2 Kings 4 explained: Elisha Helps People in Desperate Need

A widow's oil (vv. 1-7)

Under the debt customs of the time, a creditor could take a dead man's children as servants until the debt was worked off, so this widow was about to lose her sons. Elisha uses the one small jar of oil she has, and it keeps flowing until every borrowed jar is full, enough to clear the debt and live on.

A generous woman's reward (vv. 8-17)

A wealthy woman in the town of Shunem prepares a small guest room for Elisha, and when he offers to speak for her to the king she says she is secure among her own people. Learning she has no son and an old husband, he promises her a child, which she can hardly bear to hope for.

The boy dies (vv. 18-28)

Years later the boy cries out about his head while out in the fields, is carried to his mother, and dies on her lap at noon; some suggest sunstroke, but the text does not say. She lays him on the prophet's bed, gives her husband no explanation, and rides hard to Elisha, where her grief pours out: she never asked for this son.

The staff fails (vv. 29-31)

Elisha sends his servant Gehazi running with his staff, with orders to greet no one on the way, which shows the urgency. The staff does nothing, and interpreters differ on why Elisha tried it at all, but the mother refuses to leave without the prophet himself.

The boy lives again (vv. 32-37)

Elisha shuts the door, prays, and stretches himself over the boy, much as the earlier prophet Elijah once did for a widow's son. The child warms, sneezes seven times and opens his eyes, and his mother bows at Elisha's feet before taking him home.

Poison stew and shared bread (vv. 38-44)

In a famine, wild gourds, probably a bitter and poisonous kind, make the prophets' stew dangerous to eat, until Elisha puts flour into the pot and it is safe. Then a gift of twenty barley loaves, the first of the harvest, feeds a hundred men with some left over, a scene Christians later read alongside Jesus feeding crowds.

Key verse: 2 Kings 4:44

Something to think about

The mother in Shunem says, in effect, "I never asked for this child, so why give him only to take him away?" Is losing something you never dared to hope for harder than losing something you long wanted?