2
ND
KINGS
Week 6, Chapters 4 and 5
We stopped our last lesson in the middle of 2
nd
Kings Chapter 4, with the story of the wealthy
woman of Shunem having rushed to Mt. Carmel to urge Elisha to come back with her to try and
revivify her dead son.
It was through Elisha that God had first worked His miracle of grace that gave this older, barren
woman a son. And like Sarah, Abraham’s wife, this nameless woman was reluctant to accept
Elisha’s promise that she would give birth; like many of us, she preferred to dismiss any such
possibility because the thought of further disappointment at such a too-good-to-be-true
proposition was too much to bear. But of course she did conceive and now, perhaps some 12
years later, is quite in love with this greatly valued firstborn son of hers.

Since this so-called elem, which is a Hebrew term that indicates about an 11 or 12 year old
child, is now under the supervision of his father he is able (required actually) to be of use out in
the fields. But one day the boy begins to complain of a severe headache. His father has him
taken to his mother to be comforted (no doubt not suspecting anything serious), and within
hours the boy is dead. The mother doesn’t fall apart into tears and despair as one might
expect; rather she flies into action. She immediately takes her child’s lifeless body up the
stairs and into Elisha’s rooftop apartment and lays him on Elisha’s bed. Then she tells her
husband she urgently needs a donkey and an attendant, and that she is going to find the Man
of God, Elisha.
Is this panic? I don’t think so. Even though on one hand her actions don’t seem rational
because by custom she ought to be in mourning and planning for this child’s required burial
before the sun sets, on the other hand her mind is telling her that what seems final and
inalterable is not. Her husband, knowing that he has a good wife of common sense, is
confused when she wants to go find Elisha because he says that it’s not Shabbat or Rosh
Hodesh so why (especially at a time like this) would she want to go this prophet?
This woman has already personally experienced the power of God over life and death, by
bringing forth new life from her dead womb. Why would it be so unthinkable, then, for God to
work through the same Man of God he had only little more than a decade earlier used to bring
1 / 9

this happy oracle of a son to this woman, to now raise that same son from the dead? As she
races to Mt. Carmel, Elisha sees her coming and sends his servant Geichazi to intercept her
and find out if something is wrong. She has no interest in dealing with anyone but Elisha, and
so brushes the servant aside and falls at the feet of the Great Prophet and asks him to come
with her.
Elisha’s answer is to give Geichazi his wooden staff, and to send him on this 15 or 20 mile
journey to see what he can do. The woman is having none of it and Elisha relents and goes
with her. But nonetheless the younger and more spry Geichazi goes ahead of his master and
arrives at the deceased's bedside, whereupon he lays the staff by the boy’s head. What
meaning this has is unclear; but apparently there was some belief that the staff itself could be a
medium of divine power since it belonged to Elisha. Not surprisingly when the boy’s mother
and Elisha arrived, the only report Geichazi could give is that there was no movement and no
sign of life.
Let’s re-read the last couple paragraphs of chapter 4.
RE-READ 2
ND
KINGS 4:32 – end
Often, modern Bible scholars who at some level believe this story and don’t discount it as pure
legend, say that what really happened was that the child was not dead but merely in a deep
coma. Well, verse 32 directly confronts such a notion; the unequivocal statement is made that
the child was dead!
But it is apparent from what ensues that both the grief-stricken mother and the Great Prophet
believed that this situation could be remedied. Such is the measure of faith that we all ought to
strive to acquire as followers of the God of Israel that when the utterly ridiculously impossible
confronts us, we don’t lose all hope but take it before God. This calls to mind Hannah’s prayer
in 1
st
Samuel 2 when she cried out:
CJB
1Sam. 2:5-6

5
The well-fed hire themselves for bread, while those who were hungry hunger no more.
The barren woman has borne seven, while the mother of many wastes away.
6
"ADONAI kills and makes alive; he brings down to the grave, and he brings up.
2 / 9

Elisha goes into the room, and shuts himself in with the child. This miracle is not for prying
eyes and not meant to be a public spectacle. Knowing that life and death is exclusively in the
hands of Yehoveh, Elisha begins with prayer. And then he follows a pattern that hopes to
resurrect the dead, which we saw his master Elijah do in very similar circumstances.
CJB
1Kings 17:17-22

17
A while later, the son of the woman whose house it was fell ill; his illness grew
increasingly serious until his breathing stopped.
18
She said to Eliyahu, "What do you have against me, you man of God? Did you come
to me just to remind me how sinful I am by killing my son?"
19
"Give me your son," he said to her. Taking him from her lap, he carried him into the
room upstairs where he was staying and laid him on his own bed.
20
Then he cried out to ADONAI: "ADONAI my God! Have you brought also this misery
on the widow I'm staying with by killing her son?"
21
He stretched himself out on the child three times and cried out to ADONAI: "ADONAI
my God, please! Let this child's soul come back into him!"
22
ADONAI heard Eliyahu's cry, the child's soul came back into him, and he revived.

