Biblical Theology Bulletin Volume 49 Number 1 Pages 32–40
© The Author(s), 2019. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0146107918818042
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/btba
Elisha’s Body and the Queer Touch of Prophecy
Rhiannon Graybill
Abstract
When we talk about prophecy, we often focus on words or deeds—on what the prophets say, or on their performance of miraculous acts. The Elisha narratives, however, repeatedly direct attention to the prophet’s body. This
body is frequently deficient, powerless, or insufficiently masculine. And yet it is in these moments that Elisha’s body
is most effective and even powerful. This article surveys key moments in Elisha’s embodiment, including the incident with the boys at Bethel (2 Kgs 2:23–25), the restoration of the Shunammite’s son (2 Kgs 4:8–37), and the
life-giving powers of the prophet’s bones after his death (2 Kgs 13:20–21). An analysis of these texts suggests that
Elisha’s body is non-normative and even queer, and that his success as a prophet depends on his movement outside
of normative masculine embodiment. Understanding the prophet Elisha requires understanding the prophet’s body;
understanding the prophet’s body, in turn, opens a world of meanings and possibilities of its own, with particular
significance for feminist and queer hermeneutics.
Key words: Elisha, body, masculinity, hair, 2 Kings 2, 2 Kings 4, queer
T
he bodies of the prophets are the object of significant interest in the Deuteronomistic history. Samuel’s body arises
from the grave to scold and terrify the desperate Saul (1 Sam
28:11–19). Elijah is fed by ravens (1 Kgs 17:12–16) and tended by angels (1 Kgs 19:1–9); his body is also a fearsome combat machine, as he singlehandedly kills 450 rival prophets in a
showdown on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18). At other moments,
the bodies of prophets are represented as vulnerable, as when
Obadiah hides a hundred prophets in a cave (1 Kgs 18:4).
The “sons of the prophets,” a prophetic company associated
mostly with Elisha, even act as a sort of corporate body, eating, speaking, and traveling together (1 Kgs 20:25, 2 Kgs
2:3–15; 4:1, 37; 5:22, 6:1, 9:1).
Even among this panoply of bodies, the prophet Elisha
stands out. Elisha’s body is simultaneously the most powerful—he can raise the dead, simply through touch—and the
most precarious—he is also weak, deficient, and the object of
ridicule. Strikingly, these two seemingly opposed representations of the body, as weak and as powerful, often occur together, in the same narrative moment. Appreciating the complexity
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of Elisha’s embodiment in 2 Kings means taking seriously the
tensions in its representations, which are unmatched by other
prophets. It also means recognizing the significance of masculinity and masculine homosociality in relation to the representation of Elisha. Elisha’s body is also repeatedly positioned in
relation to other male bodies, in ways that at once contribute
to and complicate the performance of masculinity and embodiment. Elisha almost never touches a woman; his feminine
interactions are limited to speech and marked by distance.
While his predecessor Elijah is bound up in a complicated
Rhiannon Graybill, Ph.D. (University of California at Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Program
Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rhodes College,
2000 North Parkway, Memphis TN 38112. Email: graybillr@
rhodes.edu. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable
Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford University Press,
2016), and, with Peter Sabo “Caves of the Hebrew Bible: A
Speleology,” Biblical Interpretation 26/1 (2018): 1–22.
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cat-and-mouse game with Queen Jezebel, Elisha prefers the
company of his faithful male servant, Gehazi. This suggests a
homosocial economy of prophecy—the notion that prophecy
is performed by men, among men, and for men. (There are
of course five female prophets in the Hebrew Bible, but their
actions are extremely limited, and their portrayal is generally
negative; they are the exception that proves the rule).
In analyzing Elisha’s body, I will consider four incidents in
the Elisha cycle: Elisha’s succession of Elijah (2 Kgs 2:1–12),
the encounter with the boys of Bethel, who mock Elisha’s bald
head (2 Kgs 2:23–25), the healing of the Shunammite woman’s son (2 Kgs 4:18–37), and an incident after Elisha’s death,
when his bones bring a dead man back to life (Kgs 13:20–21).
