Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Kings · About this commentary
Four Lepers at the Gate
2 Kings 7:1-20
1 Elisha said, “Hear Yahweh’s word. Yahweh says, ‘Tomorrow about this time a seah of fine flour will be sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria.’” · WEB
Four outcasts reason their way into an empty camp, eat their fill, and then remember there is a starving city behind them.
"Tomorrow about this time a seah of fine flour will be sold for a shekel... in the gate of Samaria" 2 Kings 7:1.
The promise is absurdly specific — a market price, at a named place, within a day — in a city where a donkey's skull costs eighty shekels. And the officer at the king's elbow says what everyone is thinking: if Yahweh made windows in heaven, could this thing be? 2 Kings 7:2. His sarcasm is the reasonable position, and the sentence attached to it is exact: you will see it and not eat of it.
"Why do we sit here until we die?" 2 Kings 7:3.
The deliverance comes through four men with a skin disease camped outside the gate because the law kept them outside it Leviticus 13:46, and their reasoning is a masterpiece of desperation logic: the city is starving, staying here is death, surrendering to the Syrians is at worst the same death and at best not. They go because they have nothing left to lose, which is the only kind of courage available to them.
For the Lord had made the army of the Syrians to hear the sound of chariots and the sound of horses, even the noise of a great army 2 Kings 7:6.
The narrator explains what the lepers walk into and the Syrians never learn. An army heard something and concluded Israel had hired Hittite and Egyptian mercenaries, and ran in the twilight leaving tents, horses and donkeys standing. The deliverance cost nothing, killed nobody, and was accomplished by a noise — and the chariots and horses of fire on the hill at Dothan are one chapter behind us 2 Kings 6:17.
They went into one tent, and ate and drank, then carried away silver, gold, and clothing and went and hid it 2 Kings 7:8.
The first response of four starving outcasts is to eat and then to loot, and the account does not moralize about it. They have been hungry and excluded for a long time.
"We aren't doing right. Today is a day of good news, and we keep silent" 2 Kings 7:9.
Then the conscience turns, and their sentence is one of the finest in the Old Testament. They are not obliged to the city that put them outside the wall, and they know that hoarding a rescue is wrong anyway. The reasoning is partly fear of punishment and partly plain decency, and the mixture is honest. Four men nobody wanted are the first to understand that news like this cannot be kept.
"I will now show you what the Syrians have done to us. They know that we are hungry" 2 Kings 7:12.
The king's suspicion is shrewd and completely wrong — a trap to draw the city out — and it takes a servant's proposal of a scouting party with five spare horses to settle it. Even after the promise, even after the report, the palace has to be argued into believing.
So a seah of fine flour was sold for a shekel... according to Yahweh's word 2 Kings 7:16.
The market price is met to the shekel within the day. And the officer who sneered is posted to control the gate, where the crowd tramples him — you will see it with your eyes, but will not eat of it 2 Kings 7:19, the narrator repeating the whole exchange in full so that nobody can miss the correspondence. He is not struck down; he is killed by the very abundance he said could not happen, in a stampede toward the food he refused to believe in.
settled What this mark means