2 Kings6chapter 6

2 Kings 6:1-2

The sons of the prophets are Elisha's school, grown large enough that their meeting house no longer holds them. Their request to build at Jordan still asks his leave rather than acting alone, and his answer is two words, Go ye. The same open door runs through the whole chapter: whoever comes to Elisha, whether over lost timber or a besieged capital, finds him attending to it.

2 Kings 6:3-4

One of the company presses Elisha to come himself, and he agrees with the same brevity, I will go. A prophet who has raised the dead and multiplied oil at Gehazi's hand does not treat a day cutting beams as beneath him. The text spends two verses on an errand with no miracle in it yet, because the ordinary labor is what sets up the loss that follows.

2 Kings 6:5-7

The axe head is the smallest of Elisha's recorded miracles, iron made to swim rather than a resurrection or a plague answered, and the text is careful to say why it mattered: the tool was borrowed, and a poor man who lost another's iron in the river could not simply replace it. Elisha cuts a stick, casts it in, and the iron rises, an act with nothing spectacular in its staging. The scale of the miracle is itself the point the commentators return to: the power that sent fire from heaven at Carmel also troubles itself with one man's debt.

2 Kings 6:8-10

The king of Syria plans his raids in secret councils, and each time the man of God sends word to the king of Israel of the place to avoid. The title man of God, used of Elisha here and repeatedly through the chapter's first half, is the same office worn by the prophet of 1 Kings 13 and by Elijah before him, a man whose access runs past locked bedchambers and closed camps. The king of Israel is saved not once nor twice, the text's own count of a pattern that will soon draw Syria's suspicion.

2 Kings 6:11-12

Ben-hadad assumes a spy sits inside his own council, until a servant names the true source: Elisha tells the king of Israel the words spoken in the king of Syria's own bedchamber. No human informant is blamed once the servant answers; the prophet's knowledge is treated as a plain fact of the campaign rather than a mystery still needing a solution. The scene sets the king of Syria against an intelligence he cannot bribe or intercept.

2 Kings 6:13-14

Ben-hadad sends to find one man, and learns he is in Dothan, a small town north of Samaria. The force dispatched against him is horses, chariots and a great host, arriving by night to surround the whole city for a single unarmed prophet. The scale answers its own question: a king who cannot out-hear Elisha tries to out-number him instead.

2 Kings 6:15-17

Elisha's servant wakes to an army surrounding the city and asks the question fear always asks first. Elisha answers with the ratio that matters, they that be with us are more than they that be with them, and then prays not for deliverance but for sight, Lord, open his eyes. What the servant sees is a mountain full of horses and chariots of fire, the words that named Elijah's own departure at 2:11, their only other occurrence in Scripture, the unseen army standing guard the whole time the servant could see only the siege.

2 Kings 6:18-20

Elisha prays a second time, now for blindness rather than sight, and the army that came to take one prophet is led wherever he chooses to lead it. He tells the blinded Syrians this is neither the way nor the city, technically true and aimed at his own purpose, and marches the whole host into Samaria before praying a third time to open their eyes. The men who came by night to surround Dothan wake to find themselves standing disarmed in the middle of the enemy capital.

2 Kings 6:21-23

The king of Israel, calling Elisha father as Elisha once called Elijah father at his departure, asks leave to kill a captured army inside his own capital. Elisha refuses on the ground of plain military custom rather than sentiment, wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow, men taken by no weapon of the king's own. He orders a feast instead of an execution, and the text records the result in one line, the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel, mercy accomplishing what the earlier warnings only interrupted.

2 Kings 6:24-25

The mercy of verse 23 buys Israel a season, not permanence. Ben-hadad returns with his full army and lays a formal siege against Samaria rather than a raiding party, and the famine inside the walls is priced in the text itself: an ass's head, an unclean animal not normally eaten, sold for eighty pieces of silver, and a small measure of dove's dung, likely a cheap seed husk by most readings rather than the substance itself, at five. Whatever the exact commodity, the prices mark a siege economy that has run out of anything better to sell.

2 Kings 6:26-27

A woman appeals to the king as he walks the wall, and his first answer names the real source of help correctly before he can act on it, if the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee. The barnfloor and winepress are the ordinary places grain and wine come from in a working land, and both stand empty in a siege, so the king's question is an honest description of a kingdom with nothing left to give, not an evasion of hers.

2 Kings 6:28-29

The king asks what troubles her and hears an agreement between two mothers to eat their own sons in turn, one boiled and eaten already, the second hidden once her turn came. Deuteronomy had named this exact horror as the covenant's own last curse on a besieged and disobedient people, thine eye shall be evil toward the son of thy bosom in the siege and in the straitness wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee. The chapter does not soften the scene or explain it away; it reports the curse of Deuteronomy 28 arriving on schedule inside the city's own walls.

2 Kings 6:30

The king tears his royal robe in public grief, and underneath it the people see sackcloth already worn against his own skin, a penitential garment put on before this one horror ever reached his ears. The hidden sackcloth says the king already knew the city's condition was covenant judgment even while he kept looking for someone else to blame. What he does next shows which way that blame is about to fall.

2 Kings 6:31-33

The king swears an oath to have Elisha's head before the day ends, naming him son of a murderer rather than prophet, laying blame on the man who warned him rather than on the sin that brought the siege. Elisha, sitting with the elders, already knows the messenger is coming and has the door held against him, telling them to listen for the sound of his master's feet close behind, the king following his own errand in person. When the king himself arrives he speaks the chapter's last line, this evil is of the Lord, what should I wait for the Lord any longer, laying the famine at God's door in the same breath he has just laid the prophet's death at his own hand.