As these episodes reveal, Elisha’s prophecy depends on his
body. The body is powerful; the body is simultaneously weak
and precarious; the body is homosocially positioned.
Furthermore, Elisha’s body is usefully analyzed as queer.
The term queer has a range of meanings in scholarship, including scholarship about the Bible (Stone 2001; Stone 2013;
cf. Brintnall); it is used to describe an opposition to norms
(e.g. Halperin: 62), a non-straight trajectory, sexual or otherwise (e.g., Ahmed: 161), a relationship to LGBT sexuality
(Ahmed: 161), and a playful relationship (and resistance) to
meanings, bodies, and practices of interpretation (e.g., Berlant & Warner). All of these come into play in thinking about
Elisha. This term, queer, is useful in describing the prophet’s
body insofar as it encompasses the strangeness or obliqueness
of the prophet’s embodiment, the specific homoeroticism that
attends his bodily actions, and Elisha’s queer relationship to
norms of masculine embodiment.
In describing Elisha’s body as queer, I am not interested in
ascribing a particular sexual identity or sexuality to prophetic
bodies. This project is not one of finding and recovering lost
queer ancestors or textual specters. Instead, in describing the
prophetic body as queer, I direct attention to certain features
of this body, as well as their interpretive and political consequences. Taking seriously Elisha’s queer embodiment is an important feminist and queer hermeneutic move, one that draws
on philological and historical insights while also opening the
text in new ways. As a feminist reading technique, centering
Elisha’s queer embodiment sexes the masculine and the male
body as body. It also challenges the norms of hegemonic masculinity in the text. A queer reading of these passages centers
homoeroticism and expands the erotic beyond h­ eterosexuality
and its discontents. It also offers a way of thinking bodily
queerness in and around the Deuteronomistic history.
Assuming the Prophetic Mantle: Elijah,
Elisha, and the Male Touch
Of Elisha’s early years, nothing is known. He is first mentioned in Yahweh’s speech during the theophany on Horeb,
when Yahweh tells Elijah to “anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of
Abel-meholah as prophet in your place” (1 Kgs 19:16). Yahweh adds, almost as an aside, that “Whoever escapes from
the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever ­escapes
from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill” (1 Kgs 19:17); this
vengeance is largely missing, however, from the narrative that
follows. It is only a few verses later that Elijah encounters
Elisha in the flesh:
So he set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who
was plowing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and
he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Let
me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.”
Then Elijah said to him, “Go back again; for what have I done to
you?” He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and
slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled
their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out
and followed Elijah, and became his servant [1 Kgs 19:19–21].
Elisha’s farewells to his family, including slaughtering his
oxen and preparing a final meal from them, mark the transition from one form of life to another. Elisha leaves behind
the familiar and the familial, stepping off of his expected life
trajectory. Ahmed describes queerness as an orientation that
breaks with culturally reinforced heteronormative trajectories;
thus “queer orientations are those that put within reach bodies
that have been made unreachable by the lines of conventional
genealogy . . . which by seeing the world ‘slantwise’ allow other
objects to come into view” (Ahmed: 107). Already, the Elisha
story flirts with a queer itinerary. That Elisha himself performs
all the actions is further significant, as it marks his centrality
as agent, and the necessary use of his body, in creating his
character.
After this brief scene, Elisha is not mentioned again until
2 Kings 2, when Elijah is on the edge of death. The two
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Graybill, “Elisha’s Body and the Queer Touch of Prophecy” “
men cross the Jordan together, Elijah miraculously parting
the ­water with his mantle: “Then Elijah took his mantle and
rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the
one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry
ground” (2 Kgs. 2:8). Elisha requests from Elijah a double
portion of his spirit. And then,
A chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and they separated
the two of them, and Elijah went up in a whirlwind of fire. Elisha saw and he cried out, “My father! my father! The chariot of
Israel and its horsemen!” When he could no longer see them, he
took his garment and tore it in two pieces. He raised the robe of
Elijah, which had fallen off of him, and he stood at the bank of
the Jordan [2 Kgs 2:11–12].
