The Living Bible (119 page)
Authors: Inc. Tyndale House Publishers
Tags: #BIBLES / Other Translations / Text
One day the seminary students came to Elisha and told him, “As you can see, our dormitory is too small. Tell us, as our president, whether we can build a new one down beside the Jordan River, where there are plenty of logs.”
“All right,” he told them, “go ahead.”
3
“Please, sir, come with us,” someone suggested.
“I will,” he said.
4
When they arrived at the Jordan, they began cutting down trees;
5
but as one of them was chopping, his axhead fell into the river.
“Oh, sir,” he cried, “it was borrowed!”
6
“Where did it fall?” the prophet asked. The youth showed him the place, and Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water; and the axhead rose to the surface and floated!
7
“Grab it,” Elisha said to him; and he did.
8
Once when the king of Syria was at war with Israel, he said to his officers, “We will mobilize our forces at ____” (naming the place).
9
Immediately Elisha warned the king of Israel, “Don’t go near ____” (naming the same place) “for the Syrians are planning to mobilize their troops there!”
10
The king sent a scout to see if Elisha was right, and sure enough, he had saved him from disaster. This happened several times.
11
The king of Syria was puzzled. He called together his officers and demanded, “Which of you is the traitor? Who has been informing the king of Israel about my plans?”
12
“It’s not us, sir,” one of the officers replied. “Elisha, the prophet, tells the king of Israel even the words you speak in the privacy of your bedroom!”
13
“Go and find out where he is, and we’ll send troops to seize him,” the king exclaimed.
And the report came back, “Elisha is at Dothan.”
14
So one night the king of Syria sent a great army with many chariots and horses to surround the city.
15
When the prophet’s servant got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere.
“Alas, my master, what shall we do now?” he cried out to Elisha.
16
“Don’t be afraid!” Elisha told him. “For our army is bigger than theirs!”
17
Then Elisha prayed, “Lord, open his eyes and let him see!” And the Lord opened the young man’s eyes so that he could see horses of fire and chariots of fire everywhere upon the mountain!
18
As the Syrian army advanced upon them, Elisha prayed, “Lord, please make them blind.” And he did.
19
Then Elisha went out and told them, “You’ve come the wrong way! This isn’t the right city! Follow me and I will take you to the man you’re looking for.” And he led them to Samaria!
20
As soon as they arrived Elisha prayed, “Lord, now open their eyes and let them see.” And the Lord did, and they discovered that they were in Samaria, the capital city of Israel!
21
When the king of Israel saw them, he shouted to Elisha, “Oh, sir, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?”
22
“Of course not!” Elisha told him. “Do we kill prisoners of war? Give them food and drink and send them home again.”
23
So the king made a great feast for them and then sent them home to their king. And after that the Syrian raiders stayed away from the land of Israel.
24
Later on, however, King Ben-hadad of Syria mustered his entire army and besieged Samaria.
25
As a result there was a great famine in the city, and after a long while even a donkey’s head sold for fifty dollars and a pint of dove’s dung brought three dollars!
26-30
One day as the king of Israel was walking along the wall of the city, a woman called to him, “Help, my lord the king!”
“If the Lord doesn’t help you, what can I do?” he retorted. “I have neither food nor wine to give you. However, what’s the matter?”
She replied, “This woman proposed that we eat my son one day and her son the next. So we boiled my son and ate him, but the next day when I said, ‘Kill your son so we can eat him,’ she hid him.”
When the king heard this he tore his clothes. (The people watching noticed through the rip he tore in them that he was wearing an inner robe made of sackcloth next to his flesh.)
31
“May God kill me if I don’t execute Elisha this very day,” the king vowed.
32
Elisha was sitting in his house at a meeting with the elders of Israel when the king sent a messenger to summon him. But before the messenger arrived Elisha said to the elders, “This murderer has sent a man to kill me. When he arrives, shut the door and keep him out, for his master will soon follow him.”
33
While Elisha was still saying this, the messenger arrived followed by the king.
*
“The Lord has caused this mess,” the king stormed. “Why should I expect any help from him?”
Elisha replied, “The Lord says that by this time tomorrow two gallons of flour or four gallons of barley grain will be sold in the markets of Samaria for a dollar!”
2
The officer assisting the king said, “That couldn’t happen if the Lord made windows in the sky!”
But Elisha replied, “You will see it happen, but you won’t be able to buy any of it!”
3
Now there were four lepers sitting outside the city gates. “Why sit here until we die?” they asked each other.
4
“We will starve if we stay here and we will starve if we go back into the city; so we might as well go out and surrender to the Syrian army. If they let us live, so much the better; but if they kill us, we would have died anyway.”
5
So that evening they went out to the camp of the Syrians, but there was no one there!
6
(For the Lord had made the whole Syrian army hear the clatter of speeding chariots and a loud galloping of horses and the sounds of a great army approaching. “The king of Israel has hired the Hittites and Egyptians to attack us,” they cried out.
7
So they panicked and fled into the night, abandoning their tents, horses, donkeys, and everything else.)
8
When the lepers arrived at the edge of the camp they went into one tent after another, eating, drinking wine, and carrying out silver and gold and clothing and hiding it.
9
Finally they said to each other, “This isn’t right. This is wonderful news, and we aren’t sharing it with anyone! Even if we wait until morning, some terrible calamity will certainly fall upon us; come on, let’s go back and tell the people at the palace.”
