Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of 2 Kings 5:10
And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.
10. Elisha sent a messenger unto him ] The princely cavalcade waited at Elisha’s door, but the prophet did not come forth. We need not think of him as avoiding a leprous person, either from fear of infection, or from legal scruples. It was rather that he wished to prevent any thought of himself as the worker of the cure coming into Naaman’s mind. The Syrian captain’s idea was, as we can see from the sequel, that Jehovah was specially the God of the land of Israel. If he were sent to one of the streams of that land, he would be most likely, to connect, as he actually did, his recovery with the might of the God of Israel. The prophet would therefore only be the mouthpiece of Jehovah, and for this reason sent his direction by a messenger.
Go and wash in Jordan ] Naaman would be quite sure that the waters of the Jordan were not a cure for leprosy, otherwise there would have been no lepers in Israel. The journey from Samaria to the river would be a great test of his faith, and would set the matter before him in a very different aspect from that in which he had before viewed it. He had come as a mighty person to present his request to a king. He is first of all brought to the humble door of the prophet, and from thence sent on a further journey to what he would naturally look on as an insignificant stream. It was not to the king, nor the prophet, nor the river, that his healing could be ascribed if it were effected. We can understand how difficult this new lesson was for Naaman to learn.
seven times ] Since the seven days of God’s first week, the number ‘seven’ has been held somewhat more sacred than other numbers. Hence its frequent mention in religious services and ceremonial. Cf. also its occurrence in the narrative of the deluge; in the appointment of the passover; in the observances connected with the cleansing of lepers, which may account for the use of the number in the present narrative. It was the number of the priests who blew with trumpets before the ark as the people entered the holy land, and for seven days they were to compass Jericho, and on the seventh day to do so seven times. These are but a few out of the instances in which the number is similarly used.
and thy flesh shall come again to thee ] The expression is well suited to the case, for in leprosy the body or the part affected is covered with an incrustation, so that the flesh seems all to have disappeared.
and thou shalt be clean ] The Hebrew has the imperative ‘and be thou clean’, as is noted on the margin of R.V. Elisha is speaking as Jehovah’s minister, thus the imperative is not unfitting, and calls to mind the words of Christ to another leper (Mat 8:3) ‘I will, be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed’.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Elisha was not deterred from personally meeting Naaman because he was a leper. He sent a messenger because Naaman had over-estimated his own importance 2Ki 5:11), and needed rebuke.
And wash in Jordan – Compare the marginal references. A command is given which tests the faith of the recipient, and the miracle is not performed until such faith is openly evidenced.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 10. Sent a messenger] Did not come out to speak with him: he had got his orders from God, and he transmitted them to Naaman by his servant.
Wash in Jordan seven times] The waters of Jordan had no tendency to remove this disorder but God chose to make them the means by which he would convey his healing power. He who is the author of life, health, and salvation, has a right to dispense, convey, and maintain them, by whatsoever means he pleases.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Elisha sent a messenger; partly, to try and exercise Naamans faith and obedience; partly, for the honour of his religion and ministry, that it might appear he sought not his own glory and profit in his miraculous performances, but only Gods honour, and the good of men; and partly, for the discovery of the almighty power of God, that could by such slight means cure so desperate a disease.
Thy flesh shall come again; which was in great part consumed by the leprosy. See Num 12:12.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
And Elisha sent a messenger unto him,…. Or returned an answer by Naaman’s messenger; he did not go out to him, choosing to be retired, as he commonly did; and being perhaps employed in prayer for the cure; and it may be also to show his contempt of or little regard he had to worldly grandeur and honour, as well as to mortify the pride of Naaman:
saying, go and wash in Jordan seven times; so, according to the law of the cleansing the leper, he was to be sprinkled seven times, and on the seventh day his flesh was to be bathed or dipped all over in water, which is meant by washing here, Le 14:7
and thy flesh shall come again to thee; which was eaten and consumed by the disease on him:
and thou shalt be clean; freed from this pollution, or filthy disease, with which he was defiled; for a leper was reckoned unclean, Le 13:3.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
(10) Elisha sent a messenger.Avoiding personal contact with a leper. (Comp. 2Ki. 5:15, where Naaman, when restored, goes in and stands before the prophet.) Perhaps reverence held back those who consulted a great prophet from entering his presence (comp. 2Ki. 4:12); and therefore, Naaman stopped with his followers outside the house. Keil suggests that Elisha did not come out to Naaman, because he wished to humble his pride, and to show that his worldly magnificence did not impress the prophet. But, as Thenius says, there is no trace of pride about Naaman.