Elisha therefore lays himself on top of the boy’s corpse; in fact verse 34 says that at least part
of the procedure was to warm the boy’s flesh. Apparently nothing happened immediately as
after awhile he got up, walked around the room a bit, perhaps even going down to the main
house under his rooftop apartment; but then returned to do it again.
Last week I asked the question about what we ought to do when action or decision is needed
and cannot be deferred, but we have no clear direct instructions from God. How often we have
all prayed to God to please give us direction. And frankly, most of the time there seems to be
little more than silence. And that may be because YHWH wants us to realize that the answers
to almost all of our questions have been answered before in the patterns and principles
established in His written Word to us.
We have talked endlessly in Torah Class about God-patterns; about how the Lord establishes
patterns for His universe to operate and even about how HE operates within identifiable
patterns. And since the Bible is His Word to us, His followers, and since we can begin to see
these patterns exposed and come alive when we read His Word, then it is only logical that we
3 / 9

should learn them and rely upon them in faith. It is not necessary that we have a direct
personal oracle from God whenever a new challenge or a choice arrives; rather we ought to
pray and then act in accordance with the repeating God-patterns and principles that we have
learned. That, I’m confident, is what Elisha did. There is no hint in these passages that beyond
his prayer as an appropriate and necessary form of uni-directional plea, petition, and worship
towards God did God in-turn reply towards Elisha with a divine oracle of instruction.
But we must also recognize that God’s patterns must be employed not only in faith but in
context. And the context in the miracle of the boy’s resurrection from the dead is that it was
accomplished through the office of an exceedingly rare and great prophet. Elijah did it, and his
replacement whom Eliyahu personally commissioned now is able to do it, and naturally he
does it in the same pattern as Elijah. Could Geichazi have achieved the same result? How
about the child’s pious and fully faithful mother? The answer is “no” in both cases, because
despite their other merits they are not these exceptional and great prophets.
Our English Bibles say that the boy’s flesh began to warm up from its stone-cold condition,
and then he sneezed 7 times. The sneezing of course is indicating that the breath of life has
once again entered the boy’s lungs. But why 7 times? First the number 7 is the ideal and
divine number that let’s us know that what is happening is a work of God and divinely
ordained. But second, the Rabbis are clear that it was NOT that the boy sneezed 7 times, it’s
that Elisha performed this pattern of lying face to face upon the boy, and then getting up and
walking around a bit, 7 times. It’s what scholars call verb confusion; the idea is that the 7 times
is incorrectly grammatically linked to the sneezing instead of to what it was that Elisha was
doing. And it makes much more sense that way.
The story ends abruptly with Elisha telling his servant to call for the mother to come and pick
up her revived son. Most appropriately, she fell to the floor before Elisha, prostrating herself in
the awe of such a miracle of grace and mercy, grabbed her son and exited the apartment.
Verse 38 begins yet another story of miracles brought about through Elisha. This time he
provides food for a group of disciples who are hungry. It takes place at Gilgal, although this is a
different one than the one that is near Bethel. This Gilgal is to the north and more near Mt.
Ebal. The situation is that there was a famine in the area and the guild prophets who looked to
him as their ultimate leader were in a particularly dire situation. These folks normally lived in
the most humble of circumstances and lived a life of modesty or borderline poverty. They
needed to eat and so put on a large soup kettle from which this group of prophets ate
communally; however it was mostly just water because there were no vegetables to add to it
because of the famine. So some of the prophets went out foraging for wild plants that, despite
a bad taste, at least offered some nutrition to stave off starvation. They found something that
looked like a gourd or a melon and brought it back, cut it up and threw it in the soup pot.
4 / 9

