Elisha -A little information behind what looks like overkill at first glance...

[Angel4Truth]

Elisha and the bears...some perspective

2 Kings 2:23-25
23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!”
24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.
25 He went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

Elisha is traveling to the town of Bethel when he’s approached by dozens of young boys who start harassing him with taunts of “Baldhead!” In response, he curses the kids in the name of the Lord, and suddenly two female bears emerge from the nearby woods to tear into 42 of the boys (2:23-25).

While this may seem like an overreaction to some harmless name calling, something far more serious is happening. In the pagan cultures of the ancient Near East, baldness was a rarity, and the unfortunate few who lost their locks were considered cursed by the gods. When the boys, who were most likely teenagers or young adults, called Elisha “baldhead,” they were not only insulting him, they were saying that his God—the one, true God of heaven and earth—was powerless to stop His servant from losing his hair. By mocking Elisha, they were declaring the supremacy of their false gods, Baal and Asherah, and they were doing so with bloodthirsty intent.

This mob of likely 50 or more teens was ready to kill Elisha. “Go up, you baldhead!” in verse 23 is a reference to the way Elisha’s master Elijah was taken “up” into heaven just a short while before (2 Kings 2:1-12). These young men were telling the prophet to drop dead—to join his master in heaven—as they drew closer to him, ready to attack. Seen in this light, Elisha’s curse was one of self-defense and the divinely appointed bears, agents of justice.

Baldness curses, she-bears, and Baal worship all combine to make this passage seem completely irrelevant to our 21st century lives. But strip away the ancient Near Eastern cultural elements, and things begin to look uncomfortably familiar.

Commentary by John Greco

Changes that image quite a bit doesn't it and its not hard to see why what happened happened, when you imagine a bloodthirsty gang of which we could easily imagine happening from those in a violent gang like today.

 

[Sherman]

:thumb:
All too often the critics don't take time to understand the context of what is taking place.