Go.Infinitive, equivalent to the imperative. (Comp. 2Ki. 3:16; and perhaps 2Ki. 4:43.)
Wash in (the) Jordan.This command would make it clear that Naaman was not cured by any external means applied by the prophet. The Syrians knew as well as the Israelites that the Jordan could not heal leprosy (Bhr). Naaman was to understand that he was healed by the God of Israel, at His prophets prayer. (Comp. 2Ki. 5:15.)
Thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.Literally, and let thy flesh come back to thee, and be thou clean. Leprosy is characterised by raw flesh and running sores, which end in entire wasting away of the tissues.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
10. Sent a messenger He would not respect Naaman’s pride enough to do him the honour of going out to him in person. It was his purpose to humble the proud spirit of the Syrian soldier.
Wash in Jordan seven times This command was another measure designed to humble Naaman even more than the neglect of the prophet to come out of his house to see him. So the very simplicity of the Gospel is a stumbling block to the proud.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
And says not the prophet, in this instance, like the gospel? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, is the sweet language it proclaims. Go, wash in the blood of the Lamb, not seven times indeed, for he that is once washed, needs no more sacrifice for sin. Heb 10:18 ., And, as Jesus himself graciously said, needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit. Joh 13:10 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
2Ki 5:10 And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.
Ver. 10. Go and wash in Jordan seven times. ] This was the prophet’s oracle, which he construeth for a contempt, and thereupon blustereth. 2Ki 5:11-12 The simplicity of Christ is still much mistaken by the mad world, ever besides itself in point of salvation.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
2 Kings
NAAMAN’S WRATH
2Ki 5:10 – 2Ki 5:11
These two figures are significant of much beyond themselves. Elisha the prophet is the bearer of a divine cure. Naaman, the great Syrian noble, is stricken with the disease that throughout the Old Testament is treated as a parable of sin and death. He was the commander-in-chief of the army of Damascus, high in favour at Ben-hadad’s court; his reputation and renown were on every tongue, but he was a leper. There is a ‘but’ in every fortune, as there is a ‘but’ in every character.
So he comes to the prophet’s humble home in Samaria, and we find him waiting, a suppliant at the gate, with his cavalcade of attendants, and a present worth many thousands of pounds in our English money.
How does the prophet receive his distinguished visitor? In all the rest of his actions we find Elisha gentle, accessible, forgetful of his dignity. Here his conduct would be discourteous if there were not a reason for it. He is reserved, unsympathetic, keeps the great man at the staff-end, will not even come out to receive him as common courtesy might have suggested; sends him a curt message of direction, with not a word more than was necessary.
And then, naturally enough, the hot soldier begins to explode. His pride is touched; he has not been received with due deference. If the prophet would have come out and chanted incantations over him, and made mystical motions of his hands above the shining patches of his leprous skin, he could have believed in the cure. But there was nothing in the injunction given for his superstition to lay hold of. His patriotic susceptibilities are roused. If he is to be cleansed by bathing, are not the crystal streams of his own city, the glory of Damascus, better than the turbid and muddy Jordan that belongs to Israel? So he flounced away, and would have sacrificed his hope of cure to his passion if his servants had not brought him to common-sense by their cool remonstrance. He would have done any great thing which he had been set to do; he had already done a great thing in taking the long journey, and being ready to expend all that vast amount of treasure, and so surely there need be no difficulty in his complying, were it only as an experiment, with the very simple and easy terms which the prophet had enjoined.
Now, all these points may be so put as to suggest for us characteristics of that gospel which is God’s cure for our leprosy. And the whole story shows us as in a glass what human nature would like the gospel to be, and how we sick men quarrel with our physic, and stumble at those very characteristics of the gospel which are its main glory and the secret of its power. My only purpose in this sermon is to bring out two or three of these as lying on the surface of the story before us.