Having asked for Elijah’s spirit, Elisha instead receives his
mantle. This mantle, however, is crucial. It is also bound up,
in complicated ways, with the body. First, the mantle is inarguably linked to power. Sometimes, this power is performative:
Elisha becomes Elijah’s successor when the mantle is thrown
over him. It is also possible to read this scene as Elisha’s investiture merely as Elijah’s “minister” here. In this case, however,
the tossing of the mantle maintains performative force, insofar
as this action initiates the new role for Elisha. At other points,
its power is effective. Elisha’s first action after Elijah’s translation is to touch the mantle to the waters of the Jordan and
cause them to part, as Elijah has previously done.
Second, the mantle is also relevant to masculinity and masculine bodily performance. Elijah, the mantle’s original owner,
is in many ways an excessively virile presence. He is both aggressive and successful in his violent conflicts with others, such
as when he massacres the 450 prophets of Baʿal (1 Kgs 18).
The text identifies him as “Baʿal- seʿar,” perhaps translatable
as “lord of hair” or simply “hairy man.” It is unclear whether
the hairiness is associated with the prophet, the mantle, or
both. (Elsewhere, the prophetic mantle itself is described as
hairy [Zech 13:4; cf Matt 3:4; Mark 1:6; see Niditch: 112,
114]). In either case, hair is associated with masculine power
and attractiveness, as in the case of Samson (Judg 16). The
hairy Esau is also notably more masculine than his effeminate
brother Jacob (Gen 25), who passes his time in the tents and
associates closely with women (Macwilliam).
In putting on the hairy mantle (or the mantle of a hairy
man), Elisha signals both a general affiliation with prophecy
and masculinity (prophets are almost exclusively male, proph34
ets wear mantles, mantles and men are masculine and hairy)
and a specific affiliation with Elijah. Elisha is the new Elijah.
However, his action is not fully successful. In clothing himself in Elijah’s signature robe, Elisha cannot help but ­direct
attention to his own deficiencies when contrasted with his
predecessor. This becomes particularly pronounced because
Elisha, who dons the literal and figurative mantle of Elijah,
the “lord of hair,” is bald (2 Kgs 2). Thus the garment that is
intended to shore up the prophet’s masculinity and legitimacy ends up calling these very things into question. Elisha in
Elijah’s mantle resembles ʿAthtar attempting to sit on Baʿal’s
throne and failing in the Baʿal cycle, or Patroclus’ ill-fated
turn in the armor of Achilles in book XVI of the Iliad.
Third, the mantle relates not only to power and to masculinity, but also to intimacy. Specifically, the mantle provides
an alibi for male touch. In the Hebrew Bible, clothing often
stands in metonymically for the body, especially its edges and
margins. One clear example is 1 Samuel 24, where David is
hiding in a cave when Saul enters to defecate. Without Saul
noticing, David cuts off the edge of Saul’s garment (1 Sam
24:4). This action is a form of symbolic castration that uses
the edges of the garment to represent the boundaries (in this
case, the genitals) of the body; it is at once a threat and a sign
of intimacy (Graybill & Sabo: 12, 17). Another example is
Isaiah’s theophany in Isaiah 6, when the prophet sees Yhwh
seated upon a throne, but quickly trains his eyes on the edge
of the divine garment, instead of upon the body itself (Isa 6:1).
For Elisha to wrap himself in the mantle is to come in contact
with the margins and traces of his predecessor’s body. Elijah
never touches Elisha, except with his mantle. The garment
transmits the touch—its power, but also its erotic charge. At
the same time, however, it provides a buffer between the male
bodies, the fabric providing a material boundary not to be
breached. Thus, the mantle provides plausible deniability to
the eroticism of the touch between men.
Elisha’s Bald Head and the Boys of Bethel
Elisha’s first prophetic action on the world is a positive
one: he purifies the waters of a spring that have been causing
miscarriages (2 Kgs 2:19–21). This is immediately followed,
however, by an unpleasant encounter with a group of children:
He went up from there to Bethel. He was going up on the way,
but some small boys came from the city and teased him, saying,
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“Go away, baldy! Go away, baldy!” He turned around and saw
them and cursed them in the name of Yahweh. Two female bears
came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys to pieces.
