The Shunammite Woman

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I would like to explore a single episode—or pericope—involving the prophet Elisha, not so much to understand it better (although I certainly want to), but, more importantly, as a basis for discussing what I believe is an important new trend in biblical studies—the shift from the text to the interpreter.

Increasingly, scholars are changing the focus of their inquiry. They are turning away from probing the history behind a biblical text, or even the history of the text. The expanding frontier finds more and more biblical scholars investigating the readers who have interpreted the texts.

Finding out what happened at the Exodus from Egypt, for example, or deriving definitive religious teaching from the biblical account seem less important than asking about how and why we have read the Bible as we have. There is new urgency in finding out the social, religious and moral consequences of how the Bible has been read through the centuries.

Exploring this new and in some ways disturbing phenomenon in a thoroughly traditional way—by interpreting a specific text—will be the burden of this article.

The text is the story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:8–37).

The story occurs as part of a series of loosely connected stories about the prophet Elisha, successor to Elijah, that etch in high relief his “double portion” of prophetic powers (2 Kings 2:9).

In one of these stories, an unnamed woman—the Shunammite—emerges to challenge Elisha’s dominance of this storied world. In that one moment, her lamp outshines Elisha’s. Or at least, she dims the flame kept for Elisha by the first tellers and editors of his tales.

Yet, virtually all interpreters—traditional, as well as modern—have looked past this woman. The web of commentary they have spun fixes on Elisha, almost ignoring the woman. The question is: Why?

The story is briefly told. The Shunammite is a wealthy woman who regularly gives hospitality to Elisha whenever he passes that way. Eventually she builds a roof chamber for him to use on his travels. He is, she tells her husband, a holy man of God.

Soon Elisha decides to reward her for her hospitality, although she has asked for nothing. Elisha tells his servant Gehazi to summon the woman. She comes and stands before Elisha. Elisha instructs Gehazi to ask the woman if she would like the prophet to put in a good word for her with the king or the army commander. She says simply: “I dwell among my own people.” Elisha asks Gehazi what can be done for her. Gehazi advises Elisha that the woman’s husband is old and she has no son. Elisha tells Gehazi to call the woman back again. She comes and stands in the doorway. Elisha tells her that in a year she will “embrace a son.” She replies, “No, my lord, O man of God; do not lie to your maidservant.” But the prophecy comes true.

After the child has grown, he suddenly dies. She lays the dead child on Elisha’s bed and goes to Elisha on Mt. Carmel. When Elisha sees her coming, he tells Gehazi to go out and greet her and inquire of her welfare and that of her husband and child. She tells Gehazi that all is well, but when she gets to Elisha, she catches him by the feet. Gehazi tries to stop her. Elisha tells Gehazi to let her alone: “She is in bitter distress and the Lord has hidden it from me.”

She then says to Elisha, “Did I ask my lord for a son? Did I not say ‘Do not deceive me’?” Elisha addresses Gehazi; he tells Gehazi to go and lay the prophet’s staff on the child’s face.

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But the woman, unsatisfied, will not leave. So Elisha goes and follows her, with Gehazi leading the way. When they arrive, Gehazi places the prophet’s staff on the child’s face, but without results. Then Elisha himself goes into the child and lays upon him, “putting his mouth upon his mouth, his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands; and as he stretched himself upon him, the flesh of the child became warm.” After repeating the procedure, the child “opened his eyes.” The child returns to life! The prophet tells Gehazi once more to summon the woman. This time Elisha addresses her directly: “Take up your son,” he says. She falls at the prophet’s feet, bowing to the ground. The story concludes: “Then she took her son and went out.”

It is easy to understand even from this brief summary how a reader would fix attention on Elisha rather than the woman from Shunem. Indeed, much of the story’s content and many of its rhetorical devices seem calculated to enhance not her position, but Elisha’s.

In both the opening and closing images, the narrative suggests that one owes this prophet both admiration and respect. At the beginning, the “wealthy woman” stands in awe of Elisha; she provides him with a furnished room, since he is, as she says, a “holy man of God” (2 Kings 4:9). In the end, having received back her son, she falls prostrate before Elisha, expressing conventional self-effacement before a higher authority (2 Kings 4:37).

Moreover, the woman herself carries no name. Elisha refers to her as “the Shunammite” (Kings 4:12, 25, 36). The narrator refers to her only as “mother” (Kings 4:20, 30). Namelessness, of course, suggests powerlessness.

