Canter Bridge

The miraculous powers ascribed to the prophet Elisha must have flowed perennially rather than permanently. Otherwise, these odd vignettes would take on the qualities of a daily journal entry

Bought bread, made an ax-head float, raised up a dead boy, paid taxes …

Rather, we are meant to envisage a formidable loose cannon who moves about in the sometime company of a guild of prophets and—upon occasion—pulls off a stunning and inexplicable reversal of the natural course of events. In this way, Elisha conforms to the enigmatic and sometimes troublesome profile of the Israelite ‘man of God’.

The narrative paints a picture of a man who could appear heartless. He promises an impossible conception to a childless old couple who asked for no such thing. The child in fact appears but then dies, leaving the woman’s bitter plea—’Did I even ask for a child?—seeming more reasonable than Elisha’s ill-advised decision to leave his landlords a human being as a kind of tenant’s tip.

When faced with problems that run from community-threatening to mildly irritating, he dispenses a magical solution, then moves on with none of the teaching or gentle touch of a later prophet in Galilee who was prone to make tactile contact, to pronounce quiet words of restoration, to teach in the wake of a miracle about a Father far more kind than people imagine.

Elisha offers none of that. He moves quickly, coldly, clinically through these pages, seeming to act even against famine only when circumstances force his hand.

He is the bane of kings, a man with an extraordinary penchant for taking the wrong side or taking no side at all.

The narrative fails altogether to establish his character. There is no depth to this miracle-worker, no texture, no sign of weakness, no humanizing foibles.

Yet God’s power flows through him. A band of prophets gets their dinner after all. A bereaved couple receives back their son from death’s otherwise unyielding grip. A worker recovers his precious axe-head. An Aramaean raiding party sees the lives of its members inexplicably saved.

The narrative all but proclaims that God’s human agents are not the winners of personality or beauty contests. An inscrutable darkness shrouds his choice. His love, at times, flows through the fingers of those who seem incapable of the virtue. We do not often like his angels. They come, act, and are gone. Only new life remains where they’ve been. So we call them ‘men of God’.