"We cooked my son and ate him"

Kings 2 6:29

What happens when religious leadership fails to offer hope and to protect the nation? Who’s to blame when despair brings about the worse in human behavior, including cannibalism??

Elisha’s miracles continue to dominate this story but even with his astonishing powers he’s unable to prevent the Aramean siege on Samaria and the fatal famine that this crisis creates. King Yehoram walks around the walls of his starving city when a desperate woman stops him in his tracks in demands not just for food - but also for justice.

Her story horrifies the king who tears his clothes in grief. 

The story echoes the famous judgment of King Solomon, when two women fought over the fate of one child, but there’s no happy outcome here, no justice, just horror. But what’s more horrible yet is that what happens here is already echoed in the warnings of Moses back in the Torah, and will repeat again a century later when Samaria will finally fall. 

What happens when the famine is so fierce that parents eat their children? That’s the curse that falls upon the land in today’s chapter. 

The mother who stops the king tells him of her neighbor, another starving mother who convinced her that they will both kill and cook their children, in order to survive: 

וַנְּבַשֵּׁ֥ל אֶת־בְּנִ֖י וַנֹּאכְלֵ֑הוּ וָאֹמַ֨ר אֵלֶ֜יהָ בַּיּ֣וֹם הָאַחֵ֗ר תְּנִ֤י אֶת־בְּנֵךְ֙ וְנֹ֣אכְלֶ֔נּוּ וַתַּחְבִּ֖א אֶת־בְּנָֽהּ׃

“So we cooked my son and we ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son and let’s eat him’; but she hid her son.”

Kings 2 6:29

This horror stirs the king who finds the prophet who promises that the siege will end by the next day - which it does, and the story spills into the next day and chapter. But we pause here, with these women, at this terrible moment.  What is this nightmare about? 

Back in Leviticus 26:29  Moses warns the people that in the future, if they do not obey the laws, war and famine will consume them, and they will consume their own future:

“You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.” 

The warning gets even more specific in Deuteronomy 28:53

“ you shall eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters that YHWH your God has assigned to you, because of the dire straits to which your enemy shall reduce you.”

Whether this gruesome fate is fact or fiction is not known. But similar tropes are familiar from other fragments of the ancient world.  For example, the late seventh-century B.C.E. Vassal Treaty of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon includes this curse on any Assyrian vassal who violates the treaty through disloyalty to Esarhaddon’s son Ashurbanipal:

Mother shall [bar the door to] her daughter,

May you eat in your hunger the flesh of your children,

May, through want and famine, one man eat the other’s flesh.”

Dr.Wendy Love Anderson explores this story in its context and questions what happened first - the curses in the Torah, or their eventual outcomes in the latter books, including Kings. Probing “the difference between depiction and prediction,” she writes:

“The descriptions of child-eating in the Bible are not uniquely Jewish: in the context of covenants or treaties, they appear as threats in other ancient Near Eastern documents, and in the context of dramatic siege narratives, they seem to recur throughout human history. But the child-eating curses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy were interpreted not simply as threats but as prophecies ripe for fulfillment.

Later books of the Hebrew Bible played on the idea that these prophecies had been fulfilled, and rabbinic commentators read the curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy into the destruction of both the First and the Second Temples. A series of frightening, gruesome biblical and rabbinic narratives around child-killing emerged, fulfilling what could be viewed as the original divine threat in Leviticus... In the context of the book of Kings, that siege account is one of several emphasizing how degenerate the kingdom and people of Israel have become; eventually, falling further and further away from God, they are conquered and then “lost,” in contradistinction to Judah, which is able to survive even in exile.”

Anderson goes on to explore the different ways with which Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible interpreted these horrors throughout history. Other scholars look at how these themes are even found in fairy tales - perhaps as metaphors for our darkest sense of being.

But either way, the horror lingers in this chapter, and with it, the famine and the fear. The prophet may help bring about the end of the siege or predict a better future but what will remain of these families, and the trauma that will linger in the generations next? Many more plights will pursue Elisha’s people, but as the medieval commentator  Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote of this story: “There is nothing worse than this degree of famine.”

In yet another moment of terror found in the Torah, the land of Israel is described as “A Land That Devours Its Dwellers.” Perhaps this awful text is an echo of ancient and modern fears that homelands, and even the most maternal and loving of lands, can turn hostile. Maybe, as we near Earth Day, this is a brutal reminder that our mother, our Earth,  from which we are born and so often disregard and scorn, will watch us consume each other, destroy our future, as a starving parent eating their own child? 

The story does not end with this chapter, but the chapter does end with just one word - the quest for hope.

Image: Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring his Son, 1823

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