2 Kings2:23–25

i. The road up, and the word thrown back down it — 2 Kings 2:23

Three verbs from one root run the verse: Elisha went up, he was going up, and the boys shout go up. BSB gives them three different English words, so only the Hebrew shows the taunt is built out of the narrator's own vocabulary. Where he was going matters. Ellicott identifies Bethel as the chief seat of the illicit cultus with a prophetic community planted in it; Barnes, blunter, says Bethel was the older seat of the calf worship and a prophet of Yahweh was not unlikely to meet with insult there. Pulpit measures the climb from the Jordan valley at something like three thousand feet.

The brief's voices agree on almost everything except the one thing readers most want settled. On the age: Pulpit calls “little children” an unfortunate translation and proposes “young lads,” boys of twelve to fifteen; Ellicott allows six or seven up to twenty; Cambridge points to Solomon calling himself by the same phrase at his enthronement (1 Kings 3:7); Gill reports that the word is used of persons of thirty or forty. On the taunt, they split. Poole, Gill, Benson, Henry and JFB hear a sneer at Elijah's ascension: go up after your master. Ellicott flatly denies the Bethelites knew anything about it, and Pulpit holds the weight of the jeer was in kereach, not in aleh. ⚙ We leave it open. What is not open is the verb qâlaç, which the Verifier finds in only four verses of the canon, and which elsewhere names the contempt of a conqueror for kings he has come to break (Habakkuk 1:10) or a city's contempt for its own holy things (Ezekiel 22:5). That is the register of this word.

ii. Weight for weight: the turning, the name, the bears — 2 Kings 2:24

He turns his face to what is behind him, which Cambridge shows is the precise force of pânâh, and Ellicott, quoting Thenius, notes that the mockers had circled to his rear. Then the verse's centre: he made them light (Piel of qâlal, a root meaning slight, of no weight) in the name of the LORD. Everything the commentators build, they build on those last three words. Benson, following Dodd, distinguishes inflicting a curse, wishing a curse, and pronouncing one, and places Elisha in the third: the prophet declares a sentence already determined, so the curse is the announcement of the judgment and not its cause. Henry concedes the same point from the other direction, that had the Holy Spirit not directed the curse, providence would not have followed it with judgment. Geneva's gloss is barest: perceiving their malicious heart against the Lord and his word, he asks God to avenge the injury done to him. Cambridge will not even grant that much personal injury, insisting it was as Jehovah's servant and in vindication of Jehovah's honour that he invoked it.

Not every voice defends the act. Pulpit says outright that the action cannot be defended from a Christian point of view, that Christians have no right to curse anyone, and then grounds it where it belongs, under the Law, where God's ministers were required to curse the disobedient (Deuteronomy 27:14-26). Ellicott handles the sharpest objection head on, answering Thenius point by point and conceding at (3) that the narrative is too brief to enable us to judge of the merits of the case. K&D refuses the tidy solution that the city's rulers staged the whole thing, and asks only that we admit the worthless spirit which prevailed in Bethel was openly manifested in the ridicule of the children.

Then two she bears, and bâqaʻ, to split open. The Verifier confirms that Hosea 13:8 holds both dôb and bâqaʻ together, and there the bear is the LORD. Barnes notes this is the one occasion in his whole ministry where we find Elisha a minister of vengeance, and suggests it was needed at the outset to show that the mild successor could, like Elijah, wield the terrors of God's judgments. Almost every voice ends up saying the stroke fell through the children onto the parents: Barnes, Cambridge quoting Bishop Hall, Gill, K&D quoting a sermon attributed to Augustine, and Henry, who turns it into a warning to parents at the day of judgment.

iii. From there, and from there: Carmel and the capital — 2 Kings 2:25

The unit's frame is one adverb, miš·šām, “from there,” which opens v. 23 and appears twice more in v. 25. Elisha goes to Carmel, Elijah's mountain. K&D reads it as going to strengthen himself in solitude for the continuation of his master's work; Ellicott, to cultivate the memory of his master in solitude, noting Elijah had often lived there; Pulpit, following Ewald, to carry the facts of Elijah's removal to those who had been his intimates in that quarter; Poole, partly to decline the fury of the people of Beth-el. Then he turns to Samaria, and stays. Cambridge argues from the Naaman story and from the servant girl's phrase about the prophet that is in Samaria that his most permanent home was most likely in the royal city. Gill says he went there to bear his testimony against idolatry and reclaim men from it. Pulpit draws the contrast with Elijah furthest: Elisha does not imitate the wild, half-savage life of his master but prefers the companionship of men, and is thus, far more than Elijah, a pattern for Christian ministers. ⚙ The chapter that began with a prophet taken out of the world ends with his successor walking back into its capital.