Jehoram of Israel [IV]

The second Aramean episode takes place some time after the healing of Naaman; at the time Elisha was likely living in Samaria and engaging with Jehoram on a regular basis. Ben-hadad II of Aram and Jehoram of Israel remained in a state of war, and somehow Ben-hadad’s raids into Israel were being met with stiff resistance. It became clear that someone was leaking information from his war councils to Jehoram, but who could it be? Ben-hadad gathered his top officers together and demanded to know the identity of the traitor. His officers insisted it wasn’t them, and one of them – perhaps Naaman? – said that ‘Elisha, the prophet of Israel, tells the king of Israel even the words you speak in the privacy of your bedroom!’ Perhaps the unnamed officer knew of Elisha’s powers and didn’t think it a stretch that Elisha would have a mystical ‘ear’ into the war councils; or maybe Aramean spies in Israel’s royal palace reported Elisha’s communiqués with the king. The Aramean king, convinced that this prophet of Israel was the culprit, ordered that he be sniffed out and seized. Aramean scouts reported that Elisha was at Dothan, a hilltop city located on a main trade route about ten miles north of Samaria, and Ben-hadad wasted no time in dispatching a vast raiding party of infantry, cavalry, and a contingent of chariots to march by night and take Dothan – and its prophet – by surprise. 

Yahweh reveals his heavenly armies

When Elisha’s servant – who had likely taken Gehazi’s place – got up the next morning and went outside, he saw the Aramean troops surrounding the city on the hill. The city was built atop Tell Dothan, which rose about two hundred feet above the surrounding pasture land. The servant had an eagle’s eye view of the Aramean infantry, cavalry, and chariots surrounding the hilltop city. The servant rushed to Elisha, lamenting that they’d been trapped. Elisha told him not to panic and insisted, oddly enough, that the enemy were far outnumbered. The servant had seen none of Israel’s armed forces, so he was puzzled. Elisha prayed that Yahweh would open the servant’s eyes so that he could see what he meant; God answered Elisha’s prayer, and when the servant looked up, he saw that the hillside around them was filled with ‘horses and chariots of fire,’ angelic forces protecting Yahweh’s prophet. Yahweh was often portrayed as the ‘Lord of Hosts’ (the commander of heavenly armies), and the servant saw a snapshot of what that phrase meant; it wasn’t mere lofty language! As an aside, it’s doubtful that God employs actual chariots; rather, He was showing His prophet and his assistant the power He wields in the invisible, spiritual realm, and He was doing so in a way that would make sense to them; nowadays one might see an ‘angelic host’ of tanks and Apache helicopters.

The Arameans, oblivious to the angelic protection encircling Dothan, began to advance on the city. Elisha’s servant asked what they could do to save themselves, and Elisha prayed that God would blind their enemies, and God did so. The Hebrew word for ‘blindness’ can mean a state of confusion in which they were willing to follow the prophet’s directions, as the Aramean raiders would allow Elisha to convince them they were attacking the wrong city. Under divine delusion, the soldiers would allow the prophet to lead them to the ‘lion’s den’ of Israel. The term could also be related to an Akkadian term for day-blindness, and in Hebrew it’s sometimes used to refer to night-blindness. Day-blindness is clinically called hemeralopia, and night-blindness is nyctalopia; both are caused by a vitamin A deficiency as the primary cause, and a secondary cause is a vitamin B deficiency that often results in mental fog or confusion (with which, it appears, the Arameans suffered). Whatever the exact meaning of the ‘blindness’ Yahweh afflicted on them, they were at the prophet’s mercy. Elisha strode out of Dothan’s city gates and met them in the pastures below. He told them they’d gone the wrong way and surrounded the wrong city; he said he’d take them to the man they were looking for, and he led them straight to the capital city of Samaria. 