After it was cooked for awhile it was ladled into bowls and as they began to partake one of the
young prophets exclaimed that there was death in the pot. That merely means that the
concoction turned out to be poisonous because the gourd was toxic. Elisha’s solution was to
add flour to the mix that somehow acted as an antidote and made the soup edible. What ought
to astonish us more than the miracle of God making the poisonous soup benign, is that the
many prophets present had such faith in the Lord working through Elisha that they believed
him and ate it!
Then we immediately get a second story about food. It scarcely need be said that in the Bible,
food is an important issue (in our time, even a controversial issue). In modern times it is a
proverb that we are what we eat; and while we shouldn’t carry that glib saying quite as far as
some might, indeed we are finding that despite our highly advanced pharmaceuticals, the
simple act of choosing the right foods to eat and at the same time avoiding others have an
enormous effect not only on our daily well being but also on healing our bodies and even in our
mental outlook. Thus I encourage us all to look beyond the simple issue of the needed
calories, vitamins, protein and anti-oxidants, etc., and grasp that we can choose to view food
no differently than the heathens do (as merely a source to satisfy our hunger), or we can view
it from the Biblical perspective that food has an unseen spiritual quality to it as well. That is, the
same Lord who created these bodies that burn food for fuel in order for us to physically
survive, has also ordained that for those who recognize just who He is and who love Him, we
are to accept the Lord’s definition of what food for humans is and is not. That is essentially
what the Biblical dietary laws of Leviticus accomplish. They add the spiritual quality to food by
telling us what the Father has set aside for us as food, and what He has separated away
FROM us as not food, even though from a purely medical and physical perspective the
prohibited items are usually edible and digestible and provide energy to power these bodies.
I believe that just as with Elisha and the poisonous soup that was made edible by a miracle, it
is the faith and trust demonstrated by God’s followers that is the issue about food; it is not
always about the inherent physical qualities of the items we shove into our mouths. Thus it is
not necessarily so that the meat of a rabbit (a prohibited item) is inherently evil or dangerous,
while the meat of a cow (a permitted item) is inherently good and healthy. It is that the true
spiritual value of food comes about through sufficient trust and faith in the Lord to be obedient
to His commandments concerning diet, that were put there for both our physical benefit and for
our spiritual benefit. So while Christians have been taught all of our lives that the choice of food
is strictly a matter of preference for us, in fact the Bible sets up the matter of food as also
involving moral choices. Why a moral choice? Because for a Believer the definition of a moral
choice is to choose whether to obey the Lord’s commands or not.
Verse 42 begins by setting up the all-important context for the next story. A man from a town in
the northern kingdom brought 20 loaves of bread made from barley (NOT wheat) to Elisha.
Barley was the first of the grain harvests of the year, and so barley loaves was the standard
food offering in honor of the 3
rd
Biblical Feast, the appointed time called Bikkurim or Firstfruits.
Now some of the Rabbis say that even though it seems so, it could not have been the Feast of
5 / 9

Bikkurim because the firstfruits must be taken to the priests and that didn’t happen here. Well,
that simply ignores the realities of the times when in the north they were discouraged, if not
outright prohibited, by the ruling monarchy from even visiting the Temple in Jerusalem. There
was also a distinct societal dislike between the northerners (Israel) and the southerners
(Judah) that had gone on since the time of Joshua. In fact the entire reason for Eliyahu’s and
then Elisha’s existence and mission was essentially as a kind of substitute priesthood and
source of God’s Word for the people of the northern kingdom of Ephraim/Israel.
But despite the government mandates and politically correct societal attitudes, there were
those of the northern kingdom who sought to find ways to be as true to the Torah as they
could. And so they wanted to continue to observe the Biblical Feasts and appointed times even
though from a practical level is was impossible. This is something that we, as modern
Believers need to emulate. We need to obey God by continuing to honor His laws and
commands as best we can considering the prohibitions that our government mandates and
barriers of peer pressure that our society erects. And we also have to do what parts of the laws
and commands and feasts and sabbaths that we can do in view of the fact that there is no
Temple to visit and no priesthood to preside. In fact, I see such efforts as our obligation.
This pious man from the north therefore brought his Torah commanded firstfruits offering to the
only true representative of God there was available for him: Elisha. And the members of the
prophet guild that Elisha oversaw then could receive some food in the same way that the
Levite priests did, in the form of offerings and sacrifices. However, 20 small barley loaves was
hardly enough for 100 men. But what that term “100 men” means is that they are the
representative member of their families. Therefore it is not 100 individuals that are to be fed,
but 100 of the prophet guild families.
Open your Bibles to John Chapter 6 as we read a story that most Christians know well.
READ JOHN 6:1 – 14
Notice all the parallels between the John 6 narrative of Christ feeding the multitudes and Elisha
feeding the 100 families.
First, this took place in the north of Israel in both stories.
Second, this took place at Passover. Passover is a generic name in the New Testament for the
bundle of 3 springtime feasts that consists of Passover, Matza, and Bikkurim that occur in rapid-
fire succession. So our pious man of the north was celebrating the same feasts in going to
Elisha as was Christ as He sought to feed the hungry crowds.
6 / 9

