The Kings Of Israel And Judah. Day 103, Forty-Two Enemies Of Elisha Attacked By Bears

We will be studying the final three verses of Chapter 2 today and these verses have been quite controversial over the years. The controversy arises because of the way many versions of the Bible have translated a particular word into English. The forty-two males who meet their doom (or who are severely mauled) in this passage of the Bible are referred to in some versions as "youths", in other versions as "boys", and in other versions as "children". This has caused many to assume in error that forty-two little boys are mauled to death by bears at the end of Chapter 2. 

The word in question is used in several other verses of the Bible to describe males who are certainly not children. For example, the same word is used for Jacob's son Joseph when he was almost forty years old, for King David's grown son Absalom who was rebelling against him for the kingship, for King Solomon when he ascended to the throne somewhere around age eighteen to twenty-one, and for the junior commanders of King Ahab's army who had to be twenty years old at minimum. In Numbers 1:45 we learned that a young man in ancient Israel could not join the army unless he was at least twenty, so Ahab's junior commanders were probably older than that since they'd been soldiers long enough to have earned the rank of officers.  

The reason I'm taking such care to stress that the forty-two males in our text today are not children is because Elisha (and God, from whom Elisha gets his power) has been accused by critics of the Bible of having caused the deaths of forty-two little boys. We must dispel this erroneous idea right off the bat or else we are going to struggle a great deal with the three verses on the page today.

Elisha lodged for a time at the school of prophets in Jericho after his master Elijah was called up to heaven. Now he leaves Jericho to visit another school of prophets which is at Bethel. But Bethel, at the time of Elisha, is not a city where the majority of the people are faithful to the Lord. You'll recall that Bethel has been a center of idolatrous religious practices ever since King Jeroboam of Israel set up a golden calf there and at Dan in 1 Kings 12. The fact that Elisha is met by a gang of aggressive young men upon his arrival is proof that it is not safe to walk the streets there if you are a man or woman who boldly speaks in the name of the Lord.

"From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. 'Get out of here, baldy!' they said. 'Get out of here, baldy!'" (2 Kings 2:23) As one of the commentaries I consulted points out, "Small boys do not roam the forest in gangs of forty or more." These are not little kids who come out in a threatening attitude to make fun of Elisha's appearance and to taunt him by saying (in the original language), "Go up, baldy! Go up, baldy!" The words "go up" are a reference to the taking up of Elijah to heaven. These young men do not want a prophet of the Lord in their midst and they are inviting Elisha---in an abusive tone of voice---to be gone in the same manner. They are rejecting not only the prophet of the Lord but the Lord Himself. They are mocking the Lord who carried Elijah up to heaven and at the same time they are mocking the man who is now the Lord's chief prophetic messenger to Israel. They are making fun of Elisha's calling in life and they are making fun of his appearance; he is no longer a young man like them but is past middle age and has grown bald. 

Elisha is going to speak words against them. Some of Elisha's critics have accused him of calling down a curse on these youths in anger and embarrassment over being called "baldy". Others have accused him of speaking words that seal their doom because he's afraid of them and doesn't trust the Lord to protect him. I think it's highly possible that these young men do want to physically harm him but we won't find Elisha displaying any outward signs of fear of them. When Elisha pronounces a dire message upon this threatening group of young men, he does so on the authority of the Lord. As we've stated before, none of the prophets of the Bible has any power to perform a miracle or to bring a curse to pass unless the Lord gives him the power. Elisha could have pronounced curses against these men all day and the curses would have come to nothing if it wasn't the Lord's will for them to come to pass.

Elisha walks boldly past the gang and then looks back at them to say some chilling words which are not specifically provided to us. "He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria." (2 Kings 2:24-25) Here we learn that there were more than forty-two youths in this gang because the Bible says that forty-two "of them" were mauled by bears. It is generally assumed that the bears killed them, although the Bible only used the word "mauled" which could be taken to mean that the bears roughed them up but spared their lives. Perhaps these idolatrous youths were simply given an attitude adjustment and scars that would forever remind them not to abuse the prophets of the Lord in either word or deed. 

If it were not the Lord's will for these guys to be attacked by bears, there's nothing Elisha could have said or done to make that happen. And if the Lord had not allowed this to happen, perhaps in time these young men would have grown bold enough in their sin to physically attack or even kill people who were faithful to the Lord. I like to think that they survived their injuries and never dared to speak a word against or lay a finger on one of the Lord's servants. I like to think they saw the light and forsook false gods and gave their hearts to the one true God.