Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 1-2.

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Two points are expressed with the account here about what happens when Ahaziah sends messengers to inquire of the god of Ekron.  The first is that by doing so Ahaziah took the sin of his father, Ahab, one step further.  Ahab at least pretended that he thought that Baal was just another name for the God of Israel.  Ahaziah abandoned all pretense of worshiping the God of Israel in favor of worshiping foreign gods.  I will also note that Ahaziah knew of the God of Israel because when his messengers described Elijah to him he immediately knew that they had been confronted by Elijah.  So, Ahaziah was intentionally choosing another god over the God of Israel.  Which leads directly into the second point expressed in this account which comes up when Ahaziah sent soldiers to bring Elijah to him.  When each of the first two captains of fifty came to Elijah they assumed that the king had the authority to order Elijah, whom they acknowledged as a man of God, to do as the king directed.  By calling down fire from heaven on them, Elijah was demonstrating that God’s authority over him superseded that of the king.  The third captain recognized that he had no authority, and neither did the king, to order Elijah to act unless God granted them that authority.  The third captain begged Elijah to spare his life by coming with him to see the king.  He knew that he could not compel Elijah to come with him, but he also knew that if Elijah failed to come with him the king would have him, the captain, killed.    I want to tie this back to Ahaziah sending messengers to inquire of Baal-zebub.  By doing so, Ahaziah was saying that Baal-zebub had more authority over his life, and his people, than did the God of Israel.

That went longer than I expected, so I am going to skip over most of the rest of the passage and touch upon what is recounted at the end of today’s passage.  It says that while Elisha was on the way to Bethel from Jericho after Elijah’s death some “small boys” came out of the city and jeered at him.  Every commentary I have read on this passage says that the Hebrew word which is translated as “small boys” here refers to what we would politely call “young men”.  That is males between the ages of fourteen and twenty.  The passage says that Elisha cursed them after they jeered at him and two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of them.  So, this was not a few bad apples who were jeering at a traveler who looked funny.  This was a large group who were working up the courage to attack what they thought was a vulnerable traveler.  Think about that, even if the group was younger than fourteen, there were enough of them that two bears were able to maul forty-two of them.  Also, the passage does not say that the bears killed any of them, just that they tore forty-two of them.  Most generous interpretation of this incident was that it was a large group of boys acting in a threatening manner towards strangers with no adult supervision.  Think about being confronted by forty-two boys in a remote area.  Even if they were all only five years old, they present a significant threat to a single individual.  And it is worth noting that the wording of the passage suggests that there were more than forty-two of them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.