1:9 The king 1 sent a captain and his fifty soldiers 2 to retrieve Elijah. 3 The captain 4 went up to him, while he was sitting on the top of a hill. 5 He told him, “Prophet, 6 the king says, ‘Come down!’” 1:10 Elijah replied to the captain, 7 “If I am indeed a prophet, may fire come down from the sky and consume you and your fifty soldiers!” Fire then came down 8 from the sky and consumed him and his fifty soldiers.
1:11 The king 9 sent another captain and his fifty soldiers to retrieve Elijah. He went up and told him, 10 “Prophet, this is what the king says, ‘Come down at once!’” 11 1:12 Elijah replied to them, 12 “If I am indeed a prophet, may fire come down from the sky and consume you and your fifty soldiers!” Fire from God 13 came down from the sky and consumed him and his fifty soldiers.
4:25 So she went to visit 15 the prophet at Mount Carmel. When he 16 saw her at a distance, he said to his servant Gehazi, “Look, it’s the Shunammite woman.
6:15 The prophet’s 24 attendant got up early in the morning. When he went outside there was an army surrounding the city, along with horses and chariots. He said to Elisha, 25 “Oh no, my master! What will we do?”
9:1 Now Elisha the prophet summoned a member of the prophetic guild 28 and told him, “Tuck your robes into your belt, take this container 29 of olive oil in your hand, and go to Ramoth Gilead.
1 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
2 tn Heb “officer of fifty and his fifty.”
3 tn Heb “to him.”
4 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the captain) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
5 sn The prophet Elijah’s position on the top of the hill symbolizes his superiority to the king and his messengers.
6 tn Heb “man of God” (also in vv. 10, 11, 12, 13).
7 tn Heb “answered and said to the officer of fifty.”
8 tn Wordplay contributes to the irony here. The king tells Elijah to “come down” (Hebrew יָרַד, yarad), but Elijah calls fire down (יָרַד) on the arrogant king’s officer.
9 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
10 tc The MT reads, “he answered and said to him.” The verb “he answered” (וַיַּעַן, vayya’an) is probably a corruption of “he went up” (וַיַּעַל, vayya’al). See v. 9.
11 sn In this second panel of the three-paneled narrative, the king and his captain are more arrogant than before. The captain uses a more official sounding introduction (“this is what the king says”) and the king adds “at once” to the command.
12 tc Two medieval Hebrew
13 tn Or “intense fire.” The divine name may be used idiomatically to emphasize the intensity of the fire. Whether one translates אֱלֹהִים (’elohim) here as a proper name or idiomatically, this addition to the narrative (the name is omitted in the first panel, v. 10b) emphasizes the severity of the judgment and is appropriate given the more intense command delivered by the king to the prophet in this panel.
14 tn Heb “man of God” (also in vv. 16, 22, 25, 27 [twice]).
15 tn Heb “went and came.”
16 tn Heb “the man of God.” The phrase has been replaced by the relative pronoun “he” in the translation for stylistic reasons.
17 tn Heb “and they poured out [the stew].” The plural subject is probably indefinite.
18 tn Heb “according to the word of the man of God.”
19 tn Heb “and his skin was restored, like the skin of a small child.”
20 tn Heb “said” (i.e., to himself).
21 tn Heb “Look, my master spared this Syrian Naaman by not taking from his hand what he brought.”
22 tn Heb “man of God” (also in v. 9).
23 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elisha) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
24 tn Heb “man of God’s.”
25 tn Heb “his young servant said to him.”
26 tn The Hebrew text also has “in your hand.”
27 tn Heb “Inquire of the
28 tn Heb “one of the sons of the prophets.”
29 tn Or “flask.”
30 tn Heb “man of God.”
31 tn Heb “[It was necessary] to strike five or six times, then you would strike down Syria until destruction.” On the syntax of the infinitive construct, see GKC 349 §114.k.
32 tn Heb “man of God.”
33 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
34 tn Heb “and they left undisturbed his bones, the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria.” If the phrase “the bones of the prophet” were appositional to “his bones,” one would expect the sentence to end “from Judah” (see v. 17). Apparently the “prophet” referred to in the second half of the verse is the old prophet from Bethel who buried the man of God from Judah in his own tomb and instructed his sons to bury his bones there as well (1 Kgs 13:30-31). One expects the text to read “from Bethel,” but “Samaria” (which was not even built at the time of the incident recorded in 1 Kgs 13) is probably an anachronistic reference to the northern kingdom in general. See the note at 1 Kgs 13:32 and the discussion in M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 290.