At the very least, I’m impressed by how much thought has been made in this subject despite the anti-theistic views I usually see in my environment. It’s quite a shame how the theory, “Intelligent Design” isn’t even considered not for intellectual merit, but for ideological ones.

Now there appears to be a resurgence of a group of thinkers who call themselves, “The Enlightened” and follow the school of “free thought.” These guys base the validity of truth on logic and reason, including metaphysical claims. All I can say is good luck. You’ll need it.

“And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. / And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.”
Kings 2:23-24, King James Version

I’m pretty familiar with this verse as numerous atheists/agnostics love quoting this to me whenever they talk to me about how ‘God loves children’ and quote it with dripping sarcasm. However, they do raise up a valid point. If God is so good, why did he allow Elisha to set loose two bears and maul forty-two children?

However, I also thought several more points that were really odd.

1. Elisha did good miracles in the proceeding chapters and he was generally a nice guy. He helped a starving mother and child survive by producing oil for bread and brought another child to life. This seemed contradictory because he appeared to be nice to children compared to the beginning.

2. It’s really odd for a large, and apparently very organized mob of kids to exit out of a city considering there are plenty of violent robbers and bandits. Why would a group numbering over forty-two march out just to mock someone with a bald head while heading up to Bethel?

So I decided to take a look at my NIV version and here is the quotation I have.

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

At first, it doesn’t seem to be very different but I did notice instead of the word children, it wrote youths. Now, youths can be read as completely differently compared to children. Fed up with my increasing confusion and misgivings, I’ve decided to look up online because I didn’t trust my own literal interpretation and wanted to see how it’s supposed to be read in the proper context, from people in Elisha’s time.

With a quick search on Google, most of the sources I’ve landed on come from atheists/skeptics who talk about God’s “cruel” nature with exuberant glee. Yet I finally reached one site which took a serious look at the passage from the religious perspective.

It might be a bit tl;dr for some but here is what I gathered in rudimentary points inside my head.

1. The word that describes the word child, n’aar can also be used to describe youths in their twenties and it has been in several other verses.

2. “Go on up” can also be interpreted as following in Elijah’s footsteps when he went up in the chariot of fire. In other words, they told him to die.

3. Elijah’s curse does not mean ‘foul language’ but divine punishment and that is when the bears came out.

So if I read in it’s context and all of the above statements are true, than that means we’re dealing with a mob of young adults threatening Elisha to die. If I read it literally, a bunch of kids laugh at Elisha’s baldness.

Perhaps it is my Christian bias, but I have to go with the latter explanation. I am still unconvinced that a group of over forty-three kids can be arranged to leave the safety of their homes and simultaneously laugh at someone’s bald head for fun. I did initially read the passage literally and the Bible cannot always be analyzed in that manner. If I read all of Shakespeare literally I would’ve failed my high school English class long ago.

Well, I won’t force the readers to take my own view and you can still believe in the former if you wish. All I ask is to read and seriously contemplate both sides of a story before weighing in your final decision.

Thanks to Forest for inspiring me to write this!