Why Did This Happen???

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Exalt said:
A good father doesn’t murder his children. The Bible says he did. The Bible has to be wrong, at least on the parts where he is said to have done horrible things.
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Perhaps the root of the problem is trying to back-apply our own definition of “good” onto God, when in fact it is God that defines what “good” and “evil” are according to his will. When one says God can do no wrong, it doesn’t mean that God lives by all our ideals, but rather that he’s the one that sets the proper ideal.

This verse in particular might some like a tough one at first glance - but then it wouldn’t seem much better if you take the bears out and have Elisha lynched by 40+ punks while God ignores his prophet’s plea. As final arbiter of all life and death, God is the one that has to make the calls, even when they’re not clear-cut from our angle.
 
Exalt said:
Debunk? Hmm. That makes it seem like we’re sifting through the Bible trying to find things that contradict it. I don’t know about others, but it was through an honest reading of the Bible that I came to the following conclusions:
  1. God is thought to be a good, loving father.
  2. The Bible says that God has commanded people to do horrible things, and frequently does horrible things himselves. (By “horrible” things, I mean actions that are so abhorrent and vile that if someone were to do them today, they would probably be executed or jailed for life. I.e., if someone were to sic two viscious animals on a group of children today - killing them all, they would probably be jailed for life.)
  3. The Bible and the notion of God as a good, loving father just don’t fit. Either you have to (1) throw out parts of the Bible that don’t fit that description or (2) you have to throw out the notion that God is a good, loving father.
A good father doesn’t murder his children. The Bible says he did. The Bible has to be wrong, at least on the parts where he is said to have done horrible things.

What really disturbs me, though, is how people still stand by passages like this. I just don’t get it. Why can’t they just accept the facts that are sitting there in front of them? >.<
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the OT was writting by men not by God, this men lived several thousend of years ago, they had primitive minds, and a different understanding and perspective of almost everything.

So we should not read the bible literaly, but we must think the way those primitive people did when they wrote the bible.
the fact that they were primitive people dosent exclude that the bible is inspired.
 
Exalt said:
Debunk? Hmm. That makes it seem like we’re sifting through the Bible trying to find things that contradict it. I don’t know about others, but it was through an honest reading of the Bible that I came to the following conclusions:
  1. God is thought to be a good, loving father.
  2. The Bible says that God has commanded people to do horrible things, and frequently does horrible things himselves. (By “horrible” things, I mean actions that are so abhorrent and vile that if someone were to do them today, they would probably be executed or jailed for life. I.e., if someone were to sic two viscious animals on a group of children today - killing them all, they would probably be jailed for life.)
  3. The Bible and the notion of God as a good, loving father just don’t fit. Either you have to (1) throw out parts of the Bible that don’t fit that description or (2) you have to throw out the notion that God is a good, loving father.
A good father doesn’t murder his children. The Bible says he did. The Bible has to be wrong, at least on the parts where he is said to have done horrible things.

What really disturbs me, though, is how people still stand by passages like this. I just don’t get it. Why can’t they just accept the facts that are sitting there in front of them? >.<
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As already mentioned, we have no right to define “good”. Only God is good, says Jesus.

A good [human] father doesn’t murder his children not because he is a good father, but because he has no right to. God on the other hand, is a good father, AND the OWNER of our lives. Our lives are his to give and take back as he sees fit. It is, therefore, impossible for God to commit murder, because the lives he takes belongs to him, not us. If he strikes me or you dead right now for any reason whatsoever, that would be just and fair.

Since God is good, everything and anything he does, no matter how “horrible” they are to our sensibilities, are always Good, no question.

We are only mere creatures. It is only by grace that we are children of God. We have absolutely no right to impose moral standards on him.
 
First off, I’d like to caution the few Catholics who are saying, effectively, ‘the Bible was transcribed by mere humans, things got distorted!’. Don’t go there. You don’t want to. Trust me on this.

The Church holds that the entire Bible is the inerrant word of God – even if it was written down by human hands – and I’m afraid that position is non-negotiable: you’re stuck with it. If you start saying such-and-such passage is not inerrant, you’re going to open yourselves wide up for people saying ‘so why should we trust the veracity of this less-repulsive but still inconvenient passage?’ It’ll blow your credibility right out of the water. Don’t do it. Certainly, there is literal truth and there is metaphysical truth (and, if I remember right – which I probably am not – three other varieties), but the passages being discussed are explicitly histories.

Continuing on, yes, God committed, commanded, and condoned some pretty mindblowingly ugly things in the Old Testament, and bears are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile that history with the loving father figure presented in the teachings of Jesus. From an outsider’s point of view, it’s all but impossible to look at the God shown in the Old Testament and the God shown in the New Testament and say ‘yeah, same one’.

