The Shunamite Woman Rode to Elisha and Said Only Shalom

The boy was running between the rows when his hands went to his head. The reapers did not hear him at first. The sickles kept their rhythm, the cut barley fell, the heat sat heavy on the field outside Shunem. Then the small voice came again, thinner this time. Head. My head. His father straightened, saw the child swaying among the stalks, and called to a young man to carry him home to his mother.

A Boy Carried Out of the Field

She took him onto her knees. He was warm and then he was warmer, and the warmth was wrong, and by noon the wrongness had won. She held him until the small chest stopped moving and the head she had cradled grew still against her arm. No screaming. No tearing of her dress in the doorway where the neighbors could see. She carried him up the narrow stairs to the room she had built, and she laid him on a bed that was not his.

The room was plain. A bed, a table, a chair, a lamp. She had built it years before, not for her son, but for a stranger. She had watched a holy man pass through her town again and again, moving from one high place to another, and she had told her husband: "let us make a small upper chamber for him, so that when he comes to us he can turn in there." That was all she had wanted. A place for holiness to rest under her roof. She had asked for nothing back.

The Promise She Had Begged Him Not to Make

The prophet had wanted to repay her. He had offered to speak for her to the king or to the commander of the army. She had said: "I live among my own people. I need nothing." Then his servant Gehazi had noticed the obvious: she had no son and her husband was old. Elisha had called her back to the doorway of the room she had built and told her that within a year she would be holding a son.

She had not wanted the promise. "Do not lie to your servant," she said. "Do not give me something I might lose." He gave it anyway, and the child came as he said, and now the child was upstairs on his bed and she had saddled a donkey and told the servant to drive fast and not to slow down unless she told him to.

Gehazi Came First and Failed

Elisha saw her coming from a distance and sent Gehazi ahead to ask whether everything was well. She rode past the question. "Shalom," she said. "Shalom." Everything is fine. She did not stop to explain herself to the servant. She came all the way to the man who had made the promise and then she fell at his feet and held them and said: "did I ask a son of my lord? Did I not say do not mislead me?"

Elisha sent Gehazi ahead with his staff and instructions to lay it on the boy's face. Gehazi went. He laid the staff on the child. Nothing happened. He came back and reported: "the child did not wake." Elisha had already started walking. He walked the whole distance to her house in Shunem himself.

The Room He Had Used Before

He went up and closed the door. The boy was lying on the bed, on the bed where Elisha had slept on his own visits through Shunem, the plain bed in the plain room with the table and the chair and the lamp. He stretched himself over the child, mouth on mouth, eyes on eyes, hands on hands. The child's flesh grew warm. Elisha rose and walked through the house. Then he went back and stretched himself over the child again, and the boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes.

Elisha called Gehazi. Gehazi called the woman. She came to the room and Elisha said: "take your son." She fell at his feet and pressed her face to the ground. Then she took her son and went out.

The Soul That Had Been Here Before

One kabbalistic tradition placed this woman in a much longer story. The soul of Eve, it said, had passed through a chain of righteous women, each one carrying something of what the first woman had lost. First into Sarah, who began the repair. Then into Hannah, who prayed in silence at Shiloh until Eli thought she was drunk. Then into the Shunamite woman who gave the prophet a room and asked for nothing and rode hard when the gift was taken away. The soul moved forward through women who knew how to want something, lose it, and refuse to accept the loss without going all the way to the source.