I. First, then, God’s cure puts us all on one level.
And now, if you will generalise that, it just comes to this-that Christianity brushes aside all the surface differences of men, and goes in its treatment of them straight to the central likenesses, the things which, in all mankind, are identical. There are the same wants, the same sorrows, the same necessity for the same cleansing beneath the queen’s robes and the peer’s ermine, the workman’s jacket and the beggar’s rags.
Whatever differences of culture, of station, of idiosyncrasy there may be, these are but surface and accidental. We are all alike in this, that we ‘have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’; and our Great Physician, in His great remedy, insists upon treating us all as patients, and not as this, that, or the other, kind of patients. The cholera, when it lays hold of ladies and gentlemen, deals with them in precisely the same fashion that it does when it lays hold of waifs on the dunghill; and a wise doctor will treat the Prince of Wales just as he will treat the Prince of Wales’s stable-boy. Christianity has nothing to say, in the first place, to the accidents that separate us one from the other, but insists on looking at us all as standing on the one level and partaking of the one characteristic. We may be wise or foolish, we may be learned or ignorant, we may be rich or poor, we may be high or low, we may be barbarian or civilised, but we are all sinners. The leprosy runs through us all, according to the diagnosis of Christianity, and our Elisha deals with Naaman as he deals with the poorest footboy in Naaman’s cavalcade who is afflicted with the same disease.
Now that rubs against our self-importance; a great many of us would be quite willing to go to heaven, but we do not like to go in a common caravan. We want to have a compartment to ourselves, and to travel in a manner becoming our position. We are quite willing to be healed, but we would like to be healed with due deference. You are an educated man, a student; you do not like to take the same place as the most unlettered, and to feel that the common fact of sin puts you, in a very solemn respect, upon the level of these narrow foreheads and unlettered people. And so some of you turn away because Christianity, with such impartiality and persistency, insists upon the identity of the fact of sin in us all, and passes by the little diversities on which we plume ourselves, and which part us the one from the other. Dear brethren, I am sure that some of my audience have been kept away from the gospel by this humbling characteristic of it, that at the very beginning it insists on bringing us all into the one category; and I venture to ask you to ponder with yourselves this question, Is it not wise, is it not necessary that the physician should look only at the disease and think nothing of all the other facts of the patient’s character or life? Surely, surely, it is a fact that we are transgressors, and surely it is a fact that if we be transgressors that is the most important thing about us-far more important than all these diversities of which I have been speaking. They are skin-deep, this is the central truth, that we have souls which ought to stand in a living relation of glad obedience to our Father in heaven; and which, alas! do stand in an attitude often of sulky alienation, often of indifference, and not seldom of rebellion. If so, then it is both wise and kind to deal with that solemn fact first. In wisdom and in mercy Christianity deals with all men as sinners, needing chiefly to be healed of that disease. ‘The Scripture hath concluded all under sin’-shut up the whole race as in a great chamber, that so cleansing and forgiveness might reach them all. They are gathered together as patients in a hospital are gathered, that their sickness may be medicined and their wounds dressed.
For this impartiality of the gospel, putting us all on one level, and its determination to deal with us all as sinners, is but the other side of, and the preparation for, that blessed universality of a sacrifice for all, and a gospel for the whole world. Do not quarrel with your physic because the Physician insists upon dealing with you as sick men.
II. Then take another of the thoughts that come out of the incident before us. God’s cure puts the messengers of the cure well away in the background.
