2nd Kings Chapter 13 verse 19 Holy Bible
And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times: then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it, whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.
read chapter 13 in ASV
Then the man of God was angry with him and said, If you had done it five or six times, then you would have overcome Aram completely; but now you will only overcome them three times.
read chapter 13 in BBE
And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then wouldest thou have smitten the Syrians till thou hadst consumed [them]; whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.
read chapter 13 in DARBY
And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it: whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.
read chapter 13 in KJV
And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldst have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it: whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.
read chapter 13 in WBT
The man of God was angry with him, and said, You should have struck five or six times: then had you struck Syria until you had consumed it, whereas now you shall strike Syria but thrice.
read chapter 13 in WEB
And the man of God is wroth against him, and saith, `By smiting five or six times then thou hadst smitten Aram till consuming; and now, three times thou dost smite Aram.'
read chapter 13 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 19. - And the man of God (comp. 2 Kings 4:7, 25; 2 Kings 6:6, 9; 2 Kings 8:4, etc.) was wroth with him. Elisha was angered at the lukewarmness of Joash, and his lack of faith and zeal. He himself, from his higher standpoint, saw the greatness of the opportunity, the abundance of favor which God was ready to grant, and the way in which God's favor was stinted and narrowed by Joash's want of receptiveness. Had the king been equal to the occasion, a full end might at once have been made of Syria, and Israel might have been enabled to brace herself for the still more perilous struggle with Assyria, in which she ultimately succumbed. And said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it. It has been suggested that Joash associated the number throe with the notion of completeness, and "thought that what was done thrice was done perfectly" (Bahr); but in this case the prophet would scarcely have been angered. It is far more consonant with the entire narrative to suppose that he stopped from mere weariness, and want of strong faith and zeal. If he had been earnestly desirous of victory, and had had faith in the symbolical action as divinely directed, he would have kept on smiting till the prophet told him it was enough, or at any rate would have smitten the ground five or six times instead of three. The idea that he abstained from modesty or from prudence, "lest too extravagant demands might deprive him of all" (Von Gerlach), finds no support in the text of the narrative. He abstained (as Keil says) because "he was wanting in the proper zeal for obtaining the full promises of God." Had it been otherwise, the complete success obtained by Jeroboam II. (2 Kings 4:25-28) might have been anticipated by the space of fifteen or twenty years. Whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice (comp. ver. 25, which declares that this prophecy was exactly accomplished).
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(19) The man of God was wroth with him.--Because his present want of zeal augured a like deficiency in prosecuting the war hereafter. The natural irritability of the sick man may also have had something to do with it. Thenius well remarks on the manifestly historical character of the entire scene. It may be added that, to appreciate it fully, we must remember that ???????????, or soothsaying by means of arrows, was a practice of unknown antiquity in the Semitic world. Shooting an arrow, and observing where and how it fell, was one method of trying to fathom the secrets of that Power which overrules events and foreknows the future. The proceedings of David and Jonathan, recorded in 1Samuel 20:35, seq., appear to have been an instance of this sort of divination, which in principle is quite analogous to casting lots, a practice so familiar to readers of the Bible. The second process--that described in 2Kings 13:18--seems equally to have depended upon chance, according to modern ideas. The prophet left it to the spontaneous impulse of the king to determine the number of strokes; because he believed that the result, whatever it was, would Proverbs 16:33). Elisha's anger was the natural anger of the man and the patriot, disappointed at the result of a divination from which he had hoped greater things. In conclusion, it cannot be too often or too forcibly urged upon students of the true religion that the essential differences which isolate it from all imperfect or retrograde systems are to be found not so much in matters of outward organisation, form, and ritual, such as priesthoods and sacrifices, prophets and modes of divination, which were pretty much the same everywhere in Semitic antiquity; but in the inward spirit and substance of its teaching, in the vital truths which it handed on through successive ages, and, above all, in its steady progress from lower to higher conceptions of the Divine character and purposes, and of the right relations of man to God and his fellow-creatures.
