1. a man of God. As before, this is an alternate designation for prophet. In this story, however, the man who comes from Judah to Bethel is consistently called a man of God, whereas the old man who will go after him and bring him home to dine is called a prophet. Verse 26 is the one seeming exception, but that may reflect a textual problem.

2. Altar, altar! This sort of apostrophe to an inanimate object is not a usual form of prophetic address. The man of God adopts it for shock effect, to direct attention to what he understands to be an entirely illegitimate altar and cult.

a son is to be born to the house of David, Josiah his name. Josiah was king of Judah three centuries after the time of this story, which thus was surely composed no earlier than the late seventh century B.C.E. The continuation of this story appears in 2 Kings 23, where Josiah is reported to have undertaken a sweeping campaign to destroy idols and the apparatus of pagan worship. In the course of that campaign, he slaughters the idolatrous priests and also exhumes bones from graves and burns them on the altar of Bethel in order to make it forever ritually impure.

7. Come into the house with me and dine. Jeroboam, having seen the man of God’s fearsome power both in the destruction of the altar and the paralyzing and restoring of his arm, seeks to make him an ally.

9. No bread shall you eat nor water shall you drink. This prohibition is understandable as an expression of God’s absolute rejection of Jeroboam’s wayward kingdom: the man of God must shun the king, not breaking bread with him or even drinking water in his house.

nor shall you go back on the way you went. This third prohibition is less transparent. Perhaps the fact that he must take a different route back to Judah is meant to indicate that the dire prophecy he has pronounced is irreversible, though it looks rather like the kind of arbitrary injunction one often encounters in folktales: if you fail to follow these precise stipulations for your mission, disaster will ensue.

11. a certain old prophet. The fact that the old prophet lies to the man of God (verse 18) may raise questions about his legitimacy as prophet, but in verse 21 he is represented as the authentic vehicle for the word of the LORD.

his sons. The Masoretic Text has a singular here, but two Hebrew manuscripts and three ancient versions show a plural, the form that appears in the rest of the verse and in the next one.

14. And he went after the man of God. The man of God, as the sons have reported to the old man, has just demonstrated his credentials by performing two spectacular portents. It would appear that, as a result, the old prophet wants to associate himself with the man of God from Judah, perhaps enhancing his own prophetic status in this fashion.

18. He lied to him. Although the lie has fatal consequences, it may have been impelled by a good intention. The old man might well have imagined that the stern prohibition was directed against the king’s house but not against the house of a prophet like himself—a professional colleague of the man of God. Seeing how determined the man from Judah is to observe the prohibition, he permits himself to fabricate the story about the divine messenger.

20. the word of the LORD came to the prophet. The old man, now made the conduit of the prophecy of doom pronounced upon the man of God, is forced to see how drastically mistaken he was in bringing the man home with him under false pretences.

22. your carcass. The Hebrew neveilah usually refers to an animal carcass, not to a human corpse. Its repeated use here may emphasize the abject condition of the slaughtered man of God, his body flung down on the way.

23. the prophet who had brought him back saddled the donkey for him. The Masoretic Text reads: “and he saddled the donkey for the prophet which he had brought back.” This reading is problematic because throughout the story only the old man is called a prophet, and the other is invariably referred to as the man of God. The emendation on which the translation rests involves the change of a single consonant, hanaviʾ instead of lanaviʾ with no alteration of the Hebrew word order.

24. a lion found him on the way. This part of the story is not miraculous because in ancient Israel there was an abundance of lions in the countryside, a fact reflected in the currency of five different terms for “lion” in biblical Hebrew.

his carcass was flung down on the way with the donkey standing by him and the lion standing by the carcass. It is in this bizarre tableau that the miraculous character of the event is manifested. As we learn in verse 28, the lion kills the man but does not eat him and does not harm the donkey. Moreover, he remains standing by the body and the donkey instead of going off, as one would expect.

26. who flouted the word of the LORD. It must be said that the old prophet plays a rather ambiguous role in this story. After all, it was his lie about having received instructions from a divine messenger that led the man of God to go back with him to his house and thus flout the word of the LORD. His pronouncement here does not appear to express any remorse or any sense of guilt about the death that he has caused. Perhaps he still feels that he acted out of good intentions and that the man of God should have strictly observed the divine prohibitions, whatever the persuasive force of an argument to the contrary.

31. bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried. He had wanted to have communion with this prophetic colleague through an act of hospitality. Now he wants to have solidarity with him after his death through a common grave. In the completion of this story in 2 Kings 23, this joint burial will have a positive posthumous consequence for the old prophet because Josiah will spare the bones buried in the man of God’s grave from being exhumed and burned on the Bethel altar.

32. For the word will surely come about. The old prophet appears to have foreseen the means by which human bones will be burned on this altar in order to render it impure—the exhumation of bones from local graves—and so he may be buying himself a kind of burial insurance by having his body buried together with the man who pronounced the dire prophecy about the altar. This entire story remains bizarre to the end.

34. to wipe it out and destroy it from the face of the earth. The late writer, formulating his story more than a century after the total destruction of the northern kingdom, has that historical catastrophe in mind (although the immediate reference is to the house of Jeroboam) and here offers a theological explanation, in keeping with his Deuteronomistic outlook—the offense of cultic disloyalty.