Naaman, heathen-like, wanted something sensuous for his confidence in the prophet’s cure to lay hold upon. If the prophet would only have come out, and done like the sorcerers and magic-workers of whom he had had experience; if he would have come weaving mystical incantations, and calling upon the God whom he worshipped, but whom Naaman did not, and making passes with his hands over the leprous places-then there would have been something for his sense to build upon, and he would have been ready to believe in the prophet’s power to cure. But that was the very thing which the prophet did not want him to believe in. Elisha desired to conceal himself, and to make God’s power prominent. He wished to cure Naaman’s soul of the leprosy of idolatry as well as to cure his body; and we see, in the sequel of the story, that the very simplicity of the means enjoined and the absence of any human agency, which at first staggered the sensuous nature and offended the pride of Naaman, at last led him to see and confess that there was no God in all the earth but in Israel. Therefore the prophet keeps in the background. His part is not to cure, but to bring God’s cure. He is only a voice. He brings the sick man and God’s prescription face to face, and there leaves him. Naaman would have liked to force him into the place of a magician, in whom miracle-working power resided. Elisha will only take the place of a herald who proclaims how God’s power may be brought to heal. So men have always sought to turn the messengers of God’s cure into miracle-workers. Making the ministers of God’s word into priests who by external acts convey grace and forgiveness, is a superstition that has its roots deep in human nature. It is not that the priests have made themselves so much as that the people have made the priests. Here is an instance in a rude form of the tendency which has been at work in all generations, and has been the corruption of Christianity from the beginning, and is doing mischief every day-the tendency to place one’s confidence in a man who is supposed to be, in some mysterious manner, the bearer of a grace that will cure and cleanse. And the prophet’s position in our story brings out very clearly the position which all Christian ministers hold. They are nothing but heralds, their personality disappears, they are merely a voice. All that they have to do is to bring men into contact with God’s own word of command and promise, and then to vanish.
Christianity has no ‘priests,’ Christianity has no ‘sacraments.’ Christianity has no external rites which bring grace or help except in so far as by their aid the soul is brought into contact with the truth, and by meditation and faith is thus made capable of receiving more of Christ’s Spirit. Our only commission is to bring to you God’s message of how you may be healed. When we have said, ‘Wash, and be clean,’ as plainly, earnestly, and lovingly as we can, we have done all our appointed office. We are heralds, and nothing more. Our business is to preach, not to do rites, or minister sacraments. Our business is to preach, not to argue. We are neither priests nor professors, but preachers. We have to deliver the message given to us faithfully. We have to ring out the proclamation loudly. The virtue of a town crier is that he make people hear and understand. The virtue of a messenger is that he repeats precisely what he was told. And a Christian minister has to lift up his voice and not be afraid, to see to it that his speech be plain, and that it do not overlay the message with fripperies of ornament, or affectations, or personalities, and to plead earnestly and lovingly with men to come to the divine Healer. John Baptist’s description of himself is true of them. With rare self-abnegation, he would only reply to the question, ‘Who art thou?’ with ‘I am a voice.’ His personality was nothing. His message was all. A musical string cannot be seen as it vibrates. So the man should be lost in his proclamation. We are heralds and nothing more, and the more we keep in the background and the less our hearers depend on us, the better. If you want priests who will ‘call on the name of their God, and wave their hands over the place,’ and convey grace and healing to you by anything that they do for or to you, you will have to go beyond the limits of New Testament Christianity to find them. So men quarrel with their medicine because their cure is purely a spiritual process, depending on spiritual forces, and sense cries out for sacred rites and persons to be the channels of God’s healing.
III. And now, lastly, God’s cure wants nothing from you but to take it.
But the two commandments-that of the symbol in my text, that of the reality in the Christian gospel-are alike in this respect, that both the one and the other are a confession that the man himself has no part in his own cleansing. And so Naamans, in all generations, who were eager to do some great thing, have stumbled, and turned away from that gospel which says, ‘It is finished!’ ‘Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by His mercy He saved us.’ Dear brother, you can do nothing. You do not need to do anything. It is a hard pill for my pride to swallow, to be indebted to absolute mercy, which I have done nothing to bring, for all my hope, but it is a position that we have to take. Hard to take for all of us, very hard for you who have never looked in the face the solemn fact of your own sinfulness, and pondered upon the consequences of that; but most blessed if only you will open your eyes to see that the stern refusal to accept anything from us as working out our salvation is but the other side of the great truth that Christ’s death is all-sufficient, and that in Him the foulest may be clean.
‘Nothing in my hand I bring.’ If you bring anything you cannot grasp the Cross. Do not try to eke out Christ’s work with yours; do not build upon penitence, or feelings, or faith, or anything, but build only upon this: ‘When I had nothing to pay He frankly forgave me all.’ And build upon this: ‘Christ alone has died for me’; and Christ alone is all-sufficient. ‘Wash and be clean’; accept and possess; believe and live!
