2 Kings 4:1-7 describes a miracle in which God provided an amazing amount of oil for a widow who asked Elisha for help. Enough oil was poured into the jugs she collected from her neighbours to allow her to pay off her debts, protect her children from slavery, and live on the rest. God provided for her needs in a miraculous way.
In the miracle at the end of the chapter a small amount of bread fed one hundred people, with some left over too. In this miracle, Elisha foreshadows Jesus’ miraculous feeding of 4000 and 5000 men plus women and children and shows again God’s care and provision for people.
In between these two miracles there are two more. The second is another brief story involving the company of the prophets. One of them had cooked a meal with some unknown wild gourds, and they had made the stew poisonous! The prophets cried out to Elisha who threw some flour into the pot to make it good again. As with the salty spring of water in chapter 2, there is no natural or scientific explanation of how Elisha’s actions had the healing effect – they are clearly miraculous.
2 Kings 4:8-37 tells of Elisha’s dealing with a wealthy woman in a place called Shunem. It’s a longer and more detailed account than the other incidents have been, and well worth reading carefully. The Shunammite woman and her husband offered Elisha hospitality whenever he was in their town, and even built him a guest room (on the roof!). Although they were old, Elisha promised that they would have a son, which they did, despite her scepticism. Unfortunately, when the child was older, he fell ill and died. The woman went to fetch Elisha who came and restored the boy to life.
2 Kings tells the story in much more detail, and a few aspects stand out:
- The woman is the driving force here. Although we might expect this to be a very patriarchal society, this story bucks that trend. At the start, the woman is described as wealthy, and she takes all the initiative – she offers Elisha hospitality (v.8), decides to build him a guest room (v.10), tells her husband to give her a donkey so she can go to Elisha when her son dies (v.22), demands that Elisha himself come when he wants to send only his servant to heal the boy (v.30), and falls at Elisha’s feet in gratitude at the end (v.37). Sometimes, when we read Old Testament accounts carefully, they challenge our assumptions about what is going on.
- There are clear parallels between this chapter and 1 Kings 17 which describes Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. At Elijah’s word, the little oil and flour which the widow had was sufficient to make Elijah a meal and then to last for a long time. When the widow’s son died Elijah miraculously restored him to life. And in these actions, Elijah and Elisha both point forward to Jesus who miraculously provided wine at a wedding, bread on a hillside, and life to some who had died (including a widow’s son).
- In these accounts, the people concerned – the widow whose oil was running out, the Shunammite woman, the company of the prophets – all cried out to the man of God, the prophet Elisha in their need. The gospels and the New Testament make it clear that we can in fact cry out directly to God in our times of need. It is good to be in community with others who know Jesus, but we can all speak to God personally – we don’t have to go through a prophet like Elisha, who seems to have been quite curmudgeonly quite a lot of the time!
In fact, we can cry out with the psalmist:
Why am I so sad?
Why am I so troubled?
I will put my hope in God,
and once again I will praise him,
my saviour and my God.
(from Psalm 42, Good News Version)
Photo by Zhimai Zhang on Unsplash