What namelessness means is evidenced in another biblical story. In 2 Samuel 13, a brother (Amnon) rapes his half sister (Tamar). Amnon then leaves her violated, aggrieved and in mourning (2 Samuel 13:19). Beside this, he takes away Tamar’s name. Hating her more than he had loved her, so the narrator remarks, Amnon now orders his servant, “Put this woman out of my sight” (2 Samuel 13:17). The Hebrew reads simply the feminine “this” without object or name; we might even translate it “this female thing.”

With this horrifying example in mind, it is fair to ask what it means for our habits of reading that Elisha never grants the Shunammite a name. The narrator, after all, retained Adam’s privilege of naming all creatures on earth (Genesis 2:19–23); yet he denied the Shunammite woman this primal identity. In this way, at the very least, recognition, focus and recall accrue more to Elisha than to the woman.

Elisha’s privileged status is reinforced by the subtle protocol of the story. The narrator insistently portrays a respectful distance between Elisha and the Shunammite. The guest room she prepares is on the roof, physically removed from the family quarters. In their first meeting (2 Kings 4:12–17), we are told of a conversation not between Elisha and the Shunammite, but between Elisha and his servant Gehazi. The conversation is about, not with the woman. She stands by, in the doorway, having presented herself in response to the prophet’s summons. Indeed, the men seem to speak as if she were not there. Elisha, groping for the raw materials of miracle, shapes his own musing question as a command to Gehazi: “Say now to her: ‘Look, you’ve taken all this trouble for us; what is to be done for you?’ ” (2 Kings 4:13a). Apparently overhearing, the Shunammite speaks, but she intrudes tentatively, as though addressing no one in particular: “I dwell among my own people” (2 Kings 4:13b). Elisha takes no notice of her declaration. He continues to inquire of Gehazi (2 Kings 4:14a), who nudges the prophet toward an idea for a way to reward the woman. However, she plays no role in the decision.

Later in the story, Elisha and Gehazi cling to the same conventions. Seeing the woman’s approach (by now she has had the sorrow of her son’s death thrust upon her), Elisha sends Gehazi out with routine greetings, “How are you? And 015your husband? And the child?” (2 Kings 4:25–26). But she casts aside these formal pleasantries in her grief-stricken abandon, and rushes directly to the prophet himself (2 Kings 4:27a). This breakdown of protocol, and more important the narrator’s remarking on it, testify to the strength of the transformed Shunammite. In these few lines of narrative she deliberately challenges Elisha’s preeminence.

Yet, courtly convention (or it also gender convention?) returns at the end of the story. After working the miracle, Elisha summons the mother as usual through Gehazi, and announces, “Take up your son” (2 Kings 4:36). She falls at Elisha’s feet as though before divine or royal authority (2 Kings 4:37; compare 1 Samuel 25:24; Esther 8:3), and then silently withdraws, son in hand. Protocol imposes normalcy on the outcome: Elisha summons, he works miracles, he dispenses rewards.

Yet, one may read otherwise.¹

At their first meeting, the Shunammite strains against protocol; the narrator, however, attempts to uphold its validity (2 Kings 4:16–17). Elisha tells Gehazi that though the woman’s husband is old, she would enjoy a son. The woman reacts strongly; her words respect the form of propriety, but reject the substance with hints of skepticism and moral rebuke: “No, my lord, O man of God; do not lie to your maidservant.” On the other hand, having allowed the Shunammite her say, the writer immediately invokes a standard formula of prophecy fulfilled: “The woman conceived, and she bore a son … as Elisha had said to her” (2 Kings 4:17). In effect, the woman’s challenge is eclipsed by the power of miracle, especially since the facts are reported with that tone of indifference that accepts 016celestial displays—or the turning of seasons—as simply unremarkable.²

