Elisha
ELISHA (last half of the ninth century BCE) was a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel. The prophet Elisha (Heb., Elishaʿ) is presented in the Hebrew scriptures not primarily as a spokesperson for God to king and people, as the other prophets were, but as a holy man and a wonder-worker. In a series of hagiographic tales (2 Kgs. 2–8), his unusual powers are portrayed by his control over nature, his multiplication of food and oil, his healing the sick or raising the dead, and his powers of extrasensory perception. Such stories are similar to the legends of Christian saints and Jewish rabbis.
Elisha is associated with prophetic guilds known as the sons of the prophets; he served as their leader, or "father." The social status and religious purpose of such communities are quite unclear from the texts, so they shed little light on the nature of Elisha's prophetic office. In some stories Elisha is an itinerant prophet, traveling from place to place with his assistant; in others, he is a city dweller and property owner. The tradition says nothing about his teaching or his social and religious concerns. Nor does it reflect any protest against political and religious authorities, such as in the case of Elijah and the eighth-century prophets.
While some scholars accept the biblical chronology and order of events, it seems more likely that the period of Elisha's activity should be placed entirely within the reigns of Jehu, Jehoahaz, and Jehoash (c. 842–786 BCE). This was a period of Syrian domination of Israel, a fact that is reflected in several of the stories. The historian of Kings, however, mistakenly placed the Elisha cycle in the time before the revolt of Jehu. In this way he extended Elisha's ministry back to the time of Ahab and made him a successor of Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:19–21, 2 Kgs. 2), suggesting a tradition of regular prophetic succession. Thus two quite distinct prophetic traditions influenced each other in the final formation of the text.
Bibliography
There are no extensive treatments of the Elisha cycle in English. For the present, therefore, see the brief discussion by Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 68–77. Two studies of special importance are J. Maxwell Miller's "The Elisha Cycle and the Accounts of the Omride Wars," Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (December 1966): 441–454, and Alexander Rofé's "The Classification of the Prophetical Stories," Journal of Biblical Literature 89 (December 1970): 427–440.
New Sources
Bergen, Wesley J. Elisha and the End of Prophetism. Sheffield, 1999.
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