Elisha: from slaying oxen to the killing of humans
The prophet Isaiah minces no words about the severity of slaying an ox by saying, “He that butchered an ox” is as if “he slew a man” (66:3); I unpack this loaded statement in my new book “Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible” (Wipf and Stock Publishers). Namely, Isaiah sounds a warning that the slaughtering of an ox, even as a personal sacrificial offering (albeit when done merely as pro forma with no personal contrition of guilt for wrongdoing, per Malbim), is tantamount to or would lead to the murder of a human being. The few biblical references to the slaughtering of an ox may likely attest to such killings because they were noteworthy, and not a casual matter or an afterthought.
One notorious case where dispatching an ox leads in short order to the mass slaying of people is evident in the gory saga that takes place on Mt. Carmel, where Elijah the prophet faces off hundreds of his fellow Israelite pagan priests who served in the cult of the Canaanite idols Baal and Asherah. To make the theological statement that only God was the real deity (with which the concluding service on Yom Kippur ends), Elijah, with his militant followers, went on from sacrificing a bullock to slaying multitudes of people by the sword at the Kishon River (1 Kgs 18:33, 40).
Although Elijah ignored the commandment that restricted all types of offerings to “the place” that God designated “to cause His name to dwell there” (Deut 12:11), which in Elijah’s time was the Jerusalem Temple, God accepted de facto that burnt offering of the bullock when a heavenly flame consumed it. To be sure, God never instructs Elijah to commit this bloodbath, nor does God express verbal approval, let alone contentment, at this mass slaughter.
On the contrary, God decides in the aftermath of this atrocity that began with the slaughtering of an ox, and then led to the dispatch of numerous Israelites, to retire Elijah from his prophetic service and have him succeeded by Elisha ben Shafat (as we read in this weekly Haftarah for the Pinchas Torah portion – 1 Kgs 19:16).
Elisha, Elijah’s successor in prophecy, opts to begin his new career by slaying his two oxen and boiling their flesh for a festive meal. But not long after taking over Elijah’s prophetic tasks, he set two she-bears at a large group of resentful children from Na’aran by invoking God’s ineffable name, upon which the two animals dispatched the boys.
Thus, God seems to be behind the horrific death of those two scores of lads who mocked Elisha shortly after he succeeded Elijah in prophecy. As I quote from my above-mentioned book: “Elisha responds to their vituperation by invoking God’s ineffable name in a malediction of his own resulting in the immediate appearance on the scene of two she-bears who emerged from the forest and ‘mauled forty-two of the boys’ (2 Kgs 2:24) … a ruthless, vengeful action.”
Despite Elisha’s otherwise laudable career, commentators suggested that his severe cursing was “a major failure in carrying out his prophetic duties. Consequently, the Talmud suggests that Elisha’s illnesses that plagued him throughout his life were, in part, a punishment for his overreaction by siccing those bears on the children, presumably even with God’s willing collaboration…”
All in all, Elisha’s slaying of his pair of oxen, not unlike what Elijah did on Mt. Carmel, led “to the gratuitous slaying of many human lives, thus making one wonder if that is what Isaiah meant when saying, ‘He that kills an ox is as if he slew a man.’”