Of Prophets and Bears

I had to give a little talk in church about a story that I wasn't familiar with. At Barbara's suggestion, I decided to figure out the story of the prophet Elisha and sending bears to eat little kids.

Turns out this is a popular passage to use when pointing out how mean God is to have a bear eat some kids for poking fun at someone.

So the prophet Elijah had just been translated and Elisha took up the mantle (which was like a cloak or shawl, symbolic of passing of prophetic authority). He was heading back across the river Jordan and stayed a little while in Jericho, and then he was on his way to Bethel.

2 Kings 2:23 and 24 -

23 And he went up from thence unto Beth-el: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

Unfortunately I could hardly find a thing about this passage from a reliable LDS source, but there were plenty of other sources of Christian opinion on this. Hopefully I got it right.

First thing to notice is that "little children" in the scripture has a footnote next to it. The actual translation of this should read "youths", or "lads". A lot of the sources I read noted that the same word was used to describe Joseph back in Genesis, translated as "lad", and that he was about 17 or 18. So don't picture little 2 and 3 year olds. These were probably "youths" anywhere from 13 to late 20s.

Next thing to look at is the notation for "mocked". It references the topical guide, and says "persecution and profanity". If you look those words up in the topical guide, you find things like "cruelty, malice, hate", and "blasphemy and swearing". If you read the passage and imagine kids saying things like "Ha ha, you're so funny looking!", then you're picturing it wrong. This sounds like very mean, hateful speech in Elisha's direction.

Something I thought was interesting was the phrase "Go up". It's noted that Elijah had just been taken to heaven, so that statement could be perceived as a sort of death threat. They were telling him essentially to "go up" to heaven.

I never did figure out if he was actually bald or not :)

Cursing them in the name of the Lord wasn't used like a retaliation or to argue or anything like that. Basically Elisha was saying to Heavenly Father, "Here are these men who are behaving inappropriately. I'm passing their judgement onto You". He was letting Heavenly Father deal with them in the way He saw fit.

And then the bears. First of all, the bears "tore" these people, they didn't eat them. Secondly, it may seem awfully harsh, but that's where the message lies that I took from it.

It's showing us that God takes His mouthpiece here on earth very seriously. We should treat the words of the prophet as seriously as we would were it Heavenly Father standing right before us and giving us commandments. The bears can be seen symbolically as what the adversary may do to our spirits if we "poke fun" at what the prophet has to say to us.

And there you are, the story of the poor children being eaten by bears :)