10
So they went back to the city and told the watchmen what had happened—they had gone out to the Syrian camp and no one was there! The horses and donkeys were tethered and the tents were all in order, but there was not a soul around.
11
Then the watchmen shouted the news to those in the palace.
12
The king got out of bed and told his officers, “I know what has happened. The Syrians know we are starving, so they have left their camp and have hidden in the fields, thinking that we will be lured out of the city. Then they will attack us and make slaves of us and get in.”
13
One of his officers replied, “We’d better send out scouts to see. Let them take five of the remaining horses—if something happens to the animals it won’t be any greater loss than if they stay here and die with the rest of us!”
14
Four chariot horses were found and the king sent out two charioteers to see where the Syrians had gone.
15
They followed a trail of clothing and equipment all the way to the Jordan River—thrown away by the Syrians in their haste. The scouts returned and told the king,
16
and the people of Samaria rushed out and plundered the camp of the Syrians. So it was true that two gallons of flour and four gallons of barley were sold that day for one dollar, just as the Lord had said!
17
The king appointed his special assistant to control the traffic at the gate, but he was knocked down and trampled and killed as the people rushed out. This is what Elisha had predicted on the previous day when the king had come to arrest him,
18
and the prophet had told the king that flour and barley would sell for so little on the following day.
19
The king’s officer had replied, “That couldn’t happen even if the Lord opened the windows of heaven!”
And the prophet had said, “You will see it happen, but you won’t be able to buy any of it!”
20
And he couldn’t, for the people trampled him to death at the gate!
Elisha had told the woman whose son he had brought back to life, “Take your family and move to some other country, for the Lord has called down a famine on Israel that will last for seven years.”
2
So the woman took her family and lived in the land of the Philistines for seven years.
3
After the famine ended, she returned to the land of Israel and went to see the king about getting back her house and land.
4
Just as she came in, the king was talking with Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, and saying, “Tell me some stories of the great things Elisha has done.”
5
And Gehazi was telling the king about the time when Elisha brought a little boy back to life. At that very moment, the mother of the boy walked in!
“Oh, sir!” Gehazi exclaimed. “Here is the woman now, and this is her son—the very one Elisha brought back to life!”
6
“Is this true?” the king asked her. And she told him that it was. So he directed one of his officials to see to it that everything she had owned was restored to her, plus the value of any crops that had been harvested during her absence.
7
Afterwards Elisha went to Damascus (the capital of Syria), where King Ben-hadad lay sick. Someone told the king that the prophet had come.
8-9
When the king heard the news, he said to Hazael, “Take a present to the man of God and tell him to ask the Lord whether I will get well again.”
So Hazael took forty camel-loads of the best produce of the land as presents for Elisha and said to him, “Your son Ben-hadad, the king of Syria, has sent me to ask you whether he will recover.”
10
And Elisha replied, “Tell him, ‘Yes.’ But the Lord has shown me that he will surely die!”
11
Elisha stared at Hazael until he became embarrassed, and then Elisha started crying.
12
“What’s the matter, sir?” Hazael asked him.
Elisha replied, “I know the terrible things you will do to the people of Israel: you will burn their forts, kill the young men, dash their babies against the rocks, and rip open the bellies of the pregnant women!”
13
“Am I a dog?” Hazael asked him. “I would
never
do that sort of thing.”
But Elisha replied, “The Lord has shown me that you are going to be the king of Syria.”
14
When Hazael went back, the king asked him, “What did he tell you?”
And Hazael replied, “He told me that you would recover.”
15
But the next day Hazael took a blanket and dipped it in water and held it over the king’s face until he smothered to death. And Hazael became king instead.
16
King Jehoram, the son of King Jehoshaphat of Judah, began his reign during the fifth year of the reign of King Joram of Israel, the son of Ahab.
17
Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for eight years.
18
But he was as wicked as Ahab and the other kings of Israel; he even married one of Ahab’s daughters.
19
Nevertheless, because God had promised his servant David that he would watch over and guide his descendants, he did not destroy Judah.
20
During Jehoram’s reign, the people in Edom revolted from Judah and appointed their own king.
21
King Jehoram
*
tried unsuccessfully to crush the rebellion: he crossed the Jordan River and attacked the city of Zair, but was quickly surrounded by the army of Edom. Under cover of night he broke through their ranks, but his army deserted him and fled.
22
So Edom has maintained its independence to this day. Libnah also rebelled at that time.
23
The rest of the history of King Jehoram is written in
The Annals of the Kings of Judah.
24-25
He died and was buried in the royal cemetery in the City of David—the old section of Jerusalem.
Then his son Ahaziah
*
became the new king during the twelfth year of the reign of King Joram of Israel, the son of Ahab.
26
Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he began to reign, but he reigned only one year in Jerusalem. His mother was Athaliah, the granddaughter of King Omri of Israel.
27
He was an evil king, just as all of King Ahab’s descendants were—for he was related to Ahab by marriage.
28
He joined King Joram of Israel (son of Ahab) in his war against Hazael, the king of Syria, at Ramoth-gilead. King Joram was wounded in the battle,
29
so he went to Jezreel to rest and recover from his wounds. While he was there, King Ahaziah of Judah (son of Jehoram) came to visit him.