He went on from there to Mount Carmel, and then returned to
Samaria [2 Kgs 2:23–25].
This story has long proved difficult for readers, as it seems
to revel in inflicting pain on children. Julie Faith Parker terms
Elisha’s behavior “shocking” and “disproportionately harsh,”
asking, “Is this prophet fearful, cruel, or both?” (Parker: 94).
Laura Feldt similarly describes the “disproportion of the violence against the boys...which evokes horror in the recipient”
(Feldt: 208). Eric Ziolkowski describes the story’s “horrific effect” and notes, “The tale is so notorious that an agnostic character in a best-selling science fiction novel can retell it, citing the
biblical book and chapter where it occurs, to help illustrate why
he disdains traditional western religion” (Ziolkowski 119: 334;
the novel is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
[1961]). The older commentaries are equally harsh in their assessments; Hobbs (24) notes, with disapproval, “the death of
forty-two boys is hardly to be seen as a characteristic prophetic
activity”; while Gray (428) terms the story “puerile.”
I wish to shift focus from the victims of Elisha’s ire to the
cause of their mockery: the prophet’s bald head. Elisha’s baldness is essential, both to the brief narrative relayed here and
to the question of embodiment and prophecy more generally.
The prophet’s bald head is sometimes interpreted as a ­marker
of his prophetic vocation; there is, however, little evidence to
support such a reading (Ziolkowski: 334–335 n13). There
is, however, widespread evidence that baldness has negative connotations in both biblical and non-biblical ancient
sources. In the ancient Near East, baldness was viewed as
a disease (Geller: 4). In the Hebrew Bible, it is treated as
ugliness or deformity; it is likewise associated with mourning
(Olyan: 20). This overlap between categories (ugliness, deformity, mourning) indicates that the lack of hair represents
an exclusion from the normative. To be bald is to be other, in
appearance, ability, or affective state. In this context, the baldness of Elisha suggests that the prophet’s body—and thus the
prophet—does not meet the norms of embodiment. Elisha’s
bald head may even function like Moses’ heavy tongue—a
deformity or disability that pushes the prophet to the margins
of normative embodiment (Graybill: 41–45).
There is an implied contrast, as well, between Elisha and
his hairy predecessor Elijah. Elijah, “lord of the hair,” is both
hairy and manly; Elisha is not. It is worth noting, however,
that while his baldness marks Elisha as inferior to the hairy
and manly Elijah, it does not exclude him from the category
of the masculine as such. Because baldness is a male trait, it
can also function as a marker of sexual difference. Neither the
verbal root q-r-ḥ, “to be bald,” nor the noun used here, qērēaḥ,
“baldhead” or “baldy,” are used with female subjects anywhere
in the Hebrew Bible: all baldness is masculine. This accords
with broader ancient Near Eastern conventions; for example,
Julia M. Asher-Greve notes the use of baldness as a socio-cultural gendering in Mesopotamian art (Asher-Greve: 432–61;
cf Niditch: 34–35). Thus the bald head, while u­ ndesired, does
signal that the person afflicted with the baldness is male. Furthermore, while hair is a desirable masculine trait, an excess of
hair can lead to trouble, a point made most clearly in the death
of Absalom, stabbed while caught in a tree by his hair (2 Sam
18:9–15), and Samson (Judg 16:17–21) (Macwilliam).
The incidents with Elisha, the bears, and the forty-two
boys thus contribute to an understanding of the interrelations
of masculinity and embodiment in several ways. Baldness as
the motivating cause of crisis amplifies the questioning of the
prophet’s normative embodiment. The hair that Elisha lacks
also further complicates his relationship with Elijah, his absent predecessor. The prophet has a body; the body is powerful; the body is also deficient or abnormal (here: bald). These
features appear again in another famous Elisha story: the
Shunammite woman and her dead son.
The Healing of the Shunammite
Woman’s Son
The story of the Shunammite woman is, on a basic level,
the story of a woman who helps Elisha and is later helped in
return. The action centers not on the woman, however, but on
her child. First, the Shunammite woman observes Elisha passing by, offers him a meal, and even persuades her husband to let
her create a room for the prophet in their home (2 Kgs 4:8–11).
