📖WEB · 2 Kings 6:31
What does 2 Kings 6:31 mean?
"Then he said, “God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat stays on him today.”"
— 2 Kings 6:31 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
The king said to her, “What is your problem?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’
So we boiled my son, and ate him: and I said to her on the next day, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him;’ and she has hidden her son.”
When the king heard the words of the woman, he tore his clothes. Now he was passing by on the wall, and the people looked, and behold, he had sackcloth underneath on his body.
Then he said, “God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat stays on him today.”
But Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. Then the king sent a man from before him; but before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, “Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent to take away my head? Behold, when the messenger comes, shut the door, and hold the door shut against him. Isn’t the sound of his master’s feet behind him?”
While he was still talking with them, behold, the messenger came down to him. Then he said, “Behold, this evil is from Yahweh. Why should I wait for Yahweh any longer?”
Explanation
This verse captures a moment of raw desperation and misplaced blame. The speaker is Jehoram, king of Israel (or possibly identified simply as "the king" in the narrative), and he is swearing a solemn oath — a common ancient Near Eastern form of self-curse — declaring that he wants God to punish him severely if he fails to have the prophet Elisha executed that very day. In essence, he is saying, "May God strike me down and worse if Elisha's head is not cut off before this day ends."
The context is grim. The Syrian king Ben-Hadad has laid siege to Samaria, and the famine inside the city has grown so severe that basic food has become unimaginably scarce and expensive (verse 25 mentions donkey heads and dove's dung being sold at exorbitant prices). Just before this verse, a horrifying scene unfolds: a woman cries out to the king, and when he thinks she wants food, she reveals that she and another woman had agreed to boil and eat their own sons, one at a time, to survive. She had already given up her son, but the other woman then hid hers rather than fulfill the pact. Upon hearing this atrocity, the
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