[Dialogue] 11/04/10, Spong: Elijah and Elisha--Unforgettable Biblical Characters

Thu Nov 4 16:03:13 CDT 2010

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Bishop Spong's November Schedule
(Please see Event Calendar for details) 
11/6: Call to Action National Conference, Milwaukee, WI
11/7: Trinity United Church of Christ, Brookfield, WI
11/13 & 11/14: Unity of the Valley, Eugene, OR

Thursday November 04, 2010 

Elijah and Elisha – Unforgettable Biblical Characters

While going through past columns in my series on the origins of the Bible this fall in preparation for their publication next year by Harper Collins under the title Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, I came to a startling realization. I had, in my unit on the rise of the prophets in Israel, moved from Nathan, whom I regard as the founder of the role of the prophets, directly to the writing prophets who run from Isaiah to Malachi. This means that I skipped with little or no notice over two of the most colorful figures in Jewish history, Elijah and Elisha. So huge was this omission that I felt an immediate need to complete my story by focusing on these two figures who exercised in the ninth century BCE such wide authority on the Jewish and, therefore, the biblical story. He nce this is a somewhat out-of-sequence but, I hope valuable, column.
The stories of Elijah and Elisha are found in the Bible between I Kings 17, where Elijah suddenly arises in the text, and II Kings 13, where Elisha makes his final appearance and his death is recorded. Contained in these chapters are some of the most dramatic narratives in the entire Bible. While these two figures were on the center stage of Jewish history, they dominated the biblical story in very dramatic ways. I and II Kings record their adventures in a manner that is both fanciful and sometimes even farcical, but always entertaining. Both of these figures also play important roles in the development of the Christian story, causing much of the New Testament to be non-sensical if we do not understand that Elijah and Elisha are lurking in the background. First, Elijah was identified as the one who would herald the coming of the messiah, so he figures prominently in the early gospel portrait of John the Baptist. Mark, for example, the writer who first introduces John th e Baptist in the Christian tradition, presents John in Elijah's clothing, has him fed with Elijah's diet and locates him in Elijah's wilderness. Second, in some other parts of the tradition, the messiah was himself said to be a new and greater Elijah and so the story of Elijah, and to a lesser degree Elisha, shapes the content of the Jesus story, particularly in the gospel of Luke. Let me now lift both of these personalities out of the biblical story so that we might examine them closely.
Elijah was called a Tishbite because he hailed from Tishbe in Gilead, an area east of the Jordan River in the land called Israel. His emergence into the Jewish story is very dramatic. There was a drought throughout all the land. Elijah seems to have predicted this drought to King Ahab of the Northern Kingdom, the husband of Queen Jezebel, and thus it appears that he was assumed to have been responsible for it. Thus with a price on his head he flees in fear into a hiding place, first to a hiding place by the Brook Cherith in the desert. He is clearly portrayed as being a very special person for it was said of him that God provided for his needs by having the ravens bring him bread to eat during the drought's resultant famine. When the waters of the Brook Cherith later dried up, he went further east to Zarephath where he had his first dramatic encounter with a widow, who was the mother of an only son. Elijah asked this widow for water and a meal cake but she replied tha t she was down to her last bit of flour and oil and her plan was to use her meager supplies to make a final meal for herself and her son before they both died in the famine. Elijah assured her that if she did as he requested her supply of flour and oil would never run out. Here we find a regularly recurring biblical theme involving a miraculous feeding in which the food supply seems to expand endlessly. This theme, found first in the Moses story of manna from heaven, will also appear in the Elisha story and will make a dramatic reappearance in the New Testament, where Jesus is said to have taken five loaves and two fishes and they keep expanding until the multitude of thousands is fed. Later in the story, the son of this same widow dies and Elijah is said to have raised him back to life. This is the first biblical story in which one person raises another from the dead. Later, however, Elisha will also raise someone, this time a child, from the dead. Both of these stor ies will later, in slightly heightened forms will be retold about Jesus of Nazareth in the Synoptic Gospels. This is another example in which the idea of miracles being recycled in the Bible becomes apparent. 
In the tradition of Nathan, the prophet whom we met when he confronted David, Elijah will now confront King Ahab time after time, winning for himself from Ahab the title of "the troubler of Israel." The issue between the prophet and the king was whether or not the worship of Baal and Asherah, gods of the fertility cult of the Canaanites, which still exercised great influence in the land and was clearly supported by Queen Jezebel, could live side by side with the God Yahweh, worshiped by the faithful prophet Elijah. Elijah challenged the priests of Baal and Asherah to a duel on Mt. Carmel. Four hundred priests of Baal and four hundred and fifty priests of Asherah were lined up against the solitary and quite heroic figure of Elijah. The contest was to determine which God would respond to the prayers requesting fire from heaven to burn up the sacrificed bull. The priests of Baal and Asherah went first, dancing, chanting and even cutting themselves in pleas to their deities , but to no avail. The fire from heaven never came. Elijah, who must have had a hair shirt of a personality, taunted them from the sidelines with suggestions that perhaps their God were asleep until finally it became his turn to call on his God. Then he poured barrels of water over his altar and the sacrificed animal until the water filled the ditch around his altar, which surely heightened the power of the miracle. One wag, trying to account for the supernatural elements of this story, suggested that while it looked like water that he was pouring, it was really natural gas! Then Elijah called down the fire of God and it came devouring the sacrifice with flames and licking up all the water around the altar. Elijah, clearly the winner in this contest, was not gracious in his victory. He proceeded to cut off the heads of all the "false" priests with his sword and thus he moved quickly to purify the worship of Israel. Calling down fire from heaven appears to be something Elijah could do easily, for he repeated this miracle on two other occasions in the biblical narrative.
The story of Elijah's ascension into heaven at the end of his life is also a very dramatic story, involving a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses and a God-sent whirlwind for propulsion into the sky, all of which we will see later when Luke incorporates these details into his narrative of the ascension of Jesus.
Elijah's hand-picked successor, Elisha, comes next to the Bible's center stage and we watch as many of the stories in the Jewish tradition, including the stories of Elijah, are now replicated in the Elisha cycle. Miracles are in fact deemed to be recyclable in the Bible. Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Elisha all seem to be able to split a body of water so that each can walk through on dry land. Elisha, like Elijah, has other less admirable qualities. In a fit of anger about being called "bald headed" by some little children, he causes two she bears to come out of the woods to devour them. He appears able to cause an axe head to float on the top of a river so that it could be found. He, like Elijah, can raise the dead and, in addition, can cure foreigners of leprosy by having them wash in the Jordan River. Like Moses and Elijah before him, he had power over the weather and used it to punish the Jews for their sinfulness, especially the unfaithfulness of the king. Elisha wa s said to be able to cause a barren woman to conceive and this power, reminiscent of the earlier narratives of the births of both Samson and Samuel, will reappear in the gospel stories as background to the virgin birth of Jesus.
Yes, these Elijah-Elisha stories are filled with miracles, magic, fantasy and folk lore, all built on what was probably a mere germ of history. They clearly establish the prophet's role in Israel to be that of speaking with authority in the citadels of political power. These stories demonstrate again and again that no one, not even the king, can escape the moral law of God!
Elijah and Elisha flow together in the Bible so that it is hard to keep them separate. Even things commanded for Elijah to do are sometimes completed in the life of Elisha and sometimes even later in Jewish history. It seems obvious that Queen Jezebel's vow to remove Elijah's head, as he had done to her priests of Baal at Mount Carmel, finally gets its fulfillment when another queen named Herodias, the wife of King Herod, has John the Baptist's head removed. As the later gospel of Luke makes clear, many of the themes that he developed in his portrait of Jesus were merely the retelling of Elijah stories magnified and reused to apply to Jesus.
These two figures, Elijah and Elisha, are deeply emblazoned in Jewish history and they form a bridge to the writing prophets of the eighth century and beyond, who help to turn the religion of the Jews from the worship of a tribal deity, who is somewhat vindictive and blood thirsty, into a universal presence incorporating into the divine identity a new sense of oneness, the meaning of a transfiguring love, a searing sense of divine justice and ultimately evolving into the creation of` a deity who turns away from the external requirements and begins to assert that worship means how one lives one's life, not how one practices liturgy.
As I roamed once again over the passages of the Bible that contain the stories of Elijah and Elisha, I saw anew just how deeply interdependent the Jewish-Christian story is, how none of it can be viewed literally and how the Hebrew people believed that the divine qualities they attributed to God showed up generation after generation in the lives of the prophets. God's eternity was thus viewed and experienced in that this divine power to control nature, to command fire, to expand the food supply and even to raise one to new life are constant themes.
Elijah shows up once more in the Synoptic Gospels when he appears with Moses and the two of them talk with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. That was the gospel writer's way of saying that to understand Jesus you must read the Hebrew Scriptures. That is true! 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

