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2 Kings 3 recounts the story of a rebellion against Israel by the king of Moab. Israel, together with its allies Judah and Edom, leads a punitive expedition that invades and occupies most of the rebel territory. The rebellion is ultimately successful, however, after Israel abruptly breaks off its siege of the Moabite king's last stronghold and returns home. The reason given is a "great anger" that befell them after the Moabite king sacrificed his son on the city wall.
The biblical account leaves two mysteries unsolved: why Israel, on the brink of victory, gave up the fight, and why the prophet Elisha, who had foretold victory and on whose predictions the allied armies relied, made a false prophecy. It is the second question that I wish to address in this note.1
The discomfort of commentators with the failed prophecy is illustrated by Burke O. Long, who writes that "certain thematic inconsistencies, or tensions, lurk beneath the surface" of the narrative. He then invokes the customary stock-in-trade of the biblical commentator-the incompetent redaction of two inconsistent traditions. The "oracleactualization narrative," which demanded total victory, shaped but failed to eliminate the stubborn vestige of an earlier tradition recounting incomplete victory.2
"Incomplete victory" is a euphemism, as is Long's earlier description of the outcome as "a less than total defeat of Moab."3 The plain fact is that Israel lost the war. For Joe M. Sprinkle, this does not mean that Elisha's prophecy failed. His reasoning is that Israel was being punished for violating the rules of law laid down in Deut 20:1-20 by cutting down fruit trees and not offering peace terms. What Elisha did not say was that after Israel fulfilled these prophecies, YHWH would judge them for doing...