Subsequently, Elisha and his servant Gehazi decide to
provide the woman, who is married but childless, with a child
(12–17). How this comes about is not entirely clear. The text
tells us only: “He said, ‘At this season, in due time, you shall
embrace a son.’ She replied, ‘No, my lord, O man of God; do
not deceive your servant.’ The woman conceived and bore a
son at that season, in due time, as Elisha had declared to her”
(2 Kgs 4:16–17).
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Graybill, “Elisha’s Body and the Queer Touch of Prophecy” “
In the next portion of the story, set some time later, the
child is struck with heatstroke and dies (18–28). Elisha sends
Gehazi with his staff to revive the child but the servant is unable to do so. Elisha himself, however, brings him back to life:
Elisha came to the house and he saw the young man dead, lying
on the bed. He came and shut the door behind the two of them
and he prayed to Yahweh. He got up and he lay on the boy and
he put his mouth on his mouth and his eyes on his eyes and his
palms on his palms. He stretched out and the flesh of the child
warmed up. He got up and walked back and forth in the house
and went and stretched out upon him again. The young man
sneezed seven times and opened his eyes [2 Kgs 4:32–35].
This is a narrative of the prophet as provider and healer; Elisha’s body has clear life-giving power. However, the representation of the prophet’s body here is more complicated than the
initial reading of the text suggests.
First, while Elisha restores the child to life, he does not do
so without struggle. Before Elisha himself arrives, his servant,
Gehazi, has attempted to resuscitate the child, using Elisha’s
staff, and failed. Because Gehazi is acting as Elisha’s agent,
using Elisha’s object of power, this failure reflects especially
on Elisha. When Elisha himself arrives, there are multiple
steps to the process. The power to restore life requires time,
solitude and full bodily contact.
Elisha cannot simply touch the child; he must involve his
body more fully. According to the text, he stretches himself
out on top of the boy. The points of contact—mouth, eyes,
palms—are detailed in the text; the precise posture Elisha assumes, however, is ambiguous. The verb wayyighar, from the
root g-h-r, occurs only here and in 1 Kings 18:42, where Elijah
prostrates himself before Yahweh on Mount Carmel. Its precise
referent is unclear, but it seems to suggest a posture of crouching, or prostration, or even a bodily “rite of contractual magic”
(Gray: 447). A similar verb from the root g-h-r may occur in
the closely related language of Ugaritic. Based on this potential
parallel, Yitzhak Avishur has argued that the root involves actions of the mouth and lips and thus refers to a kind of whispering magic. While often Greek parallels in the Septuagint can
help illuminate difficult passages or roots, they do not contribute
to understanding what the original Hebrew means here.
To summarize a complicated debate: it is difficult to know,
precisely, what is intended by the verb used for Elisha’s actions
here. What is clear is that it is the touch of the body—and of
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more than simply the hands—that is essential to the healing. As
with the transfer of prophetic authority, it demands both touch
and movement. The revival of the child, which begins in verse
34 but is not completed until verse 36, is interrupted by the
prophet’s walking about the chamber. This directs our attention
to two features—first, to the room that the Shunammite woman has prepared, and in which the action occurs, and second,
to the passage of time. Bringing the boy to life requires both
isolated space and extended time. It also requires touch. And it
engenders anxieties over gender performance, as figured visually
and materially in Elisha’s unusual body posture of healing. The
prophet stretched out on the boy assumes a sexually suggestive
position that also queers the prophet’s normative masculinity: to
mime sex with children is not a typical biblical act.
Or perhaps the position is not sexual but maternal. S.
Brent Plate and Edna M. Rodríguez Mangual see the posture as one of childbirth. Of the prophet’s position, they write,
“The prophet’s body becomes like that of a pregnant woman
in that he doubles his body by mimetically stretching on top
of the boy’s body” (Plate & Mangual: 131). This reading
complements my larger point that the prophet’s posture destabilizes his culturally normative performance of masculinity.
