After he arrived in Zarephath and occupied the land that his stepfather had given him, Yashar built a hut with a rail fence around it upon the highest hill. He tilled garden plots within for Nurit and Sara and, with their oxen and tools, Yashar graded terraces for vines on the leeward side of the slope.
There he lovingly planted Naboth’s roots he had recovered from Jezreel.
Convenient water remained a problem. The nearest stream was a good hike away so, not long after they arrived, Yashar dug a well with help of hired men from town. Sara and Nurit tilled and weeded gardens. They cleared and planted the west face of their hill with saplings for eventual shade and a break against strong winds.
Fully half of Naboth’s rootstock died that first season. Those that did survive managed to accomplish nothing more. The same held true of all the fruits, flowers and vegetables they had planted. Nothing grew well that first year. Unable to survive on berries and olives alone, when winter came, Yashar moved his family, their beasts and all their light possessions into town to his mother’s house.
Though the five of them shared a single room, Yashar, Sara, Nurit and the boys’ short stay with Adella went amazingly well. Adella’s husband, Batnoam, was a cordial, godly man and the women got along like girls at a party. When Yashar thanked God aloud for their harmony, Adella laughed. “After so much time without you,” she told him, “why would I not praise God for your coming home to bless me with grandsons and sweet ladies?”
To help pay for their keep, Yashar produced Sara’s purse of coins, still nearly half-full. When Sara saw how much Yashar had saved of the gift she had left behind for him, she praised God. “If poor Naboth had handled this silver,” she sighed, “it would have vanished in a month.”
Adella was curious to hear more about Naboth so Yashar told her the vintner’s story; how he had restored the half-dead vineyard in Jezreel after the rains returned, the injustice he had suffered because of the scheming of Jezebel and how Elijah himself had pronounced judgment on Ahab and his wife for their sins against the vintner.
Winter passed. Nurit’s boys grew taller and Juttah found a girlfriend near the port, a quick, white shorthair with a curlicue tail he brought prancing home one day. She was much too young for Juttah, Nurit said. Sara named Juttah’s new girlfriend, Badood, “Because she seems so terribly lonely.”
That spring, Yashar, his family and their animals moved back to their land. Nurit bore a son to Yashar early in their second year. They named him Elijah but called him Eli because the prophet, Elijah, still lived.
*
Bidkar had seen two miracles in his lifetime, one from its onset, the other at its end. He had heard the voices of living prophets and fought for the honor of kings. How, then, after all that glory, had he become stuck in the middle of a war begun over sheep? Worse, he was no longer able to fight as a soldier but resigned to give advice. Still worse, his counsel and that of his general’s had been consistently ignored.
Three kings went to war against Moab; Jehoram of Israel, Jehoshaphat of Judah and Jehoshaphat’s vassal, the king of Edom. These three made decisions together as they pleased, all of them bad, and their first awful choice was to attack Moab from the south.
“Jehoshaphat has persuaded his peers to invade through Edom,” General Jehu told his staff, “ascending wadi el Hesa at the border and requiring a climb of four thousand feet in less than four miles, all rocks and rubble and bone dry.”
Bidkar and the others stared blankly.
“Jehoshaphat believes we’ll find water in the wadi,” Jehu sighed.
That was insane, there had recently been drought throughout Judah, but good soldiers obeyed their kings. Jehu issued orders. After a long climb onto high ground, the joint forces of the three nations found themselves exhausted and with nothing to drink. Bidkar blamed Sara for the irony. There he stood, stuck in a tent, supposedly safe yet about to die for lack of something to drink. After the general and his staff failed to devise a strategy to save the kings from the trap they had set for themselves, Jehoram said to Jehu and the others, “It seems that the Lord has called us together to deliver us into the hand of Moab.”
Jehoshaphat, always eager to call on God when his own devices failed, asked…
Is there not here a prophet of the Lord that we may enquire of the Lord by him?
“Here, in the middle of nowhere?” Jehoram asked.
One of Jehoram’s servants stepped up boldly and said, “Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who poured water on the hands of Elijah, he is here.”
No one seemed surprised to hear that.
“The word of the Lord is with Elisha,” Jehoshaphat said, and he, Jehoram and the king of Edom went down the hill to look for him. Bidkar followed with Jehu and the others, full of doubt, but there stood Elisha upon a ledge not far from their position.
When Elisha saw Jehoram he said, “What have I to do with you? Go consult your father’s and your mother’s prophets.”
Jehoram said, “No, the Lord called us together to deliver us into the hand of Moab.”
“As the Lord of Hosts lives before whom I stand,” Elisha said, “if it were not that I esteem the presence of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, I would not look in your direction or even see you.”
Jehoram raised his chin. Jehoshaphat bowed humbly.
“Now bring me a minstrel,” Elisha said.
Armies do not travel with performers yet, somehow, a bright-eyed fellow appeared on the remote high plain at Moab’s border carrying an instrument. When he began to play chords upon a lyre, Elisha shut his eyes and listened. It was unbearably hot. The kings had also not had water to drink in days but they too, stood and listened until the minstrel stopped.
“So says the Lord,” Elisha said, “make this valley full of ditches.”
Bidkar’s skin began to tingle.
