As regards the children thing, the wikion Elisha talks about the hebrew na’arim, suggesting unequivocally that it probably refers to youngsters, possibly as old as into their 30s or 40s.
[QUOTE=wiki article on Elisha, footnote 14 commenting on “Youths”]
Hebrew na’ar, translated “youths” in the New International Version. Jewish Encyclopedia on Elisha states, “The offenders were not children, but were called so (“ne’arim”) because they lacked (“meno’arin”) all religion (Soṭah 46b).” Although the Authorized King James Version used the words “little children”, John Gill stated in his Exposition of the Bible that the word was “used of persons of thirty or forty years of age”
[/QUOTE]
Huh. I’ve always just thought that all the miracles were just to show how badass Elisha was. Maybe that’s because that’s the reason the Gospels list Jesus’s miracles, and so I’m biased. But it seems to me that Elisha and Elijah are almost mythical figures in Judaism. Moses, too. Though, oddly, not Abraham–he never does anything miraculous.
It’s certainly possible. Tell me, what’s implausible about the noise and actions of a group of teenagers (or kids) attracting the attention of a wild animal?
I watch the animal channel. From that I gather that bears usually attack smaller groups of people (1-2) and usually only when startled or protecting a cub or something, and never have I heard of them attacking in pairs. And catching 42 children? I’d expect the kids to scatter. So I think that makes it pretty implausible.
Do you think the bears really attacked because Elisha cursed the children?
“Did it really happen?” is not the point of Bible study. “What does it mean?” or “What can we learn from it?” or “What was the author trying to say?” are examples of study questions.
That is definitely not what you have done in this thread so far, but let’s explore that route-Which do you think it is, and why? If it is allegorical, what message do you think the story is trying to make?
Several people have shared what they think the point of the story is, and there was an interesting side conversation on the translation of “young boys.”
Why do you think “did it really” happen is important? How should our interpretation of the story be different if it “really happened” versus it being a myth that developed as part of the Elisha story?
With the caveat that many ancient peoples didn’t really mark the same distinction between fiction and non-fiction that we do (I mean, they had distinctions near and around it, but not really the same distinction, since they thought nothing at all of mixing known apocryphal tales with known factual tales into a single work without distinction), I’m willing to affirm that, by my own contemporary categories, every narrative word of the bible is fiction. Probably the closest analogue to my own categories would be: Historical fiction.
Archaeologists 50,000 years from now, after the great nuclear apocalypse, may watch the Tudors and try to puzzle over what in it is factual and what in it is there just to tell a good story. We’re in a similar situation w.r.t. the biblical narratives. And some of those archaeologists (but not all the good ones) will focus more on the meaning of the series for its audience, rather than for what it tells anyone about real history. That’s analogous to one liberal Christian approach to the biblical narratives. (Together with a conviction that there is something vitally important and good to be found in those narratives. The future archaeologists are unlikely to have that impression about the Tudors of course…)
