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

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2001 by Walter Brueggemann

Abstract

The positive use of "remnant" in the First Testament characteristically refers to a self-conscious, self-aware, and often self-serving community that claims the future of Israel for itself (see Hasel). This article considers a "remnant" figure who is not self-conscious or self-aware, and certainly not self-serving. It refers to the "young girl" in 2 Kings 5:2-3. Her appearance in Israel's text is brief. She is assigned no important role by the text and is given no name. Moreover, her appearance is confined to two verses, and she is nowhere remembered or cited in any subsequent text. