Hi.
I got good answers for “Why God ordered his prophets to kill women and children?” in this forum, but I did not find any refrence to fathers.
Did fathers give any answer to this in their apologetic writings?
I do not know about the fathers, but I can offer this commentary:
Children Eaten By Bears (2 Kings 2:23-24)
2 Kings 2:23-24
[Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.
Once again we have a popular passage for scoffers, but that’s nothing new. St. Caesarius of Arles, for example, tells us this was a favorite passage of the Manichees for mocking the Old Testament. Elisha has a few dozen kids killed by bears for making for making fun of his baldness? Hardly behavior worthy of a prophet of God, right? Let’s break it down and see what’s actually going on here.
The curse has been considered potentially immoral by exegetes almost from the beginning, leading them to look for deeper reasons. One interpretation is that this is just a tale to instruct children in respect, and therefore it’s meant to be didactic and not literal. It was meant to show the power of the prophet’s word and the respect due to him.
A variant in the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint has “they stone” rather than “they mocked,” which obviously makes their offense much more serious. It’s also worth noting that the word translated as “small boys” in English can also mean young men. This may well have been a mob intent on doing Elisha harm.
“Forty-two” may be a symbolic number simply meaning “a lot.” We also encounter it in 2 Kings 10:14 as the number killed by Jehu. The Babylonian Talmud (b. Sota 47a) records the number of sacrifices by Balak of Moab as 42, and claims that the boys killed by the bears were taken in payments for these deaths.
What about the baldness, though? Was he naturally balding, or had he shaved his head in lamentation for Elijah? If the latter, then the mockery did not enrage him because he was vain, but because it disrespected the great prophet. Were they jeering at baldness because he was contemptible as a bald man, or were they jeering at his baldness because it signified his prophetic gift? The latter certainly would have been a more serious offense. The honor of the Lord Himself was injured by the children of Bethel. We may also read it as a condemnation of the adults of Bethel through the curse on their children.
Taken from:
Five Hard Bible Passages and What They Mean
Understanding the difficult parts of the Bible.
by Thomas L. McDonald
ncregister.com/blog/tmcdonald/five-hard-bible-passages-and-what-they-mean/#ixzz4BBTMJhFH
