A brief moment for a one-person remnant - 2 Kings 5:2-3 - identity of slave girl in the story of Elisha's healing of the Syrian commander

The Commander, Again

By the time we get to verse 14, the young girl has dealt with the commander in his emergency, prior to the prophetic intervention that she made possible. After the prophetic wonder of healing, the narrative returns to the commander, now made clean and whole again. The characterization of the restored general, restored in the flesh and restored to his proper and important public role, is stunning. He is restored like "the flesh of a young boy" (v 14). His leprous skin--marred, broken, unattractive, likely rancid to the smell--is now promptly, prophetically displaced by "baby skin," whole, sweet, soft, and smooth. As noted by many commentators and nicely exposited by Burke Long, the commander's newly given, non-leprous skin like that of a "young boy" is phrased by reference back to the "young girl" (Long: 66-76). The skin of the commander is like the skin of a "young boy," on which see the "young girl" in v 2).

The narrator presents the young girl quite intentionally as the model and anticipation for whom the leprous Syrian general will become when he submits to the Israelite prophet and when he is prepared, as in verse 15, to sing an unencumbered doxology to the God of Israel--that is, when he recognizes himself as healed and situated in the orbit of YHWH's life-giving authority. The commander gladly reaches that point with his newly given skin. The parallel phrasing of the two characters wants us not to miss the point. Where the commander has fully arrived, in the healing orbit of YHWH, the young girl has always been. She has been there, her Syrian captivity notwithstanding; she has never forgotten that rootage and its resources, and has never yielded her sense of identity and belonging there. She has accepted that zone of Yahwistic well-being, even though culturally and geographically removed from Samaria and all that it signifies. She is the antecedent and forerunner of the military commander, showing him the way to new life. And he finaly has, unwittingly and even with resistance, caught up with her, received new skin, new public life, new doxology, and new future, none of which was available to him except by her. The parallel phrasing surely intends to bind him in astonishment and gratitude to her. And even if perchance he does not make that connection, the reader must not ignore it. His response is one of gratitude and astonishment about which she already knows, on which she has long relied, and to which she has regularly appealed; this is gratitude and astonishment that he, drawn out of his old categories, now exuberantly asserts. He has become like her, both in skin and in faith.

Counterpoint: Gehazi

The counterpoint to the narrative concerning Gehazi in verses 19b-37 is perhaps an addendum. In any case Gehazi has no close connection to or contact with the young girl at all. If, however, we consider the way in which the narrator makes her luminous, we may notice how she is to be seen when contrasted with Gehazi. Because Gehazi is properly in the orbit of the prophet (on which see chapter 4), we may assume that he is a Yahwist (There can hardly be any doubt of this; yet his apparent intimacy with the Israelite king in 2 Kings 8 4-5 may suggest that his commitment to Yahwism was not as passionate and singular as one might expect from one so close to the prophet.)