Nice post Captain! (Although I think you meant Elisha, not Elijah, in #7 and #8). I think it makes sense that the purpose of the author/redactor of 2 Kings was trying to ‘prove’ show that Elisha was the legitimate heir of Elijah. Nobody at the time in Judah would have been bothered by the deaths of a bunch of hooligans from the idol-worshipping city of Bethel.
Uh, no, this sounds worse than the point I made of now having widows and very little kids now becoming orphans at the end of the bear attack.
Now the “best” explanation you have is yet again another riff on justifying genocide, worse still indeed.
I have to say if this was a different subject I could tell you guys to stop digging, but the information is interesting anyhow.
Compare and contrast: there’s another Bible verse where the Ark of the Covenant is about to tip off the wagon carrying it. A guy puts out his hand to steady it, so it won’t fall to the ground. The guy is punished. (If memory serves, he dies of a loathesome disease.) 2 Samuel 6:1 ff.
The lesson is that we can’t apply our moral systems. What we think of as right and wrong are not what God thinks of as right and wrong. (The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was, apparently, not fully digested.)
It’s a way of emphasizing the authority of the priests. The individual citizens of the time must not be allowed to be confident in their own moral judgements, but are to be dependent on the priests to interpret the law. If every man can know right from wrong, the priests’ role would be lessened. Thus, parables that make God’s will seem hard to fathom.
I do have to add that Isaac Watts wrote a children’s song about this very event. This is found in his Divine Songs for children, published in 1715:
SONG 18. Against scoffing and calling Names.
I. Our tongues were made to bless the Lord,
And not speak ill of men;
When others give a railing word,
We must not rail again.
II. Cross words and angry names require
To be chastis’d at school;
And he’s in danger of hell-fire
That calls his brother fool.
III. But lips that dare be so profane,
To mock and jeer and scoff,
At holy things or holy men,
The Lord shall cut them off.
IV. When children in their wanton play
Serv’d old Elisha so;
And bid the prophet go his way,
‘Go up, thou bald-head, go:’
V. God quickly stop’d their wicked breath,
And sent two raging bears,
That tore them limb from limb to death,
With blood, and groans, and tears.
VI. Great God, how terrible art thou
To sinners e’er so young;
Grant me thy grace, and teach me how
To tame and rule my tongue.
I think the story reflects the twisted mind of the ancient writer, nothing more.
What’s interesting to me are two defenses given:
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That children are expected to honor their parents (and by extension, apparently all old people) according to commandment and failure to do this was punishable by death. The children in the story had it coming, in accordance to God’s law.
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That they weren’t children at all, but in fact fully grown adults, aged 30-40. Where is it in God’s law that mandates the death penalty for mocking someone for baldness? Or is it that the “honor all old people, not merely your parents” clause applies to anyone, children or adults? By the way, how old was Elisha when this happened? Oh, as a prophet, was a he metaphorical old person? (Genuinely not sure about that bit.)
But in the end I agree that, if this was supposedly not disproportionate for the times (which, if true, why would it be worth noting at all?) all it does is provide yet another datum for how irrelevant and useless the Bible is for moral teaching in any remotely civilized society.
Gotta just love the casual acceptance of death as the penalty for making fun of someone just for being bald.
Way to go Bible!
Never happened. The author lacks even a basic understanding of how bears behave in the wild.
Bears are godless killing machines. They would never kill on command from the LORD or his prophets.
Yes, I would say so, there is no justification for it with the explanations I’ve seen so far, and only seem to dig themselves a bigger hole. They should just put down the shovel, and recognize it for the cruelty and injustice that many of these stories bring, but I doubt they will.
Stories such as the OP’s, and this one of yours is typical of the kind of biblical justice handed out through a good portion of it though, there are many examples. One is when Noah gets overly indulgent and partakes in wine, gets drunk, Ham walks in on him, and “uncovers his nakedness”, Noah awakes from his wine and realizes what Ham had done unto him, and immediately curses Canaan (one of Ham’s four sons) and all future generations, but not Ham! (Gen 9:20-25)
It took me some twenty years after first reading of this as a young man before I finally read from scholarly sources to find out what most likely happened, and what the euphemism “uncovers his nakedness” and “saw his nakedness” more than likely meant, along with the Hebrew words used, but it still doesn’t justify cursing Canaan and future generations.
I thought this was a “bible study”, not a “bible justification”. The point of a bible study isn’t to find reasons the text is “moral” or justify the behavior described in the text, but to study the text for what it says and means, and try to figure out why the author used the language he used or described the events he described.
I don’t think anyone in this thread thinks that bears mauling kids is a good thing. But if the author of 2nd Kings (or the redactor) includes a story that has Elisha making bears maul kids, he did so for a reason, and his audience would have understood the events in a certain context. It’s not, ‘God killed kids. Hooray God!’. It’s ‘Why did the author/redactor of Kings decide to tell a story where God kills kids, and what does that tell us about ancient Israelite society, views of the Prophet Elisha and the passing of the prophetic society, and their conception of God?’.
In other words, are we studying or bashing?
I think the OP is just trying to show that the Bible and God are suspect because of stories like this.
It’s kind of a lame and amateurish effort at a zinger since anyone who engages in Bible study has typically long since made accommodation one way or the other for these sorts of stories.
But Kable, if you are just looking for zingers about the brutality of the God of the OT (or his followers), read Joshua.
