Elisha

When Elijah is taken up in the whirlwind, Elisha tears his own clothes, picks up the fallen mantle, and strikes the Jordan with it just as his master had. The water parts, and the sons of the prophets watching from Jericho recognize at once that the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. He had asked for a double portion of that spirit before the ascent, the customary share of a firstborn heir, and the biblical narrative bears the claim out: Elisha performs roughly twice as many wonders as Elijah across his own, longer ministry.

The miracles that follow are domestic and civic as often as they are dramatic. He multiplies a widow's jar of oil so she can pay her debts and keep her sons out of slavery. He restores life to the son of a Shunammite woman who had given him lodging, after first sending his servant Gehazi ahead with his staff, which fails to revive the child, so Elisha comes himself and stretches out over the body. He purifies a pot of poisoned stew for the company of prophets, feeds a hundred men from twenty barley loaves with food left over, and makes a borrowed iron axe head float to the surface of the Jordan for a workman who feared he could not repay it. Each of these is a small crisis of ordinary life, not a national confrontation like Carmel, which is part of why Elisha's ministry reads as more embedded in daily community than Elijah's.

Elisha's ministry reaches beyond individual wonders into the politics of two kingdoms. He sends a member of the prophetic guild to anoint Jehu as king of Israel with instructions to destroy the house of Ahab, setting in motion the bloody end of that dynasty. In Damascus he weeps before Hazael, foreseeing the harm Hazael will do to Israel once he succeeds Ben-Hadad as king of Aram, and Hazael becomes king shortly after their meeting. Both episodes place a prophet, rather than a priest or a king's own court, at the hinge of dynastic succession in two separate nations.

His best known single story is the healing of Naaman, the commander of the Aramean army, who arrives in Israel seeking a cure for his leprosy and is offended to be told, secondhand through a messenger, simply to wash seven times in the Jordan. Naaman's recovery after he swallows his pride and obeys becomes a story about who God will heal and on what terms, later cited as an example that mercy has never been confined to Israel alone. Elisha's own death is unremarkable by comparison, an illness rather than a translation to heaven, but the biblical text adds one more wonder after it: a corpse hastily thrown into his tomb to escape a raiding party touches Elisha's bones and comes back to life, the only posthumous miracle attributed to any figure in the Hebrew Bible.