Elisha Fed a Widow, Blinded an Army, and Predicted a Stampede

He had watched Elijah taken up in a chariot of fire and caught the falling mantle. That was his credential. From that moment forward, Elisha the son of Shaphat carried the spirit of Elijah's prophetic office, but the miracles that came through him were stranger, more varied, and sometimes more unsettling than anything his master had done. Elijah had called fire from heaven. Elisha would multiply oil in a widow's house, walk a blinded army through the streets of Samaria, and announce the exact price of flour in a besieged city the day before the siege collapsed.

Josephus records the sequence of Elisha's works in Antiquities of the Jews, completed around 93 CE, and the catalogue is dense with specific detail. Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (1909-1938) draws on the full midrashic tradition surrounding each episode, and between the two sources a picture emerges of a prophet whose power was most visible precisely where human resources had completely run out.

The Widow's Oil That Would Not Stop

A woman came to Elisha in desperation. Her husband had been Obadiah, the steward of King Ahab, the man who had hidden a hundred prophets in caves during Jezebel's massacres and fed them at his own expense. He had borrowed to do it, and now he was dead, and the creditors were coming to take her two sons as debt-slaves. Everything she owned could be summed up in a single phrase: one small cruse of oil.

Elisha's instructions were practical and precise. Go borrow every empty vessel you can find from all your neighbors. Not a few -- as many as possible. Come home, shut the door, and begin pouring the oil from your cruse into the vessels. She did it. The oil ran from the small cruse into vessel after vessel and did not stop until the last vessel was full. Then it stopped. Sell the oil, Elisha told her. Pay your debts. Live on the rest (2 Kings 4:1-7). The Midrash Rabbah (5th century CE) notes that the quantity of oil produced was proportionate to the faith that had driven her to borrow the vessels -- the more vessels she had gathered, the more oil she would have received. The limiting factor was not divine generosity but human initiative.

How Do You March a Blinded Army Into the Heart of an Enemy City?

The Syrian king Benhadad had been setting ambushes for the Israelite forces, and every ambush had failed because Elisha knew where they were being laid and warned King Joram in advance. Benhadad's officers eventually told him the problem: there is a prophet in Israel named Elisha who tells the king of Israel the words you speak in your own bedroom. Benhadad's solution was to send an army to Dothan, where Elisha was staying, and surround the city overnight.

Elisha's servant woke at dawn, went out, and saw horses and chariots encircling the entire city. He came to Elisha in panic: what shall we do? Elisha told him not to be afraid, and prayed that God would open the servant's eyes. The servant looked again and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire surrounding the Syrians who had surrounded them (2 Kings 6:17). Then Elisha prayed the opposite prayer: blind this army. The Syrian soldiers were struck with a disorientation the text calls sanverim, the same word used for the men who assailed Lot's house in Sodom. Elisha walked calmly into the middle of the blinded force and told them he would lead them to the man they were looking for. He marched them all the way to Samaria, the Israelite capital, and into the middle of the city before praying that their sight be restored.

When the Syrians opened their eyes, they were surrounded by Joram's army. The king asked Elisha whether he should slaughter them. Elisha refused. Feed them, he said. Give them food and water, then send them home. The Ginzberg tradition records that the act of feeding enemy soldiers accomplished what military victory had not: the Syrian raiding parties stopped coming into the land of Israel for a time. The demonstration that Israelite prophetic power was precise and controlled -- that it could have destroyed the army and chose not to -- proved more effective as deterrence than any battle could have been.

The Siege That Should Have Been Impossible to Break

The deterrence did not last. Benhadad eventually besieged Samaria so completely that the city was reduced to eating what would normally be considered refuse. An ass's head sold for eighty pieces of silver. A measure of dove's dung sold for five pieces. And the situation was worse than the prices suggested: women were eating their own children (2 Kings 6:28-29). King Joram, wearing sackcloth under his royal robes, blamed Elisha for not praying the siege away and sent a messenger to execute him.

Elisha received the messenger before he arrived. He told the elders with him: the king is sending someone to remove my head. When he comes, hold the door shut -- the king himself will follow close behind. When Joram appeared, still wrapped in grief and fury, Elisha made a prediction that sounded insane from inside a starving city: by tomorrow at this hour, a seah of fine flour would sell for one shekel in the gate of Samaria. A seah was enough to feed several families. One shekel was nothing. A military officer standing at Joram's shoulder said aloud what everyone was thinking: if God himself opened windows in the sky and poured grain down from heaven, such a thing could not happen. Elisha told him: you will see it with your own eyes, but you will not eat of it.

Four Lepers and an Empty Camp

That same evening, four lepers sat at the gate of Samaria, excluded from the city by their condition. They reasoned with each other in the dark: if we stay here, we die of starvation; if we go into the city, we die there too; if we go to the Syrian camp and surrender, either they kill us or they let us live -- either way it cannot be worse than this. They walked to the Syrian camp at twilight and found it empty.

God had made the Syrians hear the sound of a vast army approaching -- chariots, horses, a force that could only be the kings of the Hittites and the Egyptians coming to relieve Samaria. They had panicked and fled, leaving tents full of silver, gold, food, horses, and donkeys, everything abandoned in the dark (2 Kings 7:6-7). The four lepers ate and drank and carried off silver and clothing and hid it, then returned to the city gate with the news. The people stampeded out to plunder the abandoned camp. The military officer who had scoffed at Elisha's prediction was posted at the gate to maintain order during the rush. The crowd trampled him to death in the surge. He saw the plenty. He did not eat of it. The prophecy had been complete in every detail.