The Bible's Elisha Explains Why He Made 2 Bears Maul 42 Children

Finally an explanation for the Bible's oddest passage!

Photo by Simon Hurry via Pexels

2 Kings 2:23–25:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

Hi, everyone. Elisha from the Old Testament here. I’ve been paying close attention to all your contemporary generation’s buzz about social justice and “Cancel Culture,” and I’d like to clear the air about a certain incident in my past that nowadays with your advanced morality maybe reflects a little poorly on my character.

Specifically, I’m talking about the incident with the two bears.

I may be infamous in top-ten lists of “weirdest stories from the Bible,” but you moderns need to remember that we’re all products of the time periods we were brought up in, and the era I lived in was quite different from 2024. I hope you don’t judge my character too harshly based upon one bad day I had 2,800 years ago. Of course, I’m not trying to make an excuse for my behavior, I’m only trying to explain the context of that fateful day.

It was the 9th Century BCE, and we were right in the swing of what we’d later call the “Abomination Age.” It was kind of like the Jazz Age of the 1920s, only, instead of jazz music and expatriate literature, our pop-culture artistic innovation was screaming out curses to God to unleash natural disasters upon our enemies.

We even had our own version of flappers too. It was a crazy progressive era for women’s liberation that saw for the first time broads going to the tabernacle within 7 days of their periods, and insisting that after birthing a daughter they only needed to be locked up in their houses for 33 days as if they had just birthed a son, instead of the customary 66 days the Bible says is necessary for daughters. It may seem tame by your contemporary standards, but the idea that women were just as clean after birthing daughters as they were after birthing sons was as radical for us as it was radical for women to start getting bank loans in the 1960s.

Cursing people doesn’t sound so artistically innovative, but keep in mind we were truly ancient, and art developed real slow back then. We didn’t have any enjoyable musical instruments, and there was no market for literature because of how time consuming it was to finish even one clay tablet page. Just imagine how much space The Great Gatsby would have taken up in my house if it had been written in my era! But demanding God inflict violence upon your enemies was a huge craze. It was like Chubby Checker, The Beatles, Pet Rocks, flagpole sitting, and Beanie Babies all rolled into one.

Everyone was doing it. We were cursing everything! Our enemies, our ancestors, polyester clothing, various sex practices, whole food groups, the time-honored tradition of sacrificing children to Moloch, our military rivals’ descendants for a thousand generations, and on and on. If you weren’t cursing people or verbally wishing awful things upon them such as hurricanes, killer bees, and lightning strikes, you were a nobody. You couldn’t get any action from slave girls, and your neighbors’ wives would laugh out loud in your face when you’d covet them!

And this bear curse wasn’t even that bad compared to most of the cursing going on back then. In 1 Samuel 5:12, when the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant, they were all of them, thousands of people, suddenly cursed with a plague of hemorrhoids. In Malachi 2:3, the prophet vowed to spread poop on all nonbelievers’ faces and in all the food they’d ever eat forever. Look it up, that stuff is literally in the Bible!

And don’t even get me started on the OG of cursing, Yahweh! I can’t imagine the number of victims from the Lord’s menstrual curse on every woman who has ever lived since Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Or His plethora of meteor strikes, fires, and plagues that have murdered tens of millions of people throughout ancient history. Compared to that, the 42 young boys I made get mauled by a couple of bears is child’s play (no pun intended)!

And that’s not even mentioning Yahweh’s Great Flood. You know, the curse that reset humanity by killing virtually everyone alive? I suddenly don’t seem like such a bad guy anymore, do I? No one refers to my little incident as the “Great Mauling” like they do the “Great Flood.” And if I’m being real for a second, I think Cancel Culture should spend a little more time focusing on undoing the whitewashing of that Godly genocide. Calling it the Great Flood makes it sound like a passive natural disaster that no one bears (pun intended this time) responsibility for, but that’s letting God off the hook a bit, isn’t it? If you ask me, we should call it the “Great Drowning.”

So I’d say it’s #Time’sUp for a certain Deity who has abused His position of authority and unequal power dynamics to curse innumerable people, and I’d like to add my name to the #MeToo list of people who have been affected by the evil and suffering this allegedly benevolent, omnipotent “Father” inflicts upon us!

But anyway, back to the two bears incident. I had been having a real bad day, and those disrespectful youths, unfortunately, were the piece of straw that proverbially broke the camel’s back for me. In hindsight, I realize my curse should not have included bears. I thought the bears would just scare the kids away, and make them never insult my bald head again, but, unfortunately, those bears instead ripped those young bullies to shreds and feasted on their flesh and organs and rolled around in their long intestines even playing tug-of-war with each other. Eventually they did a Lady and the Tramp kind of thing with one of the intestine noodles. That was a nice moment. But the rest was just a real sad, unfortunate tragedy.

And, let me tell you… the vision of all those boys being dismembered does not leave you. However, the Old Testament is very clear that the young must respect their elders or die (in many, many places), so I’m gonna go ahead and say that me and all those kids are even now. Don’t blame me. Take it up with Yahweh. I didn’t divinely inspire the Old Testament, He did.

So you can censor me if you’d like, but let he who is without problematic behavior among you cast the first cancellation. 🥃

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