2 Kings 6:24-33
Syria Besieges Samaria in Famine
24 And it happened after this that Ben-Hadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. 25 And there was a great famine in Samaria; and indeed they besieged it until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a kab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver.
26 Then, as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!”
27 And he said, “If the LORD does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress?” 28 Then the king said to her, “What is troubling you?”
And she answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ 29 So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him’; but she has hidden her son.”
30 Now it happened, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he tore his clothes; and as he passed by on the wall, the people looked, and there underneath he had sackcloth on his body. 31 Then he said, “God do so to me and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today!”
32 But Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. And the king sent a man ahead of him, but before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, “Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent someone to take away my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door, and hold him fast at the door. Is not the sound of his master’s feet behind him?” 33 And while he was still talking with them, there was the messenger, coming down to him; and then the king said, “Surely this calamity is from the LORD; why should I wait for the LORD any longer?”
A while later after the Syrian raiders had left Samaria, having been blinded by the LORD and their lives spared after being led into captivity and then freedom, Ben-Hadad the king of Syria attacked again. Most likely, Syria was so humiliated that they wanted to destroy that city of their near demise and so set siege walls against it to prevent any from leaving while they starved out the people of Israel there. The starvation got so bad that the king heard of two women eating one of their babies to stay alive, and that deception drove one to hide hers after devouring the other’s. He tore his clothes in an act of repentance and grief as he blamed Elisha for the siege due to the previous humiliation of the Syrians; he seemed to forget, however, that it was the word and work of the LORD who tricked the foreign army and let them go in shame after capturing them within the same city walls prior to this attack. He tried to blame Elisha for an attempt on his own life just to be certain to have his head. The tide of the battle was about to turn, however, as we will see in the following chapter. It is so easy to blame God when things are going badly, and easier to blame the messenger who makes God’s word plain especially when it does not favor the hearer. But in the end, the Lord has His way for our good and His glory through all circumstances, both good and bad. Do we then choose to trust Him or shoot the messenger?
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