The Gnostics took the easy way out of this problem, by holding that the being referred to as ‘God’ in the Old Testament was in reality an evil spirit, the Demiurge. Obviously this isn’t an acceptable Catholic answer. I don’t have one of those, and I’m not sure there is one.

‘The Lord giveth, and he taketh away’, certainly, but ‘The Lord punisheth the well-intentioned but accident-prone’ a la Uzzah? Does a loving, just, merciful father really do such a thing? Does he set his children against each other in genocidal wars, or command them to make slaves of each other?

It’s a tough question, and one to which I cannot find a satisfying answer that remains compatible with Catholic teaching. I wish those of you concerned over the theological history of your faith better luck than I 🙂
 
Back to the original post:

I think God was trying to send the message “Don’t mess with my prophets”!!! Doesn’t the word “prophet” translate to “messenger”.

In this case, the message is, “if picking on Elisha will result in a good old fashioned bear-mauling, just think what will happen if - no, not if, but when - you kill my messengers.”!!!

Obviously, this message was lost on ancient Israel.
 
NotWorthy said:
Back to the original post:

I think God was trying to send the message “Don’t mess with my prophets”!!! Doesn’t the word “prophet” translate to “messenger”.

In this case, the message is, “if picking on Elisha will result in a good old fashioned bear-mauling, just think what will happen if - no, not if, but when - you kill my messengers.”!!!

Obviously, this message was lost on ancient Israel.
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Israelites were a “stiff necked people” Always getting their mission wrong-kinda like us.🙂
 
There are a couple things worth taking note of in reading this passage. One is that, if I’m not mistaken, the original word from the texts for “children” actually could refer to adults as old as thirty. Secondly, this is over forty of them we’re talking about, all together, chasing after the prophet insulting him.

Is such an enormous group assembled just to play around and act in fun? Can one be at all sure that they would content themselves with only insulting him, for that matter? This is a massive group of people, a bunch of them undoubtedly pretty old (and perhaps all of them), and they were all insulting Elisha and ganging up on him. It was essentially a mob scene. The only difference is that they hadn’t done him any physical violence yet. The sheer number of people gathered around him taunting him implies that there was a real danger to Elisha. The act could easily have been one of self-defence.

A second aspect of this that should be considered is that God is absolutely holy, and his prophet was his representative. Thus, by heaping scorn upon his prophet, a huge number of people were displaying absolute contempt for God.

If you recall, in the New Testament when two people in front of Saint Peter lied to the Holy Spirit, God immediately put them to death.

Elisha, unless I am mistaken, was within the nation of Israel when the bear attack occurred. The people who were doing this to him were God’s Chosen People, separate to God, people who were devoted to God’s laws. And as the New Testament says, “he who lives by the law will be judged by the law.” These people, perhaps representing an entire village, were scorning God through their actions against his prophet. That is a terribly grave offense against the majesty of the deity. A poor comparison, meager in how feeble it is because of the poverty of human analogies to God, would be to compare this act to vomiting all over a Leonardo da Vinci portrait. Their act was infinitely worse than this, for God is infinite in glory, but perhaps that idea might help bring across the picture. What they did was incredibly contemptible, and fully deserving of divine wrath.

The incidents with the man dying who tried to steady the ark and God’s command that anyone be stoned who stepped on Mount Sinai while his glory rested upon it are similar. If people did not understand that God was holy and had to be obeyed, they would feel free to disobey and sin would reproduce and multiply. Also, God fully deserves the full honor and respect of his people, and to be treated casually by people to whom he has revealed himself and given his blessing, presence and leadership to is a disgrace of enormous proportions. I think that we fail to take into account the incomprehensible majesty of God and the full wonder of his glory when we think that treating him casually, or lying to him or mocking him are not offenses deserving terrifying penalties, if we actually had sufficient knowledge to know how wrong our action was (as the Israelites and followers of God did in all of the above cases).
 
Mirdath said:
First off, I’d like to caution the few Catholics who are saying, effectively, ‘the Bible was transcribed by mere humans, things got distorted!’. Don’t go there. You don’t want to. Trust me on this.
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things dont got distorbed because some human wanted to give his point of view or to teach a lesson in the bible.
there is a difference in to say that God wrote the bible by the hands of human. and to say that the bible is inspired by God.

the problem here seems to be that people in america are extremly influenciated by protestants and hence they cant conceive the idea that the bible was not written by God.

in my opinion, when one say that the bible is the inerrant word of God it means that it was inspired.
for example the bible could talk about history in some places and not about religion for a little while. It dosent meant that God inspired the writter to write about history, but the writter had a vast liberty to write about another topics and stuffs their own way.

the inspiration of the bible goes beyond primitive interpretation. The main thing is the overall message of it and the way how God inspire this people taking in account their primitive minds in order for God to get closer to mankind.
 