“You will not see wind or rain,” Elisha continued, “and yet that valley…” The prophet stopped to point in the direction from which the kings had come. “…that valley will be filled with water which you may drink, you and your cattle and your beasts.”
“Hallelujah!” Bidkar shouted, and though none of his military peers seemed convinced, Bidkar knew that the deed was done; a miracle the magnitude of Elijah’s on Carmel would surely transform Edom’s dust.
“This is but a light thing in the sight of the Lord,” Elisha explained as if to temper Bidkar’s enthusiasm. “He will deliver the Moabites also into your hand. You will smite every fenced city, and every choice city, and will fell every good tree, and you will stop all wells of water, and mark every good piece of land with stones.”
*
The armies dug ditches all that night. Next morning, just as the sun came up, it was clear that the flats of Edom had somehow filled with water. Bidkar cried in his hands. Every man and beast of the armies was able to drink. The Moabites, from their angle to the light, saw the water red as blood. Thinking that the invading kings’ armies had fought one another, they attacked.
Israel’s armies then rose up behind Jehu and beat them back into their own land.
They destroyed the cities of Moab. On every good piece of land, every man cast a stone. They stopped the wells of water and felled all the good trees except at Kirharaseth, where they showed mercy according to the kings’ orders (though they strayed from the will of the Lord).
After the crushing defeat, Mesha, king of Moab, offered his eldest son for a burnt offering upon a wall. The horror of that gesture sickened even the pagan men of Israel. Witnessing the miracle of spreading water had been Bidkar’s finest moment, but the sacrifice of Mesha’s son brought him to his knees.
*
In the heat of the following summer, Yashar left Nurit, Sara and the boys and took his wagon and team down the coast road to Aczib. Juttah surprised him and abandoned Badood to go along. Poor Juttah no longer possessed the energy to run the flats. Blind in one eye by then, he rode in the back of the wagon. His flesh sagged in folds around his once angular jaws and even the livid pink scar that ran the length of his back had faded to pale gray, leaving the bristly hair it once propped up curled tamely to the side.
Akko lay only nine miles farther south. Yashar drove down to the garrison there, showed the bolt Bidkar had given him and bluntly demanded mail. The soldier jumped into action as ordered, without questions, as Bidkar had promised. There were two dusty messages waiting for Yashar. The first said simply…
Son,
I no longer command the Jezreel garrison but sit on Jehu’s staff. Saw a miracle in Edom by Elisha’s hand, water everywhere from nothing. Moab has been brought in line.
The second message was a longer note in which the captain praised Yashar as wise for leaving Israel, implying that more bloodshed was inevitable, that it would be Jehu, not a descendant of Omri that would sit as Israel’s next king. Bidkar confessed in that same letter that he missed Sara terribly, regretting the pride that made me quit her and calling his decision the saddest mistake of my mistake-filled life.
There was more to the letter but Yashar read much too slowly. He pocketed both messages to read them later, at home. Last thing, he scribbled a reply…
Bidkar, we are all well in Zarephath.
“Send this at once to the captain, Bidkar, on General Jehu’s staff,” Yashar ordered.
Never hesitating, the young soldier tied and pouched Yashar’s message then saluted. “He will have it by tomorrow,” the boy said, and that was that.
*
Sometimes Gehazi longed to return to his home in Aval-mechola. Prophets seldom came there and it seemed to Gehazi that his master, Elisha, would always be Elijah’s lesser man. But one day, Elijah appeared in Gilgal and said, “It is time for me to be taken into the heavens by a whirlwind.”
What exciting good news!
“Stay here, I pray you,” Elijah told Elisha, “for the Lord has sent me to Beth-el.”
Old Elijah made perfect sense. It was easily twelve miles to Beth-el, every rugged step uphill, but no, Elisha, first time ever, refused to obey the older, wiser man. “As the Lord lives,” Elisha said, “and as your soul lives, Elijah, I will not leave you.”
So they went trudging to Beth-el. When they arrived, sons of the prophets came out to meet them. “Do you know that Adonai will take your master from over your head today?” they asked Elisha.
Elisha had no patience. “I know it,” he snapped. “Be silent!”
Elijah again spoke to Elisha, saying, “Stay here, please. Adonai has sent me to Jericho.”
Another fourteen miles! But Elisha again refused to stay put. “As the Lord lives,” he said, “and as your soul lives, I will not leave you.” So, again, they all plodded up winding ascents until they reached Michmash, crested the ridgeline just beyond it, then lumbered down the back slope until, having had no rest at all, they came to Jericho.
As before, sons of the prophets met them and said, “Do you know that Adonai will take your master from over your head today?”
Elisha answered angrily again, “I know it. Be silent!”
Gehazi checked hopefully for whirlwinds but, alas, the sky was clear.
Elijah said, “Elisha, stay here, please, Adonai has sent me to the Jordan.”
So Elijah had proposed a hike of six more miles over rough terrain.
Gehazi had walked enough. “I will rejoin you on the return,” he told his master, but the Jericho students, led by an enthusiastic fellow named Amichai, scampered after the prophets, chattering like girls, expecting to see Elijah lifted up to heaven.
But Gehazi was convinced he would never go.