The scene recalls the conventional annunciation scene in the Bible (compare Genesis 18:10–14, involving Sarah; Genesis 16:11–14, involving Hagar; Judges 13:3–5, involving Menoah’s wife; and Luke 1:11–20, 26–36, involving John the Baptist and Jesus).³ However, in the Elisha story, it is not an “angel” or other supernatural emissary who announces the imminent birth, as is usually the case (Genesis 16:11; Judges 13:3; Luke 1:30), but rather it is Elisha, a “man of God,” who acts on his own initiative. This variation on the standard scene emphasizes the prophet’s authoritative position. Yet the Shunammite woman seems to doubt the prophet’s promise. The mere fact of her protest (or doubt), since it also conforms to a convention in some of these stories (Genesis 18:12; Luke 1:18, 34), simply reinforces the expectation that, as usual, the emissary who brings such tidings speaks with the backing of miraculous powers. It is the harshness of the Shunammite’s words that are unconventional, that give pause. Moreover, Elisha himself introduces an unusual image: The Shunammite will “embrace” a son (compare Genesis 29:13, 33:4, 48:10; Song of Songs 2:6, 8:3). She will not simply bear a child, and thus, meeting the requirements of literary convention, overcome barrenness or present the world a hero; her future will have something to do with the passions and attachments of motherhood. It is this fact, at the moment not fully understood, that will prove troublesome to Elisha.

The next scenes in the story (2 Kings 4:18–25a, 25b–30) allow us to reorder the relationship between Elisha and the Shunammite. Brusque sentences with action verbs depict birth, childhood and then death, entombment of the son among the effects of the prophet and then urgent arrangements for a journey. The Shunammite is clear-headed and purposeful. Her husband, something of a foil, seems only a mystified bystander. She speaks only to get what she needs, to demand the haste she requires and to deflect her husband’s feeble objections.

The Shunammite’s intense pursuit of her aim propels her past every obstacle, including the formalities that earlier had kept Elisha at some remove. Brushing aside ambassador-like greetings sent from afar, she rushes to the prophet and “grabs hold of Elisha’s feet” (2 Kings 4:27). The expression, “grab hold the feet” is usually a gesture of abject submission (compare 2 Kings 4:37; 1 Samuel 25:23). Here it suggests insistent 017urgency. Her petition explodes into accusatory questions: “Did I ask my lord for a son? Did I not say, ‘Do not deceive me?’ ” (2 Kings 4:28). This mother will be satisfied only by direct dealings with Elisha. He, like Gehazi, is ignorant, however, of what lies behind the woman’s forcefulness and her headlong intrusion into his sanctuary on Mt. Carmel. Acknowledging her distress, Elisha admits (to Gehazi) a lack rarely confessed among the prophets: “The Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me” (2 Kings 4:27; compare 1 Kings 14:5–6).

We begin to see what the characters in the story not—that the Shunammite is pressing an advantage against a prophet whose status has been diminished by ignorance. Moreover, her rebuke implies that Elisha, normally preeminent because of his ability to tap divine powers, lacks more than a tip-off from God. The mother has been wronged in this business; it is her son who is dead, and it is this man of God who somehow should assume responsibility. At the moment of prophecy, she had pleaded, “do not lie,” but in the rhetorical rehearsal of that moment, she focuses on the moral effect of the prophecy: “Did I not say, do not lead me astray?” No longer is she the prophet-honoring Shunammite but a mother demanding that the prophet (whose ignorance she does not know of) accept the moral consequences of his miracle-making.⁴

Elisha’s initial response is to instruct Gehazi to go and heal the child. The woman, in words formally an oath (“As the Lord lives, I will not leave you”; 2 Kings 4:30a), rejects this tactic and demands implicitly that Elisha deal personally with the situation. She will not be thrust aside, either physically or procedurally (2 Kings 4:27), and certainly she will not be ignored in this matter of moral accountability. Elisha seems to understand; but—as though still clinging to formality—he speaks nothing directly to the woman. “He,” the narrator notes simply, “arose and followed her.”

Here we have seen a different ordering of privilege: A clearheaded “mother of the child” (2 Kings 4:30a) crowds convention and pressures those who cling to it, extracting direct action from a somewhat resistant, less-than-fully-informed prophet.

Subsequently, Elisha is restored to his former position of authority. Set apart from ordinary space, locked away in the roof-chamber-now-tomb, Elisha prays to Yahweh for the child, stretches himself like a curative template over the corpse, revives it and presents the now-living son to his mother. His words, “Take up your son” (2 Kings 4:37), not only announce the miracle, but invoke the memory of that earlier annunciatory moment, “You shall embrace a son” (2 Kings 4:16). The promise of birth and this short declaratory command are Elisha’s only words to the Shunammite. Otherwise, he speaks to her only indirectly, through Gehazi. Taken together, these two direct utterances, like a frame around events, express Elisha’s privileged position. In giving the son, Elisha played the part of the emissarial miracle worker who, with the help of his assistant, dispensed largesse among his patrons. In restoring the son, he merely worked his magic again. The narrator quickly concludes: “She took up her son and went out” (2 Kings 4:37). Through this simple closure, the writer allows a last admiring glance to rest on Elisha.