Furthermore, the power to restore life to the child is not a
phallic power: Elisha’s staff, which he sends before him, is
unable to restore the child to life—a clear failure of phallic
potency, given the phallic symbolism of the staff. This is also
underscored by Elisha’s instructions to his servant to “gird his
loins” as he takes the prophet’s staff/phallus (2 Kgs 4:27).
There is also the question of the dead child’s parentage.
Some commentators have suggested that the rather coy circumstances surrounding the child’s birth imply that Elisha (or perhaps Gehazi, again acting as Elisha’s agent) is in fact the father
(Jennings: 102; see also Shields: 63, Plate & Mangual: 127).
The lack of children in the Shunammite woman’s household
may be a tacit acknowledgment of her husband’s impotence; the
prophet and/or his servant may provide in more than one way.
But there is also something rather queer here: two men decide
to make a baby. This is a decision made in consultation, though
not with the woman. As in biblical genealogies, the transmission from an old generation to a new is a chain of men.
Finally, there is the detail of the young man’s sneezes.
When the son returns to life, he first sneezes seven times, then
opens his eyes. Sneezing suggests another mode of bodily
contact between the prophetic body and other bodies, as the
sneeze forces us to contemplate the messy materiality of the
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body. The child returns to life only when he sneezes; he sneezes only when Elisha leans over him. The connection is not
simply one of breath, but of a sloppy spray of nasal droplets, or
a series of blinks or bodily tremors, or perhaps a sharp intake
of breath. We might also relate the sneeze to the convulsions
of orgasm (Songu & Cingi: 136), or of awakening. But whatever the precise actions of the child, the body of the prophet
does not exit the scene of contact untouched.
The narrative of the Shunammite woman and her child thus
adds considerable complexity to the representation of Elisha’s
body. While the prophet’s body is indubitably powerful, the
expression of this power—here, the restoration to life of a dead
child—also alters the prophet’s expression of masculinity. The
failure of his staff is only the most obvious in a series of signs
of the deficiency of his performance of embodied masculinity,
which should be powerful and whole, even as the delay in the
healing suggests the contingency of prophetic power. Elisha is
a powerful prophet, but this power is not always channeled in
ways that are culturally legible as dominantly masculine. Instead, Elisha, crouching over the boy and catching his bodily
discharge on his own body, occupies a queer bodily position.
The Power of Elisha’s Body
in and after Death
The fourth and final narrative of Elisha’s body involves not
the prophet’s volitional actions, but rather what happens to
his body after death. Elisha becomes sick “with the sickness
of which he was to die” (2 Kgs 13:14). Then, after a final
interview with the king,
Elisha died and they buried him. Bands of Moabites would invade the land in the spring of the year. As they were burying a
man, they saw a marauding band and they threw the man in the
grave of Elisha. As soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha,
he came to life and stood on his feet [2 Kgs 13:20–21].
The rejuvenating power of Elisha’s bones is unmatched elsewhere in the biblical text. The brief narrative here parallels the
earlier narrative of the Shunammite’s son, in which the touch of
the prophet’s body restores life (Sweeney: 360). But there, as
in a related story involving Elijah (1 Kgs 17:17–22), the living
prophet is involved in the transfer of power. In this narrative,
the prophet is no longer even alive; the bones themselves are
sufficient to act. Instead of (or in addition to) contaminating,
this corpse gives life. The body is most effective when it is reduced to its most basic units—bare bones. In this detail, Elisha
parallels Moses, who is described as possessing unparalleled
vigor at the time of his death (Deut 34:7)—rather a marked
change from the manifold bodily difficulties that afflict Moses
throughout his life (Graybill: 29–35). Death may be easy for
both prophets; life, however, is difficult.
But while the restoration of the corpse is miraculous, it is
not wholly unproblematic. Wesley Bergen casts a skeptical
eye toward Elisha in general; of this story, he writes, “If Elisha’s bones really wanted something to do, why did they not
stop the raids?” (Bergen: 169). This is harsh, perhaps, but
also worth considering. Furthermore, the object of Elisha’s
restorative power is an unknown man, hastily discarded at
the onset of marauders. He never receives a name or, indeed,
returns to the text after his return to life. He is to be a sign of
Elisha’s power but nothing more; when his resurrection has
been successfully effected, there is nothing more to say.
