2 Kings 2:16-25 ▼

16 and say to him, “Now behold, there are fifty men with your servants, sons of valor: please let them go, and they seek your lord, lest the Spirit of YHWH has taken him up, and casts him on one of the hills or into one of the valleys”; and he says, “You do not send.”

17 And they press on him, until he is ashamed, and he says, “Send”; and they send fifty men, and they seek three days, and have not found him;

18 and they return to him—and he is abiding in Jericho—and he says to them, “Did I not say to you, Do not go?”

19 And the men of the city say to Elisha, “Now behold, the site of the city [is] good, as my lord sees, and the waters [are] bad, and the earth sterile.”

20 And he says, “Bring a new dish to me, and place salt there”; and they bring [it] to him,

21 and he goes out to the source of the waters, and casts salt there, and says, “Thus said YHWH: I have given healing to these waters; there is not anymore death and sterility there.”

22 And the waters are healed to this day, according to the word of Elisha that he spoke.

23 And he goes up from there to Beth-El, and he is going up in the way, and little youths have come out from the city, and scoff at him, and say to him, “Go up, bald-head! Go up, bald-head!”

24 And he looks behind him, and sees them, and declares them vile in the Name of YHWH, and two bears come out of the forest and ripped apart forty-two of the boys.

25 And he goes from there to the hill of Carmel, and from there he has turned back to Samaria.