Scripture Daily

Context No. 975 of 4322 · 2 Kings

Context · Reflection

2 Kings 6:24-28: in context

24After this, Benhadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. 25There was a great famine in Samaria. Behold, they besieged it until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver. 26As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!” 27He said, “If the LORD doesn’t help you, where could I get help for you? From the threshing floor, or from the wine press?” 28Then the king asked her, “What is your problem?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’

Benhadad of Syria besieges Samaria, and the famine inside grows so severe that a donkey's head, unclean and nearly meatless, sells for a fortune, and worse. As the king of Israel walks the wall, a woman cries out for help. When he asks what she wants, she tells him something unbearable: another woman had proposed they eat her son one day and the woman's own son the next; they boiled and ate the first, and now the other has hidden her child. This is the depth of horror a long siege has driven the city to.

This is the bible, and it does not look away from the worst that human beings do under extremity. The scene is deliberately placed to show what the covenant curses had warned would come if Israel persisted in unfaithfulness, that the siege would grow so desperate that mothers would eat their own children. It is meant to horrify, and it should. But notice the king's despairing line just before, if the LORD does not help you, where can I find help. Even in his helplessness he half-knows the truth, that no threshing floor or winepress, no human resource, can save a people whom God has left to the consequences of their long rebellion. The horror of the siege is not random cruelty; it is the bitter end of a road the nation chose, told plainly so no reader can pretend sin is harmless. And in the very next chapter God brings a sudden, undeserved deliverance, which makes the point that only he could rescue a city that had sunk this far. The passage refuses to let us imagine that turning from God is a small or private thing.

Do I treat my own drift from God as harmless and private, when scripture shows so bluntly where a road away from him can finally lead?

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