1. a seah of fine flour will sell for a shekel. The prices stipulated here are the antithesis of the astronomic prices for virtually inedible stuff mentioned in 6:25. This is, then, a concrete way of saying that the deadly famine will suddenly come to an end. It should be kept in mind that in this early period, the shekel is not a coin but a weight of silver (about 11.5 grams). A seah is roughly 7.3 liters.

2. the official on whose arm the king was leaning. Since Naaman performs the same function for the king of Aram, one may infer that this was a set court duty for a high-ranking figure. But Naaman in mentioning this role of his has become a convinced believer in the power of YHWH, whereas this official is a doubter.

Look, the LORD is about to make casements in the heavens. This remark, which invokes a memorable phrase from the Flood story (Genesis 7:11), is obviously sarcastic, the idea being that Elisha imagines the LORD will somehow rain down food from the sky for the starving Israelites.

but you shall not eat from there. Elisha’s words are veiled, ominously hinting at the dire fate that will befall the official.

3. And four men stricken with skin blanch were at the entrance to the gate. This disfiguring skin disease was thought to be contagious, requiring quarantine, according to the laws of Leviticus. (But the requirement of quarantine is ignored in the case of a high-ranking figure such as Naaman.) The diseased men are thus outside the town, in a liminal space between the besieged city and the Aramean camp. The schadenfreude in this account of the flight of the Arameans is heightened by the fact that the discovery of their precipitous retreat is made by outcasts.

4. If they let us live, we shall live. Given that they are bound to die of starvation either inside the town or outside the walls, they decide that they may as well throw themselves on the mercy of the Arameans, who might just feed them and let them live rather than kill them.

6. the king of Israel has hired against us the Hittite kings and the kings of Egypt. If this story of an Aramean army renouncing a siege has a historical kernel, it would be here—that an alliance of kings induced the Arameans to retreat. In their fearful dialogue, they make the monarchs of both Egypt and the Hittites plurals.

7. they . . . fled at twilight. As in many languages, the Hebrew word for twilight, neshef, can refer either to sunset or dawn. Here the likely scenario is that the Arameans depart as the sun sets, their flight thus unseen from the town; the diseased men enter the camp just after the besiegers have fled; they then bring the report of what they have seen to the king in the middle of the night.

9. guilt will befall us. The Israelites will berate them, or worse, for not having brought the news at once of the flight of the Arameans.

10. the gatekeepers. The Hebrew shows a singular noun, but “to them” is unambiguously plural. In the next verse, “gatekeepers” has the plural ending. The gates of the town were of course bolted, and so the diseased men had to make a special plea to the gatekeepers to be admitted within in order to bring their great news to the king. The gatekeepers do not let them in, but carry the news to the king.

12. Let me tell you, pray, what the Arameans have done to us. True to the fearful character that the king of Israel exhibited when he received the letter from the king of Aram about curing Naaman, he now concludes that this is a trap the Arameans have set to lure the Israelites outside the town.

13. five of the remaining horses that are left in the town. The implication is that most of the horses have been eaten. Some scholars think that “five” does not indicate a precise number but means “a few.”

look, they are like all the multitude of Israel. The repetition of this clause in immediate sequence might be an inadvertent scribal duplication (dittography), though it could equally be an expression of the speaker’s emotional turmoil in contemplating the terrible fact that there are so few survivors in the town.

they are like all the multitude of Israel who have come to an end. In the first iteration of this clause, the verb is “who are left.” Now it is “who have come to an end.” There is a grim overlap between surviving and dying: if the horses are like the people, barely surviving and on the way to joining those who have already died, there is nothing lost in sending them out on this mission.

14. two teams of horses. This seems the likely sense of the Hebrew, which is literally “two chariots of horses.”

15. And they went after them to the Jordan. What may be happening is that the horses are sent down the road, with the king’s men driving them from behind with cries and perhaps long whips, ready to fall back if the horses are spotted by Aramean troops. They evidently bypass the empty camp, where they fear an ambush, and discover—a significant use of the presentative “look” to mark their visual point of view—evidence that the flight is real in the garments and gear strewn over the road.

17. the people trampled him in the gate. This is a credible detail: the people, on the point of death by starvation, stampede through the gate to get at the food and riches they have heard are available in the Aramean camp (or to get to those who have already expropriated the flour and are selling it at the prices announced in the previous verse), and so they inadvertently trample the official. Elisha’s obscure prophecy is now violently fulfilled.

18. two seahs of barley will sell for a shekel and a seah of fine flour for a shekel. The story concludes with an elaborate verbatim repetition of Elisha’s prophecy and the words of the official. The only variation is that here the barley is first, the fine flour second, and the particle that means “and” is added to the official’s first word. In this instance, the point of the repetition with no substantive changes is to underscore how the general prophecy, and then the prophecy specifically addressed to the official in rebuke of his skepticism, are literally and completely fulfilled.