The Chariot of Fire · Elisha’s Wonders

In context

Ahab’s son Ahaziah falls through a lattice and sends to ask Baal Zebub, the god of Ekron, a Philistine city, whether he will recover (2 Kings 1:2). Elijah, “a hairy man, and wearing a leather belt,” meets his messengers (1:8); John the Baptist wore a leather belt too, and Jesus said John was the Elijah “who is to come” (Matthew 3:4; 11:14). These chapters have hard scenes: fire falls on two captains and the fifty men with each (2 Kings 1:9–12).

The sons of the prophets, groups of prophets at Bethel and Jericho, know Elijah will be taken (2:3, 5). Elisha asks for “a double portion” of his spirit, the share the law gave a firstborn son (2:9; Deuteronomy 21:17), and sees Elijah go up by a whirlwind as a chariot of fire parts them (2:11). Near the end, youths mock Elisha, and two bears maul forty-two of them (2:23–24).

Mesha king of Moab, who paid Israel in lambs and wool, rebels (3:4–5); a stone he set up, found in 1868, tells his side. The war ends when he offers his oldest son as a burnt offering on the wall (3:27). Then come Elisha’s wonders, among them oil for a widow’s debt and a son for a woman of Shunem, and the boy raised to life after he dies (4:1–37).