Aramean soldiers are shocked to find themselves trapped
in Samaria

As soon as they were in Samaria – and surrounded by Jehoram’s royal troops with shields, spears, and swords at the ready – Elisha prayed that God would open the raiders’ eyes. God did so, and the Arameans realized they were inside Samaria and encircled by their enemies. The hunters had become the hunted; the trappers became the trapped. Jehoram respectfully asked if they should slay the enemy trapped behind Samaria’s walls; Elisha responded, ‘Do we kill captives of the bow?’ The phrase ‘captives of the bow’ is an expression found in Akkadian texts to describe people captured as part of plunder; such persons were at the disposal of the victor who could employ them in slave labor, sell them, or set them free. Israelite kings were (at least according to Aramean sources) known for their mercy (a mercy relative to despotic rulers, to be sure), and it may have been Israelite practice not to slaughter those captives taken ‘by plunder’ (differentiating them from captives taken ‘in war,’ i.e. in the midst of battle). Elisha may also be insinuating that these men were not Jehoram’s plunder; they were Yahweh’s plunder, for Yahweh had blinded them and captured them. It may also be that Elisha hoped to create friendly relations with the Arameans; Elisha instructed Jehoram to treat them to a banquet of food and drink, which would echo a ceremonial meal accompanying a special occasion or establishing a treaty agreement. Elisha may have prayed that the banquet would serve as a new turn in Israelite-Aramean relations. Jehoram no doubt wanted to slaughter his much-loathed enemy, but he acquiesced to Elisha’s instructions (he had a love/hate relationship with the prophet): the captured Arameans were treated to a banquet and then sent on their way.

The Aramean raiders stayed away from the land of Israel for a time, giving Israel a brief respite, but no lasting peace resulted. The temporary reprieve could be a response to Israelite kindness; Jehoram’s civil treatment of his prisoners didn’t exactly make the Arameans want to hurt him. It could also be that word of what’d happened spread through Aram and made the Arameans hesitant to throw against Israel. A corporate blindness affecting a vast host of Arameans, and them being led by a measly prophet right into the heart of the Israelite lion’s den, didn’t exactly build confidence among Aram’s officers. 

*  *  *

The third Aramean episode begins with an Aramean siege of Samaria. Ben-hadad II mustered his armed forces, quickly marched south against Israel, and besieged the capital city. How much time passed between God’s blinding of the Aramean forces in Samaria and the siege of Samaria is unknown. Because of the siege, a great famine spread through the city so that a donkey’s head sold for eighty pieces of silver ($50 of today’s money) and a pint of dove’s dung sold for five pieces of silver ($3 modern equivalent). The fact that these all but worthless items sold for such astronomical prices highlights Samaria’s dire straits. Donkey meat was unclean and forbidden according to Leviticus 11.1-7, but desperate city-folk were clamoring to get their hands on it. Dove’s dung may refer to a variety of wild vegetables – such as roasted chickpeas – or even to a thorny variety of acacia (as the term is occasionally used in Akkadian texts). However, it’s more likely that it means what it says: people were eager to get their hands on bird’s dung either as a fuel source for fire or even for food (eating feces is seen in many ancient accounts of siege conditions). 

an artist's rendering of Aramean siegeworks according to archaeological digs

As if these ‘hot commodities’ weren’t enough, one day Jehoram was walking the city wall, observing the Arameans encamped beyond, when a woman cried out to him for help. He hissed, ‘If Yahweh doesn’t help you, what can I do? I don’t have any food or wine to give you.’ Nevertheless he asked what was wrong, and she told him she’d made a pact with another woman: on the first day the two of them would eat her son, and on the second day they would eat the other woman’s son. The woman reported that she’d slain and cooked her son, and they ate his flesh; but the next day, when it came time for the other woman to slay and cook her son, she hid him. When Jehoram heard of this abominable cannibalism –eating human flesh was one thing; eating the flesh of your own child was quite another – he tore his clothes in despair. The cannibalism behind Samaria’s walls only intensified the city’s hopelessness, for cannibalism under severe conditions had been decreed as part of God’s curse for unfaithfulness and disobedience in Deuteronomy 28. The message was clear: the city was under God’s judgment. 

Jehoram, enraged and at the end of his rope, invited Yahweh to kill him if he didn’t behead the prophet Elisha that very day. Decapitation of an enemy was frequent practice in the ancient Near East, but why had Jehoram made Elisha his sworn enemy? Perhaps he figured that the current situation was a direct result of Elisha sparing Ben-hadad’s troops. If Elisha had permitted the slaughter or capture of the Aramean troops when they’d been surrounded in Samaria, perhaps all this could’ve been avoided! Or maybe Jehoram reasoned that Ben-hadad was on the hunt for Elisha, so that the city’s besiegement was due to Elisha’s presence within her walls. If so, Elisha was certainly to blame for the city’s grief. Another theory harks back to the fact that there was no sharp line drawn between a prophet as proclaimer and instigator; the Israelite people believed that prophets could ‘shape history’ by their words (remember how Jeroboam hoped to trick a good word from the prophet Ahijah?); perhaps Jehoram believed that the prophet’s words had somehow caused this tragedy to befall the capital. 

