Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 3-4.

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This passage begins with an account of Israel, Judah, and Edom going to war against Moab.  It is often used as an example of an occasion when the god of another nation defeated the God of Israel.  This is based on what it says at the end of that account.  There the writer tells us that Moab was all but defeated when the king of Moab offered his son and heir as a burnt offering, after which a great wrath came upon Israel and forced them to withdraw from Moab.  Even on the face of it, the passage does not quite make that case.  The most one can say is that perhaps the god of the Moabites forced the army of Israel to withdraw.  There is nothing to support the idea that God was fighting for Israel and was Himself forced away by the god of the Moabites.  In fact, something I never noticed before is that the Israelite army did something which broke God’s commands about besieging an enemy city.  The passage tells us that the Israelites overthrew the cities and cut down every good tree in Moab.  They did this despite the fact that God had commanded them through Moses in Deuteronomy 20:19-20 not to destroy the trees around a city when they besieged it.  In fact, I think the spirit of that passage was that they were not to attempt to make the land uninhabitable when they went to war.  Here, they very clearly did just that because, in addition to cutting the trees, they covered the arable land with stones and stopped up the wells and springs.  We usually miss that they violated God’s Law by doing this because when Elisha told them that God would give Moab into their hands, he also predicted that they would do this.  A casual reading of the passage leaves one with the impression that when Elisha said that he was giving instructions to the army of Israel.  However, as I read it today, I realized that Elisha was not telling them that they should do that.  He was merely telling them what they would do.  So, when the Moabites were cornered and fought back desperately, God was no longer with the Israelite army and they fell before the fierce attack.  Or, perhaps, when they besieged the Moabites in the last city, the supplies for the Israelite army ran out, and they could not resupply themselves from the land because they had destroyed its fertility and had to withdraw in order to find food.

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