Bergen writes, “The prophet is powerful, but the power
is not unambiguously good” (Bergen: 13). I agree. I would
further propose modifying Bergen’s judgment upon the text
to read: the body of the prophet is powerful, but the power
of the body is not unambiguously good. Elisha’s body is powerful—even more so in death, perhaps, than in life. Furthermore, it is in moments of intimacy with other bodies that this
power emerges most fully. Elisha’s power necessitates touch.
To be touched by prophecy requires the intimate, charged,
and l­iteral touch of a prophet.
Power, Weakness, Queer Touch
To this point, I have considered four major incidents in
the Elisha narrative, which all influence the representation of
Elisha’s embodiment. I now turn to a broader analysis of the
function and significance of the prophet’s body, and why this
matters to feminist and queer hermeneutics and interpretive
communities.
First, the power of the body is inarguable in this sequence
of prophetic narratives. Repeatedly in this cycle of stories, Elisha’s body acts, and acts powerfully. Elisha’s first act of power
is to heal a spring that has been causing miscarriages among
the women; the prophet intervenes to restore life. It is notable
that the specific problem in these texts is miscarriage; this
suggests that Elisha’s power is bound up with power over life
and, in particular, over birth. The healing of the spring does
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Graybill, “Elisha’s Body and the Queer Touch of Prophecy” “
not foreground the prophet’s body but rather his biopower;
Elisha merely tosses salt and utters words (2 Kgs 2:21–22).
The subsequent events in the Elisha cycle, however, locate
this power more precisely in the body—a tendency that escalates as Elisha’s narrative progresses. In the incident with the
boys of Bethel, the prophet’s body is the problem; the act of
retaliation, however, is displaced onto other bodies—in this
case, bears that attack the children. Still, even as the bears
serve as the immediate agent, the attack on the boys of Bethel
is a profound statement of the prophet’s potency. As the incidents with the spring and the bears—separated by only a few
verses—show, his power of giving life is bound up closely in
these stories with the power over life—that is, the power of
death. The entanglement of the power of life and the power
over life continues in the later incidents, as when Elisha, with
difficulty, restores life to the Shunammite’s son, and when his
own dead body imparts life to the unknown corpse.
Of equal significance is the body’s weakness, precarity, and
deficiency throughout the Elisha stories. Elisha’s body is not
only powerful; it is also—and simultaneously—weak and deficient. Elisha is no Elijah. He is bald; his staff is impotent; his
bones are more powerful when they act on their own. When
the prophet wishes to punish his enemies—enemies, it is worth
noting, who are children—he does not act himself, but relies
on female animals to enact violence for him. This is a strike
against his masculine performance because cultural norms of
masculinity demand the effective use of violence by the male
agent (Clines: 216–217; Washington: 326)
Subsequent events do little to counter the implication that
Elisha’s body is troublesome, precarious, and weak. Elisha’s
staff, a sign of his power both prophetic and phallic, fails to
revive the dead son of the Shunammite; instead, the prophet
must lie across the boy, in a scene that suggests eroticism,
birth, or both. Elisha does eventually succeed, but only ­after
locking himself in the room with the dead child—here we
might consider, as well, the traditionally feminine coding
of interior space, as well as the difficulty and duration that
accompanies the prophet’s act of healing. There is also the
detail that the child sneezes onto the prophet, whose body is
made the passive receptacle of bodily fluids. There is no such
difficulty in the second scene of radical healing, involving the
unknown dead man in 2 Kings 13. In that narrative, he resurrects a dead man seemingly without effort (perhaps, even,
without intent). This suggests that the body’s difficulty and
precarity is not separated from his power, but rather essential
38
to it. The complication here, rather, is that Elisha is already
dead. Through this contrast, the text suggests that a dead
prophet is more effective than a living one.
Elisha’s bodily struggles are not secondary. Instead, the
difficulty that attends the prophetic body—whether the difficulty of embodying a masculine ideal of appearance, as in
the case of the prophet’s baldness, or the difficulty in bodily
power, as in the delays in healing the Shunammite’s child—
are essential to the body’s actions. Prophecy is a queer art of
failure, to borrow a phrase from Judith Halberstam; to act as
a prophetic body is to act as, with, and through bodily deficiency and non-normative embodiment.