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
Go and wash. Compare Joh 9:7, and other commands: “Go, call” (Joh 4:16); “Go, sell” (Mat 19:21).
wash = bathe (ceremonially). See note on Lev 14:9.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
2Ki 5:10-12
2Ki 5:10-12
RECEIVING ELISHA’S COMMAND; NAAMAN LEFT IN A RAGE
“And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean. But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of Jehovah his God, and wave his hand over the place, and recover the leper. Are not Abanah and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage.”
“Go and wash in the Jordan seven times” (2Ki 5:10). “The word for `wash’ here is `dip’; and it is identified with `baptism’ in the N.T.” (See the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the O.T.) Thus, what was commanded was that Naaman should be IMMERSED seven times in Jordan. Jesus gave a similar command to the man born blind, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” (Joh 9:7); and it should be remembered that all mankind are commanded to “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Act 2:38).
Significantly, the reaction of countless sons of Adam to that Divine injunction is very similar to that of Naaman’s initial reaction here, with exactly the same result. He remained a leper; they remain in their sins.
This leads us to inquire as to why Naaman was angry. There were several reasons: (1) The implication that he needed a bath was offensive. (2) The waters of Jordan were usually muddy as compared with the crystal streams of Damascus. (3) His pride had been wounded. He was a great man and expected to be honored and respected by the prophet, but Elisha’s merely SENDING him a message appeared to him as an insult.
However, his salvation from leprosy, designed to serve as a type of the whole Gentile world receiving salvation, required that he obey God’s Word as conveyed to him by a messenger. All people are to be saved “through their word” (Joh 17:20), that is, the word of the apostles, the messengers and preachers of the truth, through whom they shall hear the words of eternal life.
“Behold, I thought, He will come out to me … and call on the name of Jehovah his God” (2Ki 5:11). It is significant that Naaman knew the name of the God of Israel, a name also mentioned on the Moabite Stone. In fact, one of the important revelations of this episode is that the Gentiles indeed “knew God,” as Paul declared that, “Knowing God, they glorified him not as God” (Rom 1:21).
“Are not Abanah and Pharpar better than all the waters of Israel” (2Ki 5:12). There is a sense, of course, in which it was true that the Jordan did not compare favorably with the crystal rivers of Damascus. “Abanah is identified with the Barada, and the Pharpar was either a tributary to Abanah called Fidjeh, or another independent river, the Awaaj, running several miles south of Damascus. The Romans called the Abanah the Chrysorrhoas.”
E.M. Zerr:
2Ki 5:10. The original word for wash applies to part or the whole of a body. The command was understood by Naaman, however, to mean to dip or plunge, for that is what he finally did, receiving the desired result. At the same time, much unnecessary speculation has been done on this case. Whether Naaman was afflicted in whole or in part of his body with the leprosy we do not know. The conclusion remains that what was done was a plunging into the water, not a mere application of water to the affected parts.
2Ki 5:11-12. Naaman belonged to a race of idolaters, and such people were more or less superstitious. They believed in the ceremonies of conjuration as a means of obtaining some superhuman result. Naaman was describing such a ceremony in this place. He reasoned on the theory that Elisha expected the leprosy to be healed through the virtue of the water. Had he been acquainted with the ideas offered to our readers at 2Ki 2:8, he might have made a different speech. The rivers of Damascus were fed by clear and clean water, while the Jordan was a swift, muddy stream. The reasoning from a material standpoint, therefore, was sound. Naaman’s disappointment caused him to turn away in a rage, and he was about to return home.
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
sent a messenger: Mat 15:23-26
wash: 2Ki 2:21, 2Ki 3:16, 2Ki 4:41, Joh 9:7, 1Co 6:11
seven times: Lev 14:7, Lev 14:16, Lev 14:51, Lev 16:14, Lev 16:19, Num 19:4, Num 19:19, Jos 6:4, Jos 6:13-16
thy flesh: 2Ki 5:14, Exo 4:6, Exo 4:7
Reciprocal: Gen 35:2 – clean Lev 13:58 – be washed 2Ki 4:16 – do not lie 2Ki 5:13 – Wash 2Ki 13:17 – Open 1Ch 21:19 – went up Luk 5:5 – nevertheless Luk 5:13 – I will Joh 2:7 – Fill Joh 5:4 – was made Joh 13:5 – to wash