1. for through him the LORD had granted victory to Aram. This clause establishes the universalist perspective of the story, in which a prophet of Israel will perform a wonder for a non-Israelite. From the viewpoint of the Hebrew writer, it is the LORD, the God worshipped by Israel, Who determines all events, though of course the Aramean general could not be aware that he owes his victories to YHWH.

2. the land of Israel. This designation is actually unusual and in all likelihood reflects the perception of the Arameans.

3. Would that my master might come before the prophet. The Hebrew has only the implied verb “be.” To be or stand before someone implies a relationship of deference or even subservience, and the idiom recurs in the story. One notes that the captive Israelite girl appears to be on good terms with her Aramean mistress, evincing solicitude for her mistress’s husband.

skin blanch. The Hebrew tsaraʿat is traditionally translated as “leprosy,” but the leading symptom mentioned in this narrative and elsewhere is a complete loss of pigmentation, whereas leprosy involves lesions and lumps in the skin and sometimes a slightly paler color but not the ghastly whiteness of which the biblical texts speak. This is, then, a disfiguring skin disease that remains unidentified, and hence the present translation, here and elsewhere, coins a name not to be found in dermatological manuals that refers to the whiteness.

5. I shall send a letter to the king of Israel. The king of Aram decides to intervene on behalf of his general on the highest diplomatic level, king to king. He barely registers the advice that came from the captive girl to turn to the prophet because his letter to the king of Israel makes no mention of it, in consequence of which the Israelite king is panicked.

ten talents of silver and six thousand pieces of gold. This vast treasure is meant to be a gift or payment to the Israelite prophet.

7. he is seeking a pretext against me. Confronted with the bare request from the Aramean king in his very brief missive to cure Naaman, the Israelite king construes the entire maneuver as a trap: when he fails to cure Naaman, the king of Aram will attack him.

8. when Elisha . . . heard that the king of Israel had rent his garments. Word of this public gesture of mourning or grief would have quickly spread.

9. And Naaman came with his horses and his chariot. Now we learn that the general has come to Samaria with a full military retinue.

and stood at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Nevertheless, the distinguished general does not presume to march into the house of the man of God, but stands at the entrance, awaiting word. The word comes to him only through an intermediary, a messenger (evidently not Elisha’s personal attendant Gehazi).

11. he will surely come out and stand and call in the name of the LORD his God and wave his hand. Naaman had expected personal intervention by the prophet that involved invocation of the deity’s powerful name and magical hand gestures, probably over the “place” of the disease.

12. Are not Amanah and Parpar the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? Damascus, after all, is situated at a fertile confluence of rivers, and to the Damascene eye, the Jordan is no more than a muddy rivulet. If simple bathing could cure the disease, he would have been better off doing it in Aram.

13. The prophet has spoken a great thing to you. They intuit that the ostensibly simple command to dip seven times in the Jordan is actually the direction for a miraculous cure.

How much more so. It is a great thing that can be effected through an easy act.

14. like the flesh of a young lad. There is an interesting echo of the phrase here, naʿar qaton, with the designation of the captive girl who gave the advice, naʿarah qetanah, “a young girl.”

15. stood before him. The posture, as noted above, is deferential.

there is no god in all the earth except in Israel. The miraculous cure converts the Aramean general into a monotheist.

16. I will not take it. Elisha does not seek payment for services. His payment is in the triumph of Naaman’s conversion.

17. let your servant be given two mules’ load of soil. Naaman assumes that proper sacrifice to YHWH can be offered only on the soil of Israel, and so he requests permission to take some of it back with him to Aram. Some scholars see in this a reflection of the quandary of the Israelites exiled after 721 B.C.E., though that is not a necessary inference.

18. the house of Rimmon. This is the temple of the national god of Aram, evidently a storm god.

to worship. Literally, “to bow down,” this gesture being a synecdoche for worship.

and he leans on my arm. Given Naaman’s position as accompanier of the king in the temple, which would be an official duty, he can scarcely avoid going through the outward motions of Rimmon worship.

21. Is all well? Seeing Elisha’s attendant running after him, Naaman is alarmed that something may be amiss as far as the prophet is concerned.

22. My master sent me. Gehazi is obliged to implement his greedy act by an outright lie: that his master needs some of the proffered gift for two newly arrived acolyte prophets. He does not dare ask for the whole splendid gift, though Naaman generously gives him twice the amount of silver he requested.

26. Did not my heart come along. At this juncture, for purposes necessary to the plot in which Gehazi’s base act is exposed, Elisha exercises clairvoyance.

olive trees and vineyards and sheep and cattle and slaves and slavegirls. These items, of course, are not part of the gift Gehazi extracted from Naaman, but Elisha implies that the talents of silver could serve to purchase these standard markers of wealth in the agricultural-pastoral society.

27. May Naaman’s skin blanch cling to you. In the final turn of the universalist screw in this story, the rapacious and dishonest Israelite is stricken with the disease of which the Aramean general, now a devout follower of the God of Israel, has been cured.