Third, notice that the barley bread (not wheat bread) is the primary food item involved.
Fourth, even though it is the disciples who at the center of the action (like with Elisha’s prophet
guild members), their families are to be fed as well.
Fifth, just as in the story of Elisha, not only was the barley bread miraculously multiplied to feed
everyone present (men, women and children), but there was enough leftover to feed others or
for those present to have some for later.
Now (not to be a heretic), but which story is patterned after which? Is the Elisha story patterned
after the Jesus story, or vice versa? Of course the Yeshua story is patterned after the Elisha
story. And besides all the evident parallels, do you know how I know this for certain without
having to conjecture? Because of this direct statement that essentially concludes the Jesus
story:
CJB
John 6:14
14
When the people saw the miracle he had performed, they said, "This has to be 'the prophet'
who is supposed to come into the world."
Why did the people suppose that Yeshua had to be “the prophet”? Because He performed
exactly the same miracle during the same Biblical feasts as the Great Prophet Elisha had, over
800 years earlier, the multiplication of the barley loaves as recorded in 2
nd
Kings 4.
Let’s move on to 2
nd
Kings Chapter 5.
READ 2
ND
KINGS CHAPTER 5 all
This next story about Elisha would have caused his fame to spread well beyond the
boundaries of Israel and Judah because this miracle involved not a Hebrew but essentially a
foreign outsider who was really an enemy.
Na’aman was a revered and respected chief of the Aramean army (meaning Syrian army). It
cannot be overlooked that verse 1 even states that it was YHWH who brought about Aram’s
victory OVER Israel by using Na’aman. The important God-principle that is set down for us is
7 / 9

that the Lord doesn’t just operate within the lives of Believers. He affects the history of
mankind throughout the world because He is the God of all mankind. Let me set the stage for
this story so that we can get the most from it. King Achav of Israel had some years earlier
formed an uneasy alliance with Ben-Hadad King of Aram (Syria). But with the passing of time,
Ben-Hadad’s son wanted free of being a vassal to Israel and rebelled. He seized the city of
Ramoth-Gilead in the Trans-Jordan and so King Achav led his army to go and take it back. In
the process, Israel was soundly defeated and King Achav was killed.
Back and forth the two kingdoms of Syria and Israel went at one another; one gaining the
upper hand for awhile, and then the other. At the time of our story Syria was now more
dominant than Israel and while there was not outright war going on, nor was there a quiet
peace, there were hostile skirmishes and raids on one another’s territories that were traded on
a near continual basis. And it seems that in one of these raids into Israel by Syria, they
captured some Hebrews for slaves (perhaps one of the most common purposes for ancients to
attack one another). Among those slaves taken was a young Hebrew girl who wound up as a
house servant in Na’aman’s home.
One day this little girl expressed concern for her master to his wife. The Israelite child seemed
genuinely concerned for Na’aman, and as our story unfolds we see that indeed Na’aman must
have been a decent man who treated his slaves well and thus won their affections. She says
that she wishes that Na’aman could go see the Great Prophet because only this prophet in
Israel could cure him of his tzara’at. Now while many English translations use the word
Leprosy to translate tzara’at, that is not only highly unlikely (as formal leprosy that is now
called Hansen’s Disease was unknown in that era and in that location) it takes us down a
rabbit trail in getting caught up in identifying the exact medical term for the skin condition that
he might have suffered. However the issue of tzara’at is not the kind of skin condition but
rather the cause. And anytime we see the word tzara’at, it is speaking of a visible skin disease
that is caused by an inner spiritual condition of ritual uncleanness, sin, or both. In other words,
the Lord has caused the victim’s spiritual condition that is hidden to humans but is exposed to
God, to now become literally and symbolically exposed for the entire world to see. Na’aman
hadn’t caught some contagious skin disease. Since it was the God of Israel who caused it to
appear, it could only be removed by the God of Israel’s prophet; and the little Hebrew girl
house slave knew that.
Na’aman’s skin disease was of such concern and discomfort that he was willing to try anything
to get rid of it, so he went to his king and asked for permission to go to Israel and seek out
healing. The concept of a god of a different nation having the power to heal was of no problem
to the Oriental mind of that era. Of course how to access that god was a different matter, and
the King of Syria figured that such access would only be granted by the king of the nation who
claimed that particular god.
Kings had their gods, and gods had their prophets; that’s how it worked according to the
8 / 9

ancient mindset. The King of Aram was happy to intercede for his great warrior leader
Na’aman and so prepared a lavish gift to be presented to Y’horam, King of Israel. Along with
the gift was a letter that explained that the purpose of the gift was so that the King of Israel
would heal the Syrian military commander. Y’horam perfectly understood that this message
was not a request, it was a demand. And considering how weak of a king Y’horam was, and
how at the moment the King of Aram had the upper hand, Y’horam flew into a fit of anxiety
and wondered just exactly how he was supposed to cure this gentile (and an enemy at that) of
a disease that was thought to only affect Hebrews since it was brought on by Israel’s God.
We will continue with this story in our next lesson.

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
9 / 9