectation of plenty made the want they were in that day, and the distress that went with it, seem a light thing to them. But the captain of the third company, a friend of the king’s on whose arm the king leaned, said, “You are talking of incredible things, prophet! Just as it is impossible for God to pour down torrents of barley or fine flour out of heaven, so it is impossible that what you say should come to pass.” To this the prophet replied, “You will see these things come to pass, but you will not have the least share in them.”

What Elisha had foretold came to pass in the following way. There was a law at Samaria that those who had leprosy, and whose bodies were not cleansed of it, should stay outside the city. There were four men who for this reason stayed before the gates, and no one gave them any food, because of the extremity of the famine. They were barred from entering the city by the law; and they considered that if they were allowed to enter, they would die miserably of the famine, and that if they stayed where they were, they would suffer the same. So they resolved to give themselves up to the enemy: if the enemy spared them, they would live, and if they were killed, that would be an easy death. Having made up their minds, they came to the enemy camp by night. [j]

Now God had begun to frighten and disturb the Syrians, and to bring the noise of chariots and horses to their ears, as though an army were coming against them, and had made them suspect that it was coming nearer and nearer. In short, they were in such dread of this army that they left their tents and ran together to Ben-hadad, and said that Joram king of Israel had hired both the king of Egypt and the king of the Islands as allies and was leading them against them, for they heard the noise of them as they came. Ben-hadad believed what they said, for the same noise came to his ears as to theirs. So they fell into great disorder and tumult, left their horses and pack animals in the camp, with immense riches too, and took to flight.

The lepers who had left Samaria and gone to the Syrian camp, whom we mentioned a little earlier, saw nothing but quiet and silence when they were in the camp. So they went in and hurried into one of the tents, and when they saw no one there, they ate and drank, and carried off garments and a great quantity of gold and hid it outside the camp. After that they went into another tent and carried off what was in it, as they had from the first; and they did this four times without the least interruption from anyone. From this they concluded that the enemy had gone, and they blamed themselves for not informing Joram and the citizens. So they came to the walls of Samaria, called loudly to the watchmen, and told them the state the enemy was in; the watchmen told the king’s guards, and through them Joram came to know of it.

He then sent for his friends and the captains of his army and told them he suspected that this departure of the king of Syria was an ambush and a trick: “Out of despair of ruining you by famine, he means that when you imagine them fled, you will come out of the city to plunder their camp; then he may fall on you suddenly, kill you, and take the city without a fight. That is why I urge you to guard the city carefully, and on no account to go out of it, or proudly despise your enemies as though they had really gone away.” One of them said that he did very well and wisely to entertain such a suspicion, but he still advised him to send a couple of horsemen to search the whole country as far as the Jordan, “so that if they are seized by an enemy ambush, they may be a safeguard for your army, and it will not go out suspecting nothing and suffer the same misfortune. And those horsemen,” he said, “may be counted among those who have died in the famine, if they are caught and killed by the enemy.”

The king was pleased with this advice, and sent men to search out the truth. They made their journey over a road with no enemies on it, but found it full of provisions and of weapons, which the Syrians had thrown away and left behind so as to be light and quick in their flight. When the king heard this, he sent the people out to take the spoils of the camp. What they gained was nothing of small value: they took a great quantity of gold and a great quantity of silver, and flocks of every kind of animal. They also took tens of thousands of measures of wheat and barley, more than they had ever dreamed of. They were not only freed from their former miseries but had such plenty that about six gallons of barley were bought for a shekel and about three gallons of fine flour for a shekel, as Elisha had prophesied. The seah, the measure Elisha named, is equal to an Italian modius and a half, about three gallons.

The captain of the third company was the only man who got no benefit from this plenty. The king had appointed him to oversee the gate, to keep the crowd from pressing too hard, so that they would not endanger one another by trampling each other in the crush; and he suffered in that very way, and died in that very manner, as Elisha had foretold his death, when he alone of them all disbelieved what the prophet said about the plenty of provisions they would soon have.

Then Ben-hadad king of Syria, having escaped to Damascus, understood that it was God himself who had thrown his whole army into this fear and disorder, and that it had not come from an enemy invasion. He was deeply cast down at having God so greatly against him, and fell ill. It happened that Elisha the prophet had left his own country at that time and gone to Damascus. When Ben-hadad was told of it, he sent Hazael, the most faithful of all his servants, to meet him and take him gifts, and told him to ask him about his illness and whether he would escape the danger it threatened. So Hazael came to Elisha with forty camels carrying as gifts the finest and most precious things that Damascus produced and the king’s palace held. He greeted him kindly and said he had been sent to him by King Ben-hadad, and had brought gifts, to ask about his illness, whether he would recover from it or not. The prophet told him to bring the king no gloomy news; but still he said that the king would die. The king’s servant was troubled to hear this; and Elisha wept too, his tears running down freely, at his foresight of the miseries his people would suffer after Ben-hadad’s death. When Hazael asked him the reason for the distress he was in, he said he wept out of pity for the people of Israel and the terrible miseries they would suffer at his hands: “For you will kill the strongest of them, and burn their strongest cities, and destroy their children and dash them against the stones, and rip open their pregnant women.” Hazael said, “How can I ever have power enough to do such things?” And the prophet replied that God had told him that Hazael would be king of Syria. [o]

When Hazael came back to Ben-hadad, he gave him good news about his illness; but the next day he threw a soaked net over him, strangled him, and took his power. He was an energetic man and had the goodwill of the Syrians and the people of Damascus to a great degree. By them both Ben-hadad himself and Hazael, who ruled after him, are honored as gods to this day, because of their benefactions and the temples they built, with which they adorned the city of Damascus. Every day, too, they hold processions in honor of these kings and pride themselves on their antiquity, not knowing that these kings are much more recent than they imagine, and are not yet eleven hundred years old. When Joram king of Israel heard that Ben-hadad was dead, he recovered from the terror and dread he had been in on his account, and was very glad to live in peace.