The conquering Jews were commanded by God to slaughter wholesale. Man, woman, child, beast. According to the book of Joshua, they did so in obedience to God.
Makes Muslims and Crusaders look like pikers.
But it’s not “Bible study” to present the Elisha story just to get your zinger in. It’s amateur “gotcha” hour.
“I came here for an argument.”
“No you didn’t.”
When I read of such atrocities occurring on a regular basis, and I find apologists saying they can’t really defend such actions, but still trying to find some lesson to be learned, some moral that might be gained, or try to lessen the crime, and that they were actually young men, not children, or saying the lesson to be learned is that you shouldn’t mock men of god, or that the young children or young men were actually hooligans from another land, or that it was a different time back then, that sounds like one is trying to still justify it to me.
You say it’s about finding a reason why certain events took place. Well, many are trying to find that out, and reasons often are justified, and other times they are not, and I doubt any would change my mind on this story, but I’m reading all of the posts to see if any can justify it. I know this isn’t your concern, but it is of mine.
If we want to study the texts and try to figure out the author’s intent, look into the cultural context, examine language and translation questions, and figure out what the story meant to the people it was aimed at - let’s continue.
If this thread is going to be “this is just more evidence that your God is stupid,” well, this endeavor is pointless. Nobody is “defending” the text - we’re trying to understand it.
Not a disease; Uzzah is simply struck down dead immediately. This is a reminder about the holiness of the Ark; it was supposed to be carried on poles not on a wagon and no one was allowed to touch it. But if we want to talk about a different text (this or the Noah/Ham story) we should put it in a different thread.
Maybe that’s the disconnect here. Those of us taking this seriously are not arguing whether or not the events took place at all. Personally I don’t believe God sent a she-bear to kill 42 youths. But what I want to know is, why did the author say that God did that? Whether the attack actually happened, or it’s a made up myth, what’s the purpose of it being attached to the Elisha story?
Nothing justifies a slaughter like that. What I am interested to know, is would the original hearers of the story have the same reaction? Why was this myth included in the Elisha story? What’s the message that the author was trying to convey? Maybe he thought the kids deserved it. If I say “from the cultural perspective of the time, everyone would have understood that the kids deserved to get mauled” I am not defending the mauling. I still recognize it as brutal.
The story is obvious behaviour-modification mythology/folktale.
While it rankles modern sensibilities no end, “object lessons” in which kids are shown facing a gruesomely exaggerated fate for misbehaving are, in fact, very common, and you don’t need to look as far back as the Bible to find them.
For example: Hoffmann - Struwwelpeter
Personal favorite: little suck-a-thumb.
Read this story to a kid, he’ll never suck his thumb again, but he’ll have lots of fun stuff to tell his psychiatrist when he grows up … :eek:
In realty, I suspect kids can tell very well that this stuff isn’t meant literally, but as figurative exaggeration for effect. Suck your thumb, and a lunatic will cut your thumbs off. Mock bald-headed elders, get eaten by bears. The only significance to the latter, is that it got imbedded in the Bible.
I imagine it would be possible to make a movie that included a scene depicting this incident, where I would be shocked and horrified at witnessing the grisly (no pun intended) deaths of all those youths. But it would also be possible to make an action movie where I’d watch the bear attack scene and think “That was awesome!” Or a movie (or better yet, a South Park-style cartoon) where the bear attack scene would cause me to laugh my ass off.
And I wonder which, if any, of these responses is anywhere close to the way the original audience would have reacted to the story.
I’d enjoy the humor in it too, especially if South Park got a hold of it. Monty Python occasionally does biblical stories, I wish there were a lot more.
Having a graphic movie portray this scene, much in the way Mel Gibson did his movie, I bet one thing is for sure, parents probably wouldn’t be having any discipline problems with their kids for a very long time.
The outrage I find in the story is that 42 were killed. I would have perfectly understood if there were only a dozen or two sacrificed, maybe even go up to 29 to teach these young punks a very valuable lesson about respecting holy men, but 30 and above is where I draw the line. That was uncalled for.
Little tangents will occur in any thread, and these other biblical stories were very briefly mentioned, and are certainly appropriate to compare and contrast, without making the entire thread about it, and which wasn’t done.
I believe your first post in this thread was:
Is that still your position? If so, I believe we agree that that seems to be the lesson the bible is trying to teach. It’s not a very good lesson though, and nobody should think such a god or prophet that does such dastardly deeds is worthy of respect. It seems simply a fear ploy, not one earned from love and understanding.
But as you say, some religious folk take these stories very seriously, and may or may not even consider them as tales, but still have great reverence for them even in tale form. I personally enjoy and admire some of the stories, and sometimes it’s often not the same as a believer would see it, and I will often find humor in it where it wasn’t intended; I’m thinking mostly of stories such as these where Jehovah and his biblical justice often reads like a parody.
So maybe some of the conflict often is when a religious person wants far more reverence in these stories than what an unbeliever is willing to allow for themselves.
Yes, we agree to this point.
Here, you’ve moved beyond the meaning of the text to making a value judgment. “It’s not a very good lesson” is not a scholarly statement; it’s a personal opinion. We could find people (probably not in this thread) who think it is a good lesson. “Nobody should think such a god … worthy of respect” is the same kind of thing.
All that being said; as a believer I have a personal response to the text that is equally out of place in this type of thread.