2 Kings 2:16

2:16 They said to him, “Look, there are fifty capable men with your servants. Let them go and look for your master, for the wind sent from the Lord ¹  may have carried him away and dropped him on one of the hills or in one of the valleys.” But Elisha ²  replied, “Don’t send them out.”

2 Kings 4:1

Elisha Helps a Widow and Her Sons

4:1 Now a wife of one of the prophets ³  appealed ⁴  to Elisha for help, saying, “Your servant, my husband is dead. You know that your servant was a loyal follower of the Lord. ⁵  Now the creditor is coming to take away my two boys to be his servants.”

2 Kings 4:27

4:27 But when she reached the prophet on the mountain, she grabbed hold of his feet. Gehazi came near to push her away, but the prophet said, “Leave her alone, for she is very upset. ⁶  The Lord has kept the matter hidden from me; he didn’t tell me about it.”

2 Kings 11:2

11:2 So Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram and sister of Ahaziah, took Ahaziah’s son Joash and sneaked ⁷  him away from the rest of the royal descendants who were to be executed. She hid him and his nurse in the room where the bed covers were stored. ⁸  So he was hidden from Athaliah and escaped execution. ⁹ 

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¹ tn Or “the spirit of the Lord.”

² tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elisha) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

³ tn Heb “a wife from among the wives of the sons of the prophets.”

⁴ tn Or “cried out.”

⁵ tn Heb “your servant feared the Lord.” “Fear” refers here to obedience and allegiance, the products of healthy respect for the Lord’s authority.

⁶ tn Heb “her soul [i.e., ‘disposition’] is bitter.”

⁷ tn Heb “stole.”

⁸ tn Heb “him and his nurse in an inner room of beds.” The verb is missing in the Hebrew text. The parallel passage in 2 Chr 22:11 has “and she put” at the beginning of the clause. M. Cogan and H. Tadmor (II Kings [AB], 126) regard the Chronicles passage as an editorial attempt to clarify the difficulty of the original text. They prefer to take “him and his nurse” as objects of the verb “stole” and understand “in the bedroom” as the place where the royal descendants were executed. The phrase בַּחֲדַר הַמִּטּוֹת (bakhadar hammittot), “an inner room of beds,” is sometimes understood as referring to a bedroom (HALOT 293 s.v. חֶדֶר), though some prefer to see here a “room where the covers and cloths were kept for the beds (HALOT 573 s.v. מִטָּת). In either case, it may have been a temporary hideout, for v. 3 indicates that the child hid in the temple for six years.

⁹ tn Heb “and they hid him from Athaliah and he was not put to death.” The subject of the plural verb (“they hid”) is probably indefinite.