Elisha

Samuel must piece together YHWH’s intention to anoint David. Elisha’s plan to save a widow and her sons unfolds in fits and starts.

With a miracle of an overflowing jar of oil, Elisha saves a widow’s sons from debt-slavery. He then grants the Shunammite woman a child and later resurrects that child from an untimely death. Both stories craft a portrait of a prophet exercising powers usually reserved for God. Is this prophetic hagiography or criticism of his encroachment on God’s domain?

Israelite women are conspicuously absent from the Decalogue’s Shabbat law. Three stories in the Prophets featuring female characters—Rahab the prostitute, the great woman of Shunem, and Queen Athaliah—each tie to Shabbat in some unconventional way.

Virtually all biblical scholars—even feminist biblical scholars—consider the Bible and ancient Israelite society patriarchal. But is that a valid designation?

In the Prophets, Israelite leaders such as Joshua, Saul, David, and Ahab use divination to help them make decisions, just as their ancient Near Eastern counterparts did. The Torah sidesteps the divinatory character of these objects and practices, and instead, emphasizes their ritual and religious character.

Biblical tradition often depicts difficult father and son relationships. Accordingly, the concluding verses of Malachi—the final book of the Prophets—imagines ultimate redemption through a metaphor of father-son reconciliation, in which the fire and brimstone prophet Elijah is its unlikely harbinger. Leave it to the poet Yehuda Amichai to step in and offer a counter-model to rescue the metaphor.

And the challenges of putting it into practice.