At this time Elisha was sitting in his house with ‘the elders of Israel’ – likely the heads of Samaria’s wealthiest and most influential families who were probably hoping to receive guidance and an oracle from the prophet – when Jehoram dispatched a messenger to summon him. Elisha sensed what was afoot, and he told the elders, ‘A murderer has sent a man to cut off my head. When he arrives, shut the door and keep him out. We’ll soon hear his master’s steps following him.’ Just as Elisha finished speaking, the messenger – identified as an ‘officer,’ a term denoting the king’s royal armor-bearer or adjutant – arrived and announced the king’s words to Elisha: ‘All this misery is from Yahweh! Why should I wait for Yahweh any longer?’ Unspoken was Jehoram’s real question: ‘Why should I not break with Yahweh, slay his lying prophet, and surrender the city to the Arameans and hope for the best?’ Jehoram probably intended for Elisha to be compelled to meet face-to-face with the king to suave his doubts, at which point the king could kill him; but Elisha gave the messenger a cryptic response: ‘This is what Yahweh says: by this time tomorrow in the markets of Samaria, six quarts of choice flour will cost only one piece of silver, and twelve quarts of barley grain will cost only one piece of silver.’ The flabbergasted messenger retorted that such a thing couldn’t even happen if God opened the windows of heaven; Elisha replied that the messenger would see it with his own eyes – but he added that he wouldn’t be able to eat any of it. 

the stunned lepers raid the abandoned Aramean camp

The biblical narrative then switches the scene from inside Elisha’s house to the city gates. Four lepers were on the verge of perishing in the ‘no man’s land’ between the Aramean siege-works and the barred city gate. Their friends in the city could no longer provide them food, as there was no more food to go around. Their only hope of survival was to desert to the enemy and hope for the best. At twilight they began walking towards the enemy encampment– but they found the Arameans had deserted before them! In the middle of the night the Aramean host had heard ‘the sound of chariot wheels’ and concluded that a vast army was sweeping down on them. Convinced that Jehoram had hired Hittite and Egyptian mercenaries to attack them from opposite directions in a pincer movement, Ben-hadad broke camp and scurried for home. Aram had a rich history of warfare with the Hittites, who had left their Anatolian homeland centuries earlier and resettled in regions north of Aram. The Hittites were centered in the city-states of Carchemish and Keratepe, and they were often at odds with their southern neighbor. Egypt had a history of getting entangled in wars throughout the Fertile Crescent, and it isn’t inconceivable that Jehoram could enlist Egyptian help. The Hebrew term mysrym refers to Egypt, but some scholars have speculated that the text originally said msry (for Musra) but was corrupted sometime in ages past. If the Arameans feared the Musri were upon them, they were probably thinking of the same Musri who appeared in the inscriptions from Shalmaneser III of Assyria during this period. The Musri were included among the allies from the ‘Land of Hatti’ who fought against Shalmaneser at Qarqar in 853 and are listed right after Jehu of Israel in the tribute list on the Black Stela of the same Shalmaneser from 841. The Musra likely lived in north Syria, above Aram, and they’re named as neighbor of Arpad (located north of Aleppo in northern Syria) in the Aramaic Sefire treaty of the 8th century. Perhaps, then, Ben-hadad suspected Jehoram of enlisting his northern enemies against him (remember the old adage, ‘the enemies of my enemies are my friends’); if he suspected this, it makes sense for him to uproot and head north, if only to protect Damascus from the swords and shields of his marauding northern neighbors. Whatever the Aramean king’s suspicions, they were enough to get him moving, and the lepers satisfied their hunger among the abandoned loot before reporting the events to Jehoram’s officers and court.

Jehoram, for his part, suspected some kind of trick; after all, a fake withdrawal was a well-known ruse in the ancient world: an enemy would pretend to withdraw, and when their pursuers ran ragged after them, an ambush would be sprung. Such a tactic was used by the Greeks against Troy centuries earlier and was recorded in The Iliad; such tales would’ve been known to the kings of Israel and Judah. Jehoram dispatched two chariots to investigate the report, and the charioteers followed the main road to the Jordan Valley. All along the route were the flotsam and jetsam of fleeing troops: garments, weapons, baggage, food. News of the Arameans’ departure spread through the city of Samaria like kudzu, and starving people flooded from the city gates to feast on what was left behind – and Jehoram’s officer, who had been so disdainful of Elisha’s prophecy and God’s power, was trampled to death in the mass exodus.