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eBook details

• Title: Elisha's Deceptive Prophecy in 2 Kings 3: a Response to Raymond Westbrook (Critical Notes)
• Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
• Release Date : January 22, 2007
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 185 KB

Description

In a recent issue of JBL, Raymond Westbrook contributed a constructive note on the notoriously difficult to interpret story of Jehoram's unsuccessful military campaign in 2 Kings 3. (1) Westbrook is somewhat inconsistent, however, when he argues that Elisha did not "offer a deliberately false prophecy" and then describes the prophet's oracle as "the deceptively worded prediction" (pp. 531-32). His thesis is that Elisha's prophecy was, strictly speaking, true--not false--even though Elisha was intentionally misleading. In any case, the primary shortcoming in Westbrook's analysis is that he focuses on the level of historical event and fails to appreciate, on the level of literary account, how Dtr is defending a problematic event in the career of the prophet Elisha. According to Westbrook, Jehoram should have recognized the deceptive nature of Elisha's oracle. After Elisha says that the Israelites would "destroy" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) the fortified cities of Moab, he follows with actions (i.e., felling every good tree, stopping up the wells, and ruining the fields with stones [2 Kgs 3:19]) that would naturally precede destroying well-fortified strongholds. Jehoram does not notice the specious, unreasonable sequence of events. The subsequent use of the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] meaning simply "strike" (v. 25) reinforces the notion that Jehoram should have perceived the trickery. (2) On more careful analysis, however, the order in which the events are subsequently chronicled, in the narrator's voice (2 Kgs 3:25), suggests that the arrangement of actions in Elisha's oracle serves a larger literary strategy. (3) Westbrook calls attention to the sequence in Elisha's prophecy but fails to comment on the order of events as they are reported. In the standard prophecy-fulfillment pattern, where the storyteller records the fulfillment of events with dialogue-bound narration (see, e.g., 1 Kgs 17:14-16), the narrator reports the fulfillment of Elisha's words, but in reverse order.

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