1 Kings 19:19-21
The mantle and the oxen
Elijah passes and throws his mantle on him and keeps walking. Elisha burns the equipment of his old life to cook a farewell meal, which leaves nothing to go back to.
People of the Bible
Elisha
Asked for a double portion of his master’s spirit, and spent fifty years mostly feeding people and mending things.
Elisha is ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen when a mantle lands on his shoulders. He asks leave to kiss his parents, then kills the oxen, burns the plough to cook them, feeds the people and follows. He asks for a double portion and gets it, and the miracles that follow are almost all domestic: a widow’s oil, a poisoned pot, twenty loaves for a hundred men, an axe head floating, a child brought back in an upstairs room. He also makes a Syrian army blind, leads them into Samaria, and then tells the king to feed them and send them home.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Elisha
- 01
- 02
2 Kings 2:9-15
A double portion
He asks for what an eldest son inherits. He is told it is a hard thing and that he will have it if he sees him go, and he does, and picks up the mantle that fell.
- 03
2 Kings 4:1-7
Borrow vessels, not a few
A widow about to lose her two sons to a creditor has one pot of oil. He tells her to borrow every empty vessel she can, shut the door, and pour. The oil stops when the vessels run out.
- 04
2 Kings 4:18-37
The room on the wall
The Shunammite’s son dies on her knees at noon. She lays him on the prophet’s bed, rides for Carmel, and will not be fobbed off with a staff sent ahead by a servant.
- 05
2 Kings 6:8-23
They that are with us are more
His servant sees the city surrounded and panics. Elisha prays for his eyes to be opened, then prays the enemy blind, walks them to Samaria, and orders bread and water instead of swords.
Why it matters
Where Elijah is fire on a mountain, Elisha is the same power spent almost entirely on small mercies and foreigners. The enemy general he heals and will not be paid for, the enemy army he feeds, the barren woman, the borrowed axe. Jesus names both scenes that were most offensive to his hometown congregation: Elijah sent to a widow in Sidon, and Elisha cleansing Naaman the Syrian and no other leper in Israel.
14 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