Well, the way some of the toy bear products are promoted these days with tags such as - ’ he listens, he watches, and all his love is true …’ , may be we are still dealing with some subtle bear attacks …
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The O.T times , being times of demonic forces  probably lot worse than we can imagine , those youth , steeped in a culture of idolatry, could have been  truly ' evil' and even on a  path of  lot more evil  , unless they repented ...
Now , they challenge prophet Elish , to ’ go up’ … did the youth, may be carelessly running after the prophet, fall into a ravine , even onto some baby bear cubs …and get mauled by the angry mother bears( may be they too were demon possesed - since idolatry can invite in all such !) …

ofcourse, those youth had also asked to be outside of the protection of the True God, by thier mocking His prophet .

Well, they could have learned their lesson … and got healed …and gone back in to the idol worshipping hometown to bear witness …for the true God …

Just hope that our own children do not feel cheated and lied to by toy bears, to grow up with bald heads - lacking the helmet of faith !
 
I think we should be careful about reading things into Scripture without evidence in Scripture. This passage does not say God sent the bears to kill them. To say that he did is only a guess, without backing from this passage itself.
 
The bear attacks may not have been instantaneous. It says that after Elisha prayed, the bears attacked, but he could have prayed, and then a couple days later the bears started attacking, and then after a period of a few months they left the village alone, having killed forty two people by the end of that time period. Or he might have prayed and the bears immediately attacked, killing two or three people and scaring off the rest of the mob, and then over the next few months they killed the rest of the forty-two.

The scripture doesn’t say how much time passed. It may have all been one instantaneous slaughter, though like the rest of you I’ve never heard of such a thing done by a non-human, but it may also have been a long term event.

There certainly are many stories of rogue beasts attacking humans and killing large numbers of them. Some lethal wild animals have killed as many as two hundred people, over periods of years. In the time period of history we’re discussing, people were less of a threat to wild animals than they are now, so the wild animals would have been more bold than they are nowadays. Much as American wild animals were to the first European explorers. There still are rogue animals in modern times that do things like that, but they’re not so common now as they were then.

I read that around 250 or so BC, when Hamilcar Barca wanted to position his army on a hill near Eryx, he first sent out troops to rid the place of any dangerous wild animals, before he dared move his army there. That’s just an indication of how much more dangerous wild animals were then than they are now. Nowadays we wouldn’t worry about it, except perhaps for disease-carrying insects and little parasites. Hamilcar was more concerned about lions and big beasts like that.
 
Let’s get these facts out before any thing is said:

–I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be [a] bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be ** loosed in heaven. (Mt. 16:19)
– Isaiah 45:
5 I am the LORD, and there is no other;
apart from me there is no God.
I will strengthen you,
though you have not acknowledged me,
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6 so that from the rising of the sun
   to the place of its setting
   people may know there is none besides me.
   I am the LORD, and there is no other.

7 I form the light and create darkness,
   I bring prosperity and create disaster;
   I, the LORD, do all these things.
It is the general view of conservative Bible scholars that the young men of Bethel likely were idolaters whose reproaches upon Elisha were expressions of contempt for his prophetic office, and thus, ultimately directed at the God Whom he served. Thus, their punishment was a divine judgment intended to serve as a dramatic example in horribly wicked times.
The tragedy that befell these young men obviously was of divine design. Notice that it was not Elisha who slew those forty-two youths, but the Lord in His Providence.

Respectfully,
PhilJ**
 
ChristianWAB said:
I just got done reading 2 Kings 2:23-25 and my jaw nearly hit the floor.

Being the flawed human that I am, I’m going to assume that I misinterpreted what I read, which is why I came here for clarification.

Here’s how 2 Kings 2:23-25 reads in the NASB version of the Bible:

23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!”

24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.

25 He went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

So, did God send bears to kill 42 kids for making fun of Elisha?
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My standard post on this: :o 🙂 - there is a question whether they were children: naar can be used of children & grown ups, much like French garçon. The Dios kouroi (Castor & Pollux, as they are known in Latin) are the “lads of Zeus” - & the naarim here in 2 Kings may have been followers of the cult of Jehovah as practiced at Bethel (which is criticised several times by the Prophets), & thus been “lads of Jehovah” belonging to that particular holy place of Jehovah. There was an Israelite prohibition against certain kinds of hair-cutting, for cultic reasons.​

So - if this theory has anything in it - the “naarim” would then be representatives of what Elijah & Elisha had been fighting against. Which would make the text an encounter between two different sorts of religion - rather like Elijah’s encounter with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, just a few chapters earlier. The calling down of fire by Elijah on two contingents of soldiers sent to arrest him could support this interpretation of the naarim; for in poetic texts outside the OT, Baal has “lads” & the god El has an army - which would make the “soldiers” & “children” the earthly equivalents of those followers of those gods.

