This haftarah opens briefly with Elisha multiplying a modest gift of bread and grain to feed a hundred men with some left over, before turning to its main narrative: Naaman, a celebrated military commander of Aram afflicted with tzaraat, is told by a captured Israelite servant girl in his own household that a prophet in Samaria could cure him.
Naaman travels to Israel with a letter and lavish gifts, and Elisha, without even coming out to meet him personally, sends word that Naaman should bathe seven times in the Jordan River. Naaman is initially insulted, expecting a more dramatic ritual and considering the rivers of his own homeland superior to Israel's, but his servants persuade him to try the simple instruction anyway, and his skin is restored, becoming like that of a young child.
The haftarah closes with Naaman returning to declare that he now knows there is no god in all the earth except in Israel, offering gifts Elisha refuses to accept, and asking to take soil from Israel home with him so that he might continue to offer sacrifices to this God even after returning to his own country.
The servant girl who first tells Naaman about the prophet is easy to overlook in a story centered on a powerful commander, yet without her modest, almost incidental remark the entire healing never takes place, a detail the tradition has noted as its own quiet lesson about whose words can matter most.