Elisha

Elisha (Hebrew Elisha, "God is salvation") son of Shaphat, of Abel-meholah, was the disciple and prophetic successor of Elijah, ministering in the northern kingdom of Israel for some sixty years through the reigns of Joram, Jehu, Jehoahaz, and Joash. His very name sums up the ministry he exercised — one of healing, deliverance, and life, more public and national than his master's, and marked by more recorded miracles than any other figure in the Old Testament.

Elisha was called as he plowed with twelve yoke of oxen, when Elijah passed by and cast his mantle upon him. In a decisive break with his old life, Elisha slaughtered his oxen, burned his plowing equipment to cook them, and rose to follow and serve the prophet (1 Kings 19:19–21). When Elijah was taken up to heaven in the whirlwind, Elisha had asked for a "double portion" of his spirit; taking up the fallen mantle, he struck the Jordan and crossed over, crying, "Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah?" — and the company of the prophets recognized that Elijah's spirit rested on him (2 Kings 2:9–15).

His miracles abound through the books of Kings. He healed the bitter spring of Jericho with salt, multiplied a widow's oil to pay her debt, and promised a son to the hospitable Shunammite woman and later raised that son from death (2 Kings 4:1–7, 32–37). He purified a poisoned stew, fed a hundred men with twenty loaves, and made an iron axe-head float (2 Kings 4:42–44; 2 Kings 6:6). Most famously he sent the Syrian commander Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan and so be cleansed of leprosy, refusing all reward (2 Kings 5:10–16). When Syrian raiders came against him, he struck their army with blindness, led them into Samaria, and bade the king feed them home in peace (2 Kings 6:18–23), and he foretold the sudden, miraculous lifting of Ben-hadad's terrible siege of Samaria (2 Kings 7:1).

Elisha's reach extended to thrones and nations: through his word Hazael came to the throne of Syria and Jehu was anointed king over Israel to purge the house of Ahab (2 Kings 8:13; 2 Kings 9:1–3), and on his deathbed he gave King Joash the sign of the arrows promising victory over Aram (2 Kings 13:14–19). So great was the life-giving power that rested on him that even after his death a corpse thrown into his tomb revived at the touch of his bones (2 Kings 13:21). His ministry, full of grace to the lowly and even to foreigners, anticipates the Saviour's own works of cleansing the leper, multiplying bread, and raising the dead; and Jesus himself pointed to Naaman the Syrian, healed by Elisha, as a sign that God's saving mercy reaches beyond Israel to the nations (Luke 4:27).