Elisha and the Bears - Part 1

After sitting through countless sermons and Sunday School lessons as a kid, I thought I knew Scripture pretty well. But just to be sure, I decided to read the Bible from cover to cover the summer before entering seminary. And I quickly encountered several stories that had not made it onto the flannel-graph boards at First Baptist Church.

Take the story of Elisha in 2 Kings 2, for instance. As this great prophet traveled from Jericho to Bethel, a group of young lads began to taunt him, calling out, "You baldhead!" In response, Elisha cursed the boys, whereupon two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of them. As I read this tale for the first time, several problems became immediately apparent:

1. It seemed like Elisha—being a prophet and all—could have been a shade more thick-skinned about these little jests. Why so touchy?
2. How did 2 bears maul 42 boys? After the first 6 or 8 went down, you’d think the rest of them would run like hell. Were they trapped in a box canyon or something?
3. What spiritual lesson is being imparted here, exactly? "Thou shalt not ridicule middle-aged prophets with male-pattern baldness?"

And that was a fairly mild example of the bloodshed—much of it apparently ordered by God. What was going on here? Fortunately, I had signed up for an Old Testament class at Golden Gate, where such questions were sure to be resolved. And on the first day of class, my hopes soared when I found the OT professor to be smart, engaging, and dedicated to the integrity of Scripture. But as the semester wore on, we focused more on the formation of the Old Testament than the meaning of individual texts. And learning about the JEPD theory of the Pentateuch’s authorship didn’t help much with Elisha and the bears.

After a while, I feared we were ignoring the elephant in the room: a literal reading of the Old Testament left us with the jarring notion of God-sanctioned violence. And I was about to discover that others sometimes bumped into the same elephant.