Elisha

Russian icon of Elisha (18th century, Kizhi Monastery, Russia)

Elisha's story is related in the Books of Kings (Second Scroll, chapters 2–14) in the Hebrew Bible (part of the Nevi'im). According to this story, he was a prophet and a wonder-worker of the Kingdom of Israel who was active during the reigns of Joram, Jehu, Jehoahaz, and Jehoash (Joash).[5] Elisha was the son of Shaphat, a wealthy land-owner of Abel-meholah; he became the attendant and disciple of Elijah.[6]

His name first occurs in chapter 19 of the Books of Kings in the command given to Elijah to anoint him as his successor.[7] After learning in the cave on Mount Horeb, that Elisha, the son of Shaphat, had been selected by Yahweh as his successor in the prophetic office, Elijah set out to find him. On his way from Mount Horeb to Damascus, Elijah found Elisha "one of them that was ploughing with twelve yokes of oxen".[8] Elijah went over to him, threw his mantle over Elisha's shoulders, investing him with the prophetic office.[6] Elisha delayed only long enough to kill the yoke of oxen, whose flesh he boiled with the wood of his plough. After he had shared this farewell repast with his father, mother, and friends, the newly chosen prophet "went after Elijah, and ministered unto him".[9] Elisha became Elijah's close attendant until Elijah was taken up into heaven. During all these years we hear nothing of Elisha except in connection with the closing scenes of Elijah's life.

Ain es-Sultan in Jericho (also known as "Elisha's Spring"), believed to be the fountain purified by Elisha in 2 Kings 2:19–22.

Elisha accompanied Elijah to Jericho, where according to 2 Kings 2:3–9, "the sons of the prophets" tell Elisha that the LORD would "will take away thy master from thy head to-day".

Elijah and Elisha went to the Jordan River. Elijah rolls up his mantle and strikes the water,[10] the waters of which divided so as to permit both to pass over on dry ground. Elisha asks to "inherit a double-portion" of Elijah's spirit. Suddenly, a chariot of fire and horses of fire appear and Elijah is lifted up in a whirlwind. As Elijah is lifted up, his mantle falls to the ground and Elisha picks it up.

Some scholars see this as indicative of the property inheritance customs of the time, where the oldest son received twice as much of the father's inheritance as each of the younger sons. In this interpretation Elisha is asking that he may be seen as the "rightful heir" and successor to Elijah.[11] Critics of this view point out that Elisha was already appointed as Elijah's successor earlier in the narrative and that Elisha is described as performing twice as many miracles as Elijah. In this interpretation the "double-portion" is not merely an allusion to primacy in succession, but is instead a request for greater prophetic power even than Elijah.[12]

Elisha Refusing the Gifts of Naaman, by Pieter de Grebber 1630

By means of the mantle let fall from Elijah, Elisha miraculously recrossed the Jordan and returned to Jericho, where he won the gratitude of the people by purifying the unwholesome waters of their spring and making them drinkable.[13]

When the armies of Judah, Israel and Edom, then allied against Mesha, the Moabite king, were being tortured by drought in the Idumean desert, Elisha consented to intervene. His double prediction regarding relief from drought and victory over the Moabites was fulfilled on the following morning.[6]

When a group of boys (or youths[14]) from Bethel taunted the prophet for his baldness, Elisha cursed them in the name of Yahweh and two female bears came out of the forest and tore forty-two of the boys.[4]

To relieve a prophet's widow importuned by a harsh creditor, Elisha so multiplied a little oil as to enable her not only to pay her debt but to provide for her family needs.[15] Jewish tradition identifies the widow's husband as Obadiah, the servant of King Ahab, who hid 100 prophets of Yahweh in two caves.[16]

According to the first Book of Kings, Elijah resuscitated a Phoenician boy in the city of Zarephath.[17] In the second Book of Kings, Elisha obtained for a rich lady of Shunem the birth of a son. When the child died some years later, Elisha successfully resurrected the child by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.[18]

A Famine in Samaria (illustration by Gustave Doré from the 1866 La Sainte Bible)

To nourish the sons of the prophets pressed by famine, Elisha changed a pottage made from poisonous gourds into wholesome food.[13] He fed a hundred men with twenty loaves of new barley, leaving some leftover,[19] in a story which is comparable with the miracles of Jesus in the New Testament.[20]

