4. he would bring back to the king of Israel. The context suggests that the verb here has an iterative sense: this is the tribute that Mesha, as vassal to Israel, would give annually to the king of Israel. David had initially reduced Moab to vassal status. At some point, perhaps during the reign of Baasha, Moab drove out the Israelite overlords, but King Omri again subjugated it.

a hundred thousand lambs. As with the numbers given for troops and casualties in these narratives, the figures here are hyperbolic.

5. when Ahab died. Mesha exploits the political disorder following upon Ahab’s death to rebel against Israel.

7. I am like you, my people like your people. This speech repeats almost verbatim Jehoshaphat’s words to the king of Israel in 1 Kings 22:4. Verse 11 then repeats, with small variations, Jehoshaphat’s words in 1 Kings 22:7. All this has the look of a story floating around in the scribal archives that was first ascribed to Ahab (although, perhaps symptomatically, without using his name) and then, in different circumstances with a different enemy and a different prophet, to Jehoram (though here, again, in the body of the story, he is not referred to by name). It is possible that the original story was actually about a third king whose identity, however, remains conjectural.

8. The way of the Wilderness of Edom. The allied forces, instead of taking a direct route by crossing the Jordan and then driving south to Moab, swing round (that verb is used in the next verse) in a long arc through the Negeb and then the wilderness of Edom to the east of the Dead Sea, thus approaching Moab from the south. Their likely intention would have been to avoid Moabite troops stationed along the northern and western perimeters of Moabite territory. But this move takes them on a seven-day march through the desert, during which they run out of water.

11. attended. The literal sense of the Hebrew idiom is “poured water on the hands of.”

13. Go to your father’s prophets and to your mother’s prophets. He is referring to the sycophantic court prophets or actually pagan prophets who surrounded Ahab and Jezebel.

14. were I not showing favor to Jehoshaphat. Elisha grudgingly agrees to seek a propitious oracle only for the sake of Jehoram’s Judahite ally Jehoshaphat.

15. as the lyre player played, the hand of the LORD was upon him. The use of stringed instruments and percussion instruments to induce a vatic trance through their hypnotic rhythm is known in many different traditions of ecstatic religion. In the Bible, it is typically linked with bands of professional prophets (see, for example, 1 Samuel 10:5–6). What is unusual here is that an individual prophet feels he has to have recourse to these musical stimuli in order to gain access to God’s word.

16. Dig out this wadi into hollows. In the rocky gulches in this region, rainwater would gather in the little hollows and crevices in the rock. In this miraculous instance, however, there will be no rain.

18. this is easy in the eyes of the LORD. Just as the LORD can easily provide water where there is no rain, He will be able to effect the defeat of the Moabites with no difficulty.

19. every fine town. The word for “fine” (or “choice”), mivḥor, is an odd formation (it should be mivḥar), and some scholars think it is an erroneous scribal duplication of the previous phrase, “every fortified town,” kol ʿir mivtsar.

every goodly tree you shall fell. This is in direct contradiction to Deuteronomy 20:19, which prohibits cutting down an enemy’s fruit trees.

22. from a distance Moab saw the water red as blood. The red look of the water is a result of the early light of dawn, perhaps reinforced, as many have proposed, by the reddish sandstone surrounding the wadi and its bed. God’s miraculous providing of water, then, serves a double purpose: first it revives the troops and their animals after the long march in the desert, and then it sets a trap for the Moabites.

23. each striking down his fellow. The Moabites assume that the potentially fragile alliance put together by the king of Israel has fallen apart violently.

and they are now Moab’s booty. They conclude that most, if not all, of the enemy are dead, and that they have no one to fight, only corpses to despoil.

24. and they struck Moab again and again. The Hebrew text looks defective at this point (with a confusing divergence between the consonantal text and the marginal correction), but this is the likely sense.

25. Kir-Hareseth. This is an alternate name for Kir-Moab, the Moabite capital.

26. he took seven hundred sword-wielding men with him to break through to the king of Edom. He musters an elite fighting unit in an attempt to break through the besieging forces, probably driving against the vassal king of Edom as the weakest element in the alliance of three kings. The attempt is foiled, and the Moabites are driven back into the town.

27. he took his firstborn. A king’s sacrifice of his own child, in an effort to placate the gods at a moment of military emergency, was a familiar practice in the ancient Near East.

and a great fury came against Israel. This denouement is surely perplexing from a monotheistic point of view. “Fury” (qetsef) is usually the term for God’s devastating rage against Israel when the people has transgressed. Here, however, Israel has done no wrong. And the descent of the fury explicitly reverses Elisha’s favorable prophecy. This turn of events might reflect an early tradition that accords Chemosh, the Moabite god, power that must be propitiated by human sacrifice, so that he will then blight the enemies of Moab. In any case, the story means to explain why Israel and its allies, after an initial victory, were obliged to retreat. A Moabite inscription on a stele, discovered in 1868, in which Mesha speaks in the first person, triumphantly proclaims a sweeping victory over Israel, though it is not altogether clear whether this victory is over Jehoram or his predecessor.