Third, and finally, the stories of Elisha’s body foreground
intimacy, eroticism, and queer touch. Elisha’s power is never
enacted at a distance; instead, it depends on closeness, often
even touch. Furthermore, when we bring together the examples,
it becomes clear that there is a certain profile for the bodies
that serve as objects for Elisha’s power—masculine, but marginal. Elisha almost never touches a woman. He does, however,
crouch over the (dead) son, take the abandoned corpse into
his bones’ embrace, and wrap himself in the mantle of Elijah,
his dead predecessor. He likewise curses the boys who tease
him, while the (female) bears appear as an extension of his own
reach. The objects of his touch are thus dead male children,
dead men, and other men’s clothing. If we include the healing-at-a-distance of Naaman (2 Kgs 5), then this category also
includes a disabled, disfigured king (Naaman) and the familiar
male body of Elisha’s own servant, Gehazi. Elisha himself is
touched by Elijah, though only indirectly, by means of the mantle. As that incident shows, the object provides both a conduit
for the (eroticized) male touch and an alibi for it.
Elisha’s prophetic actions depend upon touch that is
charged with homoerotic intimacy. While the outcome of the
touch may be different—dismemberment, in the case of the
boys mauled by bears, restoration to life for the Shunammite’s son and for the unknown dead man—there is still an
intimate connection between bodies. These bodies, moreover,
are male. In this light, it is notable that Elisha’s only miracle
aimed directly at female bodies—the healing of the miscarriage-causing spring—is effected through a nonliving agent,
as Elisha tosses salt in the water to repair it. The miracle of
the oil for the widow in 2 Kings 4:1–7 is likewise carried out
without the prophet’s touch; it is the woman who pours the oil,
in a locked room that does not include the prophet among its
occupants. Female touch is so uncommon that when the Shu-
B I B L I C A L T H E O LO GY B U L L E T I N • VO LU M E 4 9 • 2 0 1 9
nammite reaches out for Elisha’s feet in supplication, Gehazi
quickly moves to push her away (2 Kgs 4:27).
Without making an exclusive claim for a particular form of
the erotic, it is clear that in the Elisha stories, prophecy offers
a homosocial and even homoerotic space. The suggestions of
same-sex intimacy in the prophet’s touch are amplified by the
other homosocial relationships in the Elisha text, as well as
the larger unit of Elijah and Elisha stories. It is the larger context of this homoeroticism that gives Elisha’s prophetic touch
homoerotic overtones.
The prophet’s uses of the body alters his performance of
masculinity, and in doing so exposes the possibility of thinking beyond hegemonic heteromasculine ideals of embodiment.
Elisha’s body acts otherwise. This body is queer and queered,
particularly in the touch between male bodies, whether
­prophet to prophet (Elijah and Elisha, though mediated by
the mantle) or Elisha lying upon the dead boy.
Centering Elisha’s body makes it possible to perceive the
thematic connections between disparate miraculous or narratively significant moments. It positions the Elisha stories in a
wider field of prophets, bodies, and bodies of prophetic text.
It is also an essential feminist and queer hermeneutical move.
Elisha’s intermittent impotence and power, his intimacies with
men and boys, his violence and his healing, are all central to
the prophet. Emphasizing these features, rather than treating
them as secondary epiphenomena, allows the prophet Elisha
to emerge as a queer figure with a queer body in his own right,
with all the richness of that phrase. This is also a feminist and
queer hermeneutical intervention, insofar as the queerness of
Elisha, which breaks with normative masculinity, offers an
alternate configuration of gender, weakness, and embodiment.
Centering Elisha’s body offers a model of new ways of thinking about masculinity, embodiment, prophecy, and vocation.
Ambivalent, precarious, powerful, and queer, Elisha’s
body forms the necessary substrate of the Elisha texts. Literary theory often talks of meanings written on the body; in the
case of Elisha, the body writes the meaning.
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