The incident is a pendant to the episode of the passing of Elijah, & should be read as continuous with it: the Elijah cycle of stories is full of incidents which parody & satirise the cult of Baal, & the anger of Elisha is understandable, if the reference to his baldness implied that he was a follower of Baal, or even of the cult of Jehovah as practiced in Israel. Bethel after the division of the ten tribes of Israel (in the North) from Judah & Benjamin (in the South) became an Israelite royal shrine, where Jehovah was represented by bulls as his sacred animals. In the time of Elijah & Elisha, the worship of Jehovah was endangered by the fact that the queen-mother was a Tyrian princess & a zealous worshipper of Baal.

If they were not boys or children - the problem vanishes.
 
These guys were not kids, but “youths”, roving gang members that were dangerous and were going to do Elijah harm. Look it up at tektonics.org

A “youth” in the language it was written in could be anywhere from 15-35 years or something like that. I know that in Chinese (Mandarin) which I can speak, anyone younger than 35 or 40 is typically considered “young” (qingnian) and after that it’s middle age (zhongnian). So, “youth” doesn’t always mean kids.
 
I guess my approach to this passage is a little different. I did look around www.tektonics.org, and it has some interesting stuff.

But I prefer to avoid all the dancing around and linguistic “what is the definition of ‘youth’” rigmarole, and go straight for the heart. The skeptic’s point here is that IF God killed a bunch of kids (whether by Bear Strike or a pillar of salt or a plague of locusts), THEN God is unjust and not worth worshipping.

But that conclusion just doesn’t follow from the premise. You have to remember a couple of things. First, God plays by a different set of rules. Life is a gift from God, and the length of that life is entirely up to God. Period. Second, death is not the end of the line. If you take the line:

“God killed 100 babies”

and rephrase it as

“God took 100 babies to a place where they’re perfectly happy and content for eternity”

the objection really falls away. Sure, those babies’ parents are going to be devastated. But you can’t claim, on the basis of that rewritten-but-equivalent statement, that God is being unjust to the babies.

One might question the equivalence of those two statements – but then you’re getting into a question of God’s capacity for just judgment, which is an entirely different issue.
 
God and Jesus are the same. Jesus sat the children upon his knees and loved them.
1300 years earlier Jesus was tearing then A Sun Deer for laughing at Elishas bald head.

God mellowing over the years brings up the question. Was he still infallibly right when he did it?
This sort of barbarism was perfectly acceptable when Kings was written. Our idea of God was more of a punishing vengeful one. Ask any firstborn in Egypt what they thought of his benificence and mercy.

Now with a fluffier and loving God, we have to square the circle of past scripture.
we can do this by saying “the kids deserved it” or “they were youths not kids”. ive even seen thm described as a mass of ancient Hoodies about to attack poor old Elisha and his cursing was self defence. Right.

All christians feel uncomfortable when they read this. As they do when they read pretty much any part of the OT. Rape , genocide, murder, patricide, incest, homosexuality, the passages keep on flowing.

Simply put,bears diddnt kill the kids. Perhaps one or two got killed over the next few years and the Author of Kings saw an oppotuinity for a miracle in there.
A bit like Hurricane Katrina being Gods wrath on gambeling in New Orleans.

Why do christians get corncerned over the 42 kids when a Jewish Death Squad killed hundreds of Kids and civilians in their “night of the long Knives” that they call passover.
Even down to marking the doors so that God knew which houses to target. Is God so bad at target recognition that he needed marks on houses?
 
When we try to reinterpret bibilcal verses to fit our image of God as we understand Him now , it can open a whole set of new problems.
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The world of  O.T was most likely a world of much evil .....in the form of presence of satanic powers that were esp. virulent through both persons and such practices as idolatry ....
There is ( possibly an exgerrated ) internet story of an evil egyptian mummy who brough death and destruction wherever it happpened to be …

A reverse of the power of relics of holy saints in our own times …

Our Lord had come to desrtoy the powers of evil …

And prior to His coming, it was the Jewish people who were able to maintain any sort of fidelity to the True God …and their unfaithfulness could have had consequences for everyone else …

Hence , it is easy to see how God had to use appropriate measures , on those few occasions when He advocated herem warfare of total destruction and such …

Even in our own times , does not Fr.Amorth talks about how even some buildings can become possessed and have to be destroyed !

’ Deliver us from evil ’ - possibly only in heaven we would know how our Lord, being with us , protect us !
 
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