George Kuhlman from Athens, Georgia, writes: 
Our book group is reading "The First Paul" by Borg and Crossan. Their explanation of Paul's "illness/burden" as malaria seems probable. The symptoms of malaria with its periods of fever and headaches certainly could place limits on Paul that he would like to be rid of. What do you think of that possibility and their arguments for it?

Dear George, 
Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan are brilliant New Testament scholars and I think you might do well to pay close attention to any theory that they present. They are also good friends and admired colleagues and I have read most everything they have written, both individually and together. 
Over the years, many theories have been offered to explain Paul's mysterious "thorn in the flesh," which he prays for God to remove. Paul's assumption is that this is something akin to a chronic and non–curable affliction. Among these various theories offered through the ages are such things as a chronic draining eye affliction, epilepsy, malaria and a deeply feared and repressed homosexuality. 
In my book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, I speculated that a deeply feared and repressed homosexuality was the reality to which Paul referred. I went through the writings of Paul to gather the autobiographical evidence that Paul himself seems to provide. He argues in Romans that the attraction of a person to his own gender was punishment for not worshiping God properly. In other parts of the genuine Pauline corpus, he goes to great pains to demonstrate that he had made a lifetime effort to be one who worships properly. With all his heart Paul tried to be faithful to the traditions of his "Fathers." I cited his own writings to portray him as a deeply conflicted human being. His body, he said, did not follow the law of his mind. I noted that Pau l never married, that he was filled with a sense of self–loathing, quoting such things as his cry: "O, wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death." I looked at his transformation in which he says that now, nothing, not even my own nakedness, which I interpret to mean not even the secrets of my own body, when fully exposed, can separate me from the love of God that he has met in Christ Jesus. 
Repressed homosexuality in a world that thought that to be a homosexual was to be evil, seems to me to fit all the data better than malaria or any other malady. Am I certain? No, my suggestion is a theory just like Marcus and Dom's suggestion of malaria is a theory. We will never know for sure until we interview Paul in the Kingdom of heaven. Until then I recommend that each of us listen to and consider all of the theories that are abroad, examine the evidence that is available and come to the conclusion that best fits the evidence. I do not believe that salvation depends on any of us having everything correct. 

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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