1. Look, the place where we dwell is too cramped for us. From this petition, one may infer that Elisha as master prophet was responsible for decisions regarding the living arrangements of the acolyte prophets as well as for providing them with food. It also is evident that they constituted a sizable group.

3. Be so kind, pray, as to go with your servants. They feel dependent on his guidance and his sustaining presence.

5. Woe, my master, it is borrowed. An axehead was a valuable item, and we have already seen that the acolyte prophets were relatively poor.

6. the iron blade floated up. This particular intercession on behalf of a follower is, even more transparently than the previous one, an act of pure magic.

8. And the king of Aram had been battling against Israel. It is not possible to determine with any confidence which kings they are from these generalized terms. It also looks as if these episodes in sequence were originally independent stories collected and strung together editorially. There is no hint here that in the previous episode an Israelite prophet cured an Aramean general, who then went off happily, converted to monotheism.

his servants. The Hebrew term that has the general meaning of “servants” or “slaves” refers in royal contexts to the king’s courtiers, who may well be high officials.

9. Keep yourself from passing through this place. Elisha again exercises prophetic clairvoyance, a power duly recognized by the Aramean king’s courtiers in verse 12.

16. Do not fear, for there are more with us than with them. At this point, it is not yet clear that he is referring to supernatural forces. Elisha, more than any other of the early prophets, repeatedly resorts to miraculous powers. His master Elijah was obliged to flee for his life when Ahab sought to kill him, but Elisha when mortally threatened can immediately count on chariots of fire and mysterious cavalry.

17. LORD, open his eyes, pray, that he may see. Elisha, with his prophet’s vision, has already seen the supernatural army on the mountains. The narrative will go on to play with a counterpoint of opening the eyes and blinding them with dazzling light.

18. Strike this nation with blinding light. Blinding light, sanweirim, is also what the divine messengers at Sodom (Genesis 19:11) use to disable the mob of would-be rapists, and a connection between these two groups impelled by nefarious intention may be suggested.

19. the man whom you seek. Your targeting of a man of God is misconceived. If you are Israel’s enemy, let me show you Israel’s king.

20. And the LORD opened their eyes and they saw. Unlike the opening of the servant’s eyes, which enables him to see supernatural allies, what they see is that they are in the heart of the enemy capital, a potentially fatal place for them, as the king’s words in the next verse make clear.

23. And he made a great feast for them. The king, taking Elisha’s cue that these miraculously captured warriors are not legitimate prisoners of war, goes one better than the prophet’s instructions and lays out a generous feast for the Arameans, not merely bread and water.

25. And there was a great famine in Samaria. Starvation in besieged towns cut off from all food supplies was one of the great terrors of ancient warfare, a fact reflected in many biblical texts. The famine here is a counterpoint to the royal feast at the end of the preceding episode.

till a donkey’s head cost eighty pieces of silver and a quarter of a qab of pigeon-droppings five pieces of silver. The besieged population is so desperate for food that even the most inedible part of an unclean animal commands a prince’s ransom. Some scholars understand the term for pigeon-droppings as a reference to carob pods, but that dilutes the hyperbolic power of the statement—that even animal filth was consumed by the starving people, and at a stiff price. Qab is a unit of dry measure, probably a little over a liter.

26. Rescue me. This cry, hoshiaʿ, was the set term in pleading for justice from the king.

27. From where can I rescue you, from the threshing floor or from the winepress? These are, of course, places where food and drink are produced, and they are inaccessible to anyone in the besieged town. Thus the king assumes she is pleading for food. The phrase has the ring of a set idiom.

28. Give over your son, that we may eat him today. Cannibalism in time of siege is invoked a number of times in Prophetic poetry, and it appears to have been a reality in the ancient world, but only here do we get a direct representation of the grisly act in dialogue, as part of a narrative.

30. when the king of Israel heard . . . the woman’s words, he rent his garments. The situation of the two women, one asking for justice from the king after her child has been cannibalized, is reminiscent of the two whores with the dead child and the living child in 1 Kings 3. This king, however, has no option to exercise Solomonic wisdom after the woman’s child has been eaten, and instead, despairing, he rends his garments in an act of mourning.

sackcloth was on his flesh underneath. The king is wearing some sort of royal robe, but it has now been torn open, and the sackcloth beneath is visible.

31. So may God do to me and even more, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat stays on him today. The king’s fury against Elisha may be triggered by his recognition of the prophet’s supernatural powers. If the man of God is able to blind and capture a heavy force of Aramean warriors, his failure to intervene on behalf of the besieged town must be a deliberately hostile act.

32. the elders were sitting with him. The elders would constitute a political group outside the monarchy, and harking back to the premonarchic period. They may even be a center of opposition to the king.

And he sent a man ahead of him. Again, he sees what is about to happen through clairvoyance.

the messenger. The term, which designates any agent, human or divine, here refers to an assassin, not to someone bringing a message.

this murderer’s son. This could well refer to Jehoram, the son of Ahab, whom Elijah excoriated as a murderer, though some scholars prefer to understand it as “murderous person.”

close the door and squeeze him against the door. Elisha reduces the would-be hit man to an object of farce, pinned between the door and the wall.

33. the king came down to him. The received text says “messenger,” malʾakh, but the king has been following close after his messenger, his footsteps audible, and in the next moment in this scene (7:2), we see the king, who has just been addressed by Elisha, leaning on the arm of his official. Malʾakh, then, is in all likelihood a scribal error for melekh, “king.” See the second comment on 2 Samuel 11:1, where the orthographic closeness of these two words is pointedly put into play.