1 Kings13chapter 13

1 Kings 13:11-13

Now there dwelt an old prophet: An old prophet living at Bethel hears the whole account secondhand from his sons and saddles his ass to catch the man who has already left on foot. Barnes notes that Israelites who kept faith with the Lord after Jeroboam's changes generally left for Jerusalem, so a prophet who stayed at the new center of the calf worship is already a different kind of man than the visitor from Judah. The chase itself is the old prophet's own choice; nothing in the text says he was sent.

The sons had been at the altar that day and watched the man of God leave. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take them for worshippers at Bethel, and they allow that the sons served as priests there. Their father knows the prophecy only from their report.

The old prophet rides out to catch a man with a head start. Donkeys run through the rest of the chapter: one is saddled for the man of God at verse 23, stands beside his body at verse 24, and carries it home at verse 29. Adam Clarke notes that the lion leaves the donkey untouched.

1 Kings 13:14-15

found him sitting under an oak: He finds the man of God resting under an oak and invites him home for bread, the same invitation Jeroboam already made and the man of God already refused. Clarke reads the old prophet's motive as ordinary curiosity about the prophecy just pronounced against Bethel, not malice, and nothing in the narrative before this point contradicts that reading.

Come home with me, and eat: The old prophet makes the same offer the king made at verse 7, a meal at home. The man of God refused the king. Matthew Henry asks whether he had forgotten Deuteronomy 8:3, that man lives on every word from the mouth of the LORD.

1 Kings 13:16-18

I may not return with thee: The man of God repeats to the old prophet the exact refusal he gave the king, bread and water withheld from Bethel by direct charge from the Lord. The old prophet answers with a claim to his own angelic message countermanding it, and the text stops to tell the reader what the man of God is not told: but he lied unto him. Clarke and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both weigh why an established prophet would deceive a stranger over so small a matter, and neither settles it beyond calling it a strange and costly lie.

The charge is spoken three times in the chapter, at verses 9, 17 and 22. It names bread, water, and the way back each time. Albert Barnes holds that a charge given this plainly should have been kept until God gave evidence as strong to release it.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the angel as a messenger and name the messenger as the old prophet's own sons. Adam Clarke notes that the text says outright he was lying. Paul sets the same test at Galatians 1:8, where even an angel who brings a contrary word is to be under a curse.

So he went back with him: He turns back on the strength of another man's claimed revelation and eats the bread he had twice refused. Henry calls the judgments that follow unfathomable, since the deceived man and his deceiver both answer to a Lord who does not explain every dealing in this life. The obedience that survived a king's table falls at a stranger's word.

1 Kings 13:20-22

as they sat at the table: While the two men sit at the meal that broke the charge, the word of the Lord comes on the old prophet, and the sentence he speaks against his guest is the same word he had just contradicted in his own mouth. Keil and the bench read the case as obedience to a direct, personal word admitting no second revision, even one claiming a fresh angelic message, so the man of God is judged for trusting a report over the command he already had. The false prophet who lied speaks true judgment in the same breath, and the text names the irony without resolving it.

Albert Barnes notes that the man of God broke a plain command of God, the same sin Jeroboam committed with his calves and his feast. The judgment on him puts that sin before all Bethel. Matthew Henry names it in one word, disobedience.

Burial with one's fathers was the hope of every Israelite. This sentence takes it away, and Adam Clarke reads it as a warning of an early death. John Gill notes the fulfillment: verse 30 lays him in the old prophet's own tomb.

1 Kings 13:23-25

after he had eaten bread, and after he had drunk: The old prophet saddles the ass for his guest but does not ride with him, and Wesley reads the omission as a guilty conscience unwilling to share the road with a man now under sentence. A lion kills him on the way and then behaves against its nature, neither dragging off the body nor touching the ass standing beside it, and travelers report the scene exactly as they find it. Clarke calls the restraint itself the visible hand of God, a judgment stopped precisely at death and carried no further.

Adam Clarke reads the death of the man of God as a sin unto death in the sense of 1 John 5:16, the body killed on the road and the soul spared. Gregory the Dialogist held that a hard end may purge a small sin in one of God's servants. The lion kept to its commission.

Travelers saw the scene and carried the news into the city where the old prophet lived. Matthew Henry reads the death as serving the glory of God, and the report made it public. Bethel heard it.

It is the man of God: Word reaches the old prophet at Bethel before he goes to see for himself, and he reads the death correctly on a report alone: this is the man of God, disobedient to the word of the Lord, delivered to the lion by that same word. He states the theology of the judgment without yet naming his own part in causing the disobedience he condemns.

1 Kings 13:27-28

And he spake to his sons, saying: The old prophet rides out himself now and finds the tableau standing exactly as reported, carcase, ass and lion together in the road. The lion had not eaten the carcase, nor torn the ass, the same restraint Clarke already called preternatural, and Keil reads the standing lion and the untouched ass together as visible proof that the beast acted under commission rather than hunger.

The same judgment falls again at 20:36, where a man who refuses a prophet's word is killed by a lion. Adam Clarke sees the lion and the donkey standing guard over the fallen prophet. The body was kept for burial.

1 Kings 13:29-30

took up the carcase of the man of God: The old prophet lifts the body himself, carries it home on the ass, and buries it in his own grave, the funeral rites of a man mourning someone he calls brother though they met only once. Gill notes the man of God could not lie in his fathers' sepulchre as the sentence required, since he died far from Judah, so the old prophet's own grave becomes the only honor left to give him. The lament, Alas, my brother, is the ordinary funeral cry of the period, the same form Jeremiah later uses at 22:18.

John Gill and Adam Clarke both point to Jeremiah 22:18, where the same cry over a dead brother is withheld from Jehoiakim. Clarke reads the grief of the old prophet as partly for his own part in the death of the man of God. The prophet who lied to him now mourns him.

1 Kings 13:31-32

lay my bones beside his bones: The old prophet asks to be buried in the same grave, and Henry reads his reason as plainly stated: what the man of God cried against Bethel's altar will surely come to pass, and he wants his own bones lying where they will be safe when it does. Three centuries later at 2 Ki 23:16-18, Josiah burns the bones of Bethel's priests on that same altar and, seeing the marker, spares this one grave by name, both men's bones inside it. The old prophet's request outlives his lie and secures what his disobedient guest's own obedience could not.

the cities of Samaria: Samaria was built later by Omri, who bought the hill from Shemer at 16:24. Adam Clarke and John Wesley both note that the writer uses the name the kingdom of Israel bore in his own day. The old prophet trusted the word against the altar in Bethel.

1 Kings 13:33-34

returned not from his evil way: After a withered hand restored, an altar split by sign, and a fellow prophet struck dead for one broken command, Jeroboam returned not from his evil way. He goes on consecrating priests from whoever will take the office, no regard to lineage, and Wesley notes he did not abate so much as a circumstance of the worship the whole chapter has just answered with three separate signs. The chapter's last verse names the wages plainly: this thing became sin unto the house of Jeroboam, marked for its own cutting off.

Jeroboam does not repent of his evil ways. Adam Clarke calls the refusal obstinate after the sign at Bethel and the miracles that confirmed it. Albert Barnes reads anyone who desired to be a priest as a priesthood open to all, whatever their birth or character.

Jeroboam made priests for the high places to keep the kingdom in his house, and Matthew Henry notes that they cut his house off. John Gill observes that the next event is the illness of Jeroboam's son. Chapter 14 opens with it.