Elisha cured the Syrian military commander Naaman of leprosy but punished his own servant Gehazi, who took money from Naaman.[21] Naaman, at first reluctant, obeyed Elisha, and washed seven times in the River Jordan. Finding his flesh "restored like the flesh of a little child", the general was so impressed by this evidence of God's power, and by the disinterestedness of his prophet, as to express his deep conviction that "there is no other God in all the earth, but only in Israel."[22] Elisha allowed Naaman to continue in the service of the Syrian king and therefore be present in the worship of Rimmon in the Syrian temple. According to Luke's gospel, Jesus referred to Naaman's healing when he said, "And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet: and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian."[23]

Elisha's actions included repeatedly saving King Jehoram of Israel from the ambushes planned by Benhadad,[4] ordering the elders to shut the door against the messenger of Israel's ungrateful king,[24] bewildering with a strange blindness the soldiers of the Syrian king,[25] making iron float to relieve from embarrassment a son of a prophet,[26][13] and confidently predicting the sudden flight of the enemy at the siege of Samaria and the consequent cessation of the famine in the city,[27]

Elisha then journeyed to Damascus and prophesied that Hazael would be king over Syria, while weeping because of the evil he would do.[28] Elisha directs one of the sons of the prophets to anoint Jehu, the son of Jehoshaphat, as king of Israel, and commissions him to cut off the house of Ahab.[29] The death of Jehoram, pierced by an arrow from Jehu's bow, the end of Jezebel,[30] and the slaughter of Ahab's seventy sons, proved how he executed that demand.[31]

The miracle at the grave of Elisha. (Jan Nagel, 1596)

While Elisha lay on his death-bed in his own house,[32] Jehoash of Israel, the grandson of Jehu, came to mourn over his approaching departure, and uttered the same words as those of Elisha when Elijah was taken away, indicating his value to him: "My father, my father! the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof".[33] Jehoash assists Elisha to fire an arrow eastwards from the window of his room, predicting as it lands:

The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance and the arrow of deliverance from Syria; for you must strike the Syrians at Aphek till you have destroyed them.[34]

Elisha predicts three successful battles over the Arameans, but no absolute victory.[35] 2 Kings 13:25 records three victories of Joash whereby cities lost to the Arameans, probably on the west bank of the Jordan, were regained.[36]

According to the Books of Kings the year after Elisha's death and burial (or, in the following spring) a body was placed in his grave. As soon as the body touched Elisha's remains the man "revived and stood up on his feet".[37]

• Amina Adil, Gaben des Lichts. Die wundersamen Geschichten der Gesandten Gottes (Kandern im Schwarzwald 1999), 563–73
• al-Farrāʾ, Maʿānī al-Qurʾān, ed. Aḥmad Yūsuf Najātī and Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Najjār (Cairo 1955–71), 2:407–8
• Josef Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen (Berlin and Leipzig 1926), 99, 101
• al-Khūshābī, ʿArāʾis al-Qurʾān wa-nafāʾis al-furqān wa-farādīs al-jinān, ed. Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ (Beirut 2007), 167–9
• al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, ed. Isaac Eisenberg (Leiden 1922–3), 199–205, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston Jr., The tales of the prophets of al-Kisaʾi (Boston 1978), 269
• al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār (Beirut 1983), 13:396–403
• al-Maqdisī, al-Muṭahhar b. Ṭāhir, al-Badʾ wa-l-taʾrīkh, ed. Clément Huart (Paris 1903), 3:100
• al-Rabghūzī, Stories of the prophets, ed. Hendrik E. Boeschoten, M. Vandamme, and Semih Tezcan (Leiden 1995), 2:460
• Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī, Mirʾāt al-zamān fī taʾrīkh al-aʿyān, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut 1985), 1:460, 466
• al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje et al. (Leiden 1879–1901), 1:542–4, trans. William M. Brinner, The history of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 4, The Children of Israel (Albany 1991), 124–5
• al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (Cairo 1954), 259–61, trans. William M. Brinner, ʿArāʾis al-Majālis fī Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ or Lives of the prophets, as recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʿlabī (Leiden 2002), 432–35.