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Still spending my time on getting prints available (I’m close!), so this week I have some more Word leftovers. This time it’s prophets, teenagers and bears, oh my! You may remember that the prophet Elisha did some cool stuff like cleansing nasty water with salt, but he’s also part of (in my opinion) one of the craziest, straight-out-of-an-action-movie scenes in the Bible.
I’m Just Hangin’ out at the Maul
Right after the passage where Elisha heals the water, he faces the biggest challenge of his life… teenagers. Elisha is simply walking along the road when suddenly he encounters a group of teens who start teasing him because he’s bald. I can imagine that with a big crowd of rowdy teens and all their nonstop threats of “Get out of here, baldy!”, it must have been difficult for Elisha to stay calm. Maybe he starts to get a little flustered, even panicked a bit because he is vastly outnumbered. Luckily, he pulls out his How to be an Old Testament Prophet (for Dummies) book and quickly pages through it. “OK… page 145, paragraph 3… ‘If you are being teased by a pack of teenagers make sure you a) overreact and b) use lots of violence’.” As he looks up from the book, the panic leaves his face, he stares at the teens and proclaims “It’s not enough that you like to read Twilight books and listen to crappy music, but now you have chosen to mess with a representative of Yahweh?! It’s on like Donkey Kong!” Mixing overreaction and violence with the creativity of a master artist, Elisha, like some kind of bizarro Dr. Dolittle, calls out two bears who maul 42 of the teenagers. Then he probably looked at the camera and said something like “I can’t bear to be teased” or “I guess there will be 42 fewer people in line for the next Twilight movie.” (Little known fact: OT prophets invented those action movie one-liners.) For discussion: In your opinion, what is the weirdest story in the Bible?
Tags: bears, Elisha, Historical books, maul, teenagers, Word leftovers
Posted on Friday, September 3.
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Just a quick comment.
The teenagers in that story are not the same “teenagers” in the same sense as we know today. According to the Jewish tradition, in this passage they are refered as “boys” which means they were very likely young men of their twenties whom were much very aware of the consequences of mocking a prophet of God directly! Mocking Elijah was like spitting in God’s face basically
They got what they deserved
Love the one-liner quip. :)
I want this. No really.
To clarify it even further the boys were most likely a pretty large gang. In those days the disenfranchised youths would roam around the desert robbing caravans and the like; notably older caravans going slow in the fast lane.
So when they starting picking on him he was probably outnumbered quite significantly and they were using a term that was one of the most offensive things you could say to a man back then.
Just think about the maths though. For two she-bears to take out 42 youths how many had to have escaped?
In eating, I love leftovers because the flavors have had time to infuse everywhere and are even more enjoyable. This Kings II may be a leftover but it’s definitely enjoyable and I’ll be coming back next week for another helping of Word.
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
@Noe & Andrew: Thanks for the clarification. Do you have any references? I read somewhere that some translations say that they were “small children.”
@Noe: I’m curious about something…. Don’t we all really “deserve” what they “got”? I’m not sure what those kids did that I haven’t done before.
This has been one of my favorite bible passages for a long time.
My favorite weird stories include:
- This one
- Death in the Pot (2 Kings 4)
- Where the Giants come from (Genesis 6)
To your reply to Noe:
Of course we do (Romans 3). Thank God he sent Jesus and not Elisha as Messiah. In the following centuries there were enough angry Christians around who claimed the ones they were hurting or killing just got what they deserved.
I’m really no fan of that phrase. At the entrance of the concentration camp Buchenwald stand the words “To each his own”. I’m sorry, but growing up in a town half an hour away from that place makes me kind of touchy and really sick when I hear such things.
This page is pretty funny. In all seriousness though, the Hebrew “naar” (pluralized in this passage)is best translated ‘youth.’ In the book of Kings alone its semantic range is shown to include people who are up to 30 years old (my degee is in Biblical Languages).
Furthermore, as has been noted above, if 42 died, how many were there originally? This is not a case of Elisha being “mean;” it’s a case of self-defense. Two final things to note: Elisha merely pronounced condemnation, God chose the form of the judgment, and….Elisha himself could probably have been described as a “naar/youth”. Given that he lived 60 years or so past this event, it’s unlikely that he was much older than 20 or 25 years old when it happened. Sort of deflates the idea that he was a mean bald old man who called down a heavenly swat team on a bunch of kids. More like he had just finished doing mercy miracles in Jericho and a huge of gang of similarly-aged young men began openly mocking and/or threatening him. Contextually, we can infer that this may well have been a mob supportive of Baal worship. The death offends my modern sensibiities too, but it does put this “crazy” story in a more understandable (and if I do say so myself, accurate) light. The translation of naar as “children” or “little kids” is ludicrous, lexically or contextually.
Thanks for that Daniel, I had completely forgotten about this :)