Yet, for me these concluding words cannot entirely suppress the Shunammite’s challenge to prophetic privilege. She is a victor. She forced a change in Elisha. And because of this, her mute gestures of subservience at the end are now highly ambiguous. As in the cases of Abigail with David (1 Samuel 25:23) and Esther before King Ahasuerus (Esther 8:3), her bowing down, prostrate, may hide resourceful manipulation of a holy man’s power in her world. Even her earlier intrusion into Elisha’s and Gehazi’s discussion of a suitable reward for her (2 Kings 4:13–14) in retrospect now admits of another reading. Did she piously refuse any reward for her deeds? Or did she, even without being given the power of a name in the story, announce her autonomy, a “great woman” who needs nothing from the prophet, the king or the king’s men?

Both legend and traditional commentaries on this story imply readings that consistently grant Elisha special privilege. His piety is admired and approved of, and it leads to awesome displays of power. His wonder-working is said to be greater than Elijah’s, who was himself no lightweight. Some traditions leave the Shunammite nameless, but give her a satellite identity: she is the wife of Iddo, a prophet, we are told.⁵ Other sources identify Iddo as the old seer in 1 Kings 13.⁶ The Zohar, a medieval mystical commentary, considers the Shunammite the mother of another prophet, Habakkuk. A traditional Jewish homily⁷ fixes on Elisha, not the Shunammite, as a religious paradigm. The story is understood to teach the duty of gratitude (Elisha’s virtue) in return for hospitality (the woman’s deed).⁸ A Christian sermon by St. Caesarius (c. 469–542 C.E.^a) views Elisha as an allegory of Christ within a strict gender hierarchy. Just as the Shunammite bore a son by the prayer of Elisha, so too, the Church bore a Christian people when Christ came to the Church.⁹

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Modern historical-critical commentators continue to view the Shunammite as a member of the supporting cast. In this role, she implies at most some ancillary lesson for the faithful, who themselves may occupy similarly subordinate positions in their communities.

The following are a few representative statements, which, because they generally appear near the end of the commentator’s discussion, leave us with a sense of the final word:

“Elisha is truly the spirit empowered, wonder working successor to Elijah a truly holy man of God!”¹⁰

“Elisha rewarded the proven hospitality in miraculous ways. He bequeathed the power of life … to give back a dead son.”¹¹

“The instigation for Elisha to perform a miracle comes not from a divine command but only from the heroic faith of the woman …. As in the Gospel, her faith has helped her …. She is an example of a person, who, believing in the man of God and his power, experiences this power.”¹²

“[The Shunammite is] one of the Old Testament’s most attractive characters … [and] her reaction parallels the awe and amazement [for Elisha] the narrative intends to instill in the reader.”¹³

A commentary by T. R. Hobbs offers an interesting variation on this conventional deference to Elisha.¹⁴ Hobbs tells us to look at Elisha’s concern for individuals, and then to look at the motivation for miracles through which Elisha expresses his concern—not to celebrate raw power but to respond compassionately to human needs. For Hobbs, Elisha’s “compassion” and “great tenderness” are humanized by “excessive zeal” (2 Kings 4:13–16) and a “fumbling sense of inadequacy” as he repeatedly tries to raise the dead child. Elisha’s character, which is implicitly contrasted with the Shunammite’s “cold efficient control,” reflects in turn “the very character of God himself” and finds its echo in the ministry of Jesus. Hobbs in the end looks away from the Shunammite and constructs an idealized prophet whose nurturing of the needy flows from a social position of gendered prerogative (in this case that of a man who is assigned personal attributes which in our culture are often associated with women).¹⁵

A recent commentary by Meir Sternberg tells us that the Shunammite woman provided Elisha with hospitality as a “spontaneous act of piety”: When she provides the hospitality, not even the reader knows she is childless. Thus, according to Sternberg, the narrative gives us an “attractive, yet credible portrait of a woman who deems virtue its own recompense.” To Sternberg, the woman’s piety essentially is adulation for Elisha, and her virtue consists simply of self-denying humility, refusing to ask anything of this exalted man of God.¹⁶

All of the commentaries, whether traditional or modern historical-critical, construct a rhetoric of privilege for Elisha. They all weave a web of textual readings that fix our attention on a heroized prophet Elisha, while diverting our gaze from the woman. She is thereby diminished.

Why have commentators, virtually without exception, preferred this way of reading the story rather than one that might allow the woman more determinative power?

I’m not sure I have a good answer. We may observe the consensus of commentators, but to understand the social process by which an opinion comes to be enthroned as consensus is quite another matter. It is too easy to bandy about politicizing slogans, like sexism or misogyny or male chauvinism, as though that would end the discussion.

I would like to propose a line of inquiry that may at least offer a framework within which some answers might be discovered.

Commentators—published readers—tend to focus a single beam of energy on the target to reduce it to its simplest essence. The commentators offer a definitive interpretation of the text, effectively suppressing or neutralizing ambiguities that otherwise might have suggested alternative readings.¹⁷ This tendency to want singular meaning, a bottom line, or at least a better and improved meaning, is of course familiar. It is especially evident in biblical studies because of its roots in theology. Even today, with many scholars engaging in biblical studies in colleges and universities long since separated from the practice and promulgation of religion, scholarly study of the Bible remains significantly driven by theological concerns. In Christian circles at least, this religiously interested social context supports habits of mind and heart that drive toward normative statements of religious truth (the eternal verities of God).

Let us take another step. Since the 17th-century European enlightenment, we have witnessed a marriage between the age-old theologian’s desire for normativity and the literary critic’s desire to lay hold of a text’s original meaning. In the case of the Bible, this means that enormous energy has been devoted to reconstructing the Bible’s original 019circumstances of production, from which we might determine its original meaning, whether placed there by a human author, an editor or even by God, if the notion of divine inspiration be carried to its furthest logical implication.

The new science of historiography made the plain meaning of the Bible, as opposed to allegory and other sorts of esoteric and mystical interpretations, seem much more achievable and reliable. In this way, modern historical “science” supported a shift in values toward “plain meaning” (peshat) that had already been developed in the 11th century by the Jewish commentator known as Rashi as well as by some Christian Hebraists.

Most of us, whether or not we are religious, are probably children of both the theologian’s desire—leading to a conviction—to find the reading (normativity) and modern science’s ostensibly objective effort to find the original understanding of the text. Most modern readers interpret the text with a desire for a stable meaning by which they want to control the interpretations of others, which appear often as not to be subversive misreadings. Considering the place of the Bible in our cultural history, desire and moreover, the assurance that one possesses the definitive meaning, had great, even terrible, social consequences. If you hold fast to the only truth, you hold power to define correct and incorrect, orthodox and heretical, fundamentalist and liberal, Christian superseding Jewish, Jewish against Christian and so on.

Now, let me join these broad cultural tendencies with an assumption about biblical times. Biblical writers more than likely lived in a society in which men dominated not only political and economic affairs, but also the capacity to make and control the symbols of reality—that is, how people represented to themselves the “way things really are” in the world. Thus, when today we read the Elisha story historically, that is, predisposed to discerning what the original (male) writer meant in his own circumstances, we tend to accept a rhetoric of privilege for Elisha as natural; it passes—and we pass it on—unquestioned, quite as invisible as a frequently used turn of phrase.

Another factor that plays a significant role in modern biblical interpretation lies in the high value biblical scholars, especially Protestant Christians, have typically given to biblical prophecy, compared, for example, to biblical law. Biblical scholars like Gerhard von Rad in his widely used, by now modern classic, work, The Message of the Prophets¹⁸ are confessedly Christian theologians seeking to find the theological message in the prophets, but nevertheless attempting to understand the prophets as they really were. In the context of his alleged devotion to the prophets, von Rad subtly disparages the organized ways of established religion. He portrays the prophets as the fullest (and truest) expression of ancient Israelite religion. Why? Because they were privy to the innermost emotions of God and alive to God’s open-ended, radically new salvific dealings with Israel that would sweep away old encrustations of tradition, cult and law.¹⁹ In short, von Rad’s historical description fits perfectly with his underlying theme of Christianity’s new dispensation as foreshadowed in the Hebrew Bible.

Von Rad’s approach, like that of other scholars in his train, has a long and complicated history, going all the way back to early Christian times. We may fairly suppose that a modern Christian literary historian, even if not consciously taking a theological approach, might be especially drawn to a prophet or a prophetic word because of a fundamental and very ancient interpretative paradigm: “Everywhere the Old Testament speaks (prophetically) of Christ.”²⁰

The profile I am suggesting is of a (primarily) Christian reader, historically oriented, granting privilege to an original meaning 042expressed-in-text by an original (male) writer, drawn by religious conviction or acculturated habit to the prophetic. Such an interpreter might be susceptible to reading the story of the unnamed woman from Shunem only as an Elisha story and to standing in awe of Elisha only (and diminishing the woman).

Some readers will be aware that such habits of mind as I have sketched have recently been met by energetic challenges. Many critics and literary theorists, not to mention readers from the margins of our own society, such as women and people of color, have exposed the covert subjectivity that is effaced by the language of historical scholarship. They ask about the social and ideological dimensions of speech, writing and reading. They ask how bodies of traditional knowledge and the professionals who mediate them for us are in fact intertwined with specific forms of personal and institutional power. When focused on the Bible, this line of investigation might, for example, do as I have done: probe the Elisha-centered tradition of interpretation as passed along by biblical critics and try to understand the preference for Elisha partly in the context of general intellectual culture and partly Christian theology, which has its links to churches and denominational publishing houses.

But the roots of the probe and its philosophical underpinnings also tap into this-worldly, modern, often non-theological attitudes and assumptions. Readers of the Bible—and here I speak mainly of scholars—find themselves, whether or not they seek religious truth, in this new world. Competing voices of pluralism, none of which may claim prescriptive power, stand up against theological tradition within which many biblical scholars stand.

Such an apocalyptic scene envisions revolutionaries arrayed against theological armies deployed to defend unitary, definitive meaning in a text, the defensive bulwark of ruling privilege. I have overstated the situation, of course. However the changes occurring in the premises of biblical studies are serious and related to transformations underway in other scholarly disciplines. The situation calls for some judgements to be made.

I take my stand with the pluralists, and against the uniformists. I choose to forgo the certainties that various dogmatisms, secular or religious, may provide. And thus, out of this stance, I have asked about the rhetorics of privilege that lie behind the reading of this particular biblical story. I seek to complicate what may have seemed to have been a straightforward consensus, rooted in objective truth, on how to read this story as basically an Elisha story. I would like to see the day when biblical scholars practice a form of criticism that goes against the grain of such a constructed consensus. By long cultural habit such agreed upon interpretation may seem naturally true, even harmless, but that for those excluded from its protection, can be destructive.

The program of study I hope for need not be anti-theological or anti-religious. It need only be honest, and ask that one’s own blindspots be pointed out by someone else.

Let us return, for a moment, for one last look at Elisha and the Shunammite.

Multiple strategies diminish her place in the tale. The writer encloses her with protocols that protect a lionized Elisha. The editor of Kings includes her as a minor character in a larger collection of stories about the prophet Elisha that reinforce expectations about Elisha’s greatness and miracle working. A long procession of commentators read each other’s works, but more importantly, share a socially formed way of reading that fixes on Elisha and diminishes the Shunammite.

On the other hand, one may refuse the premises that lead to this regime and, like the Shunammite, break with protocol. She can be model of sorts for readers in a new world. The great lady from Shunem might inspire us to counteract the weight of consensus in interpretation, but in a way that does not deny Elisha’s place or the voice of commentators who guard a privilege for Elisha. This might be a way that allows both Elisha and the Shunammite power and independence in the story. It might even provide for new religious insights.

In any event, it is a sign of the new situation in which biblical scholars work that even such a satisfying resolution to our troubles begs to be undone as well. But that is a task for another occasion—or perhaps a letter to the editor.

This article grew out of the Amherst College Bruss Lecture that I delivered in March 1990. I am grateful to my Amherst hosts for the occasion to develop these ideas.

I would like to explore a single episode—or pericope—involving the prophet Elisha, not so much to understand it better (although I certainly want to), but, more importantly, as a basis for discussing what I believe is an important new trend in biblical studies—the shift from the text to the interpreter. Increasingly, scholars are changing the focus of their inquiry. They are turning away from probing the history behind a biblical text, or even the history of the text. The expanding frontier finds more and more biblical scholars investigating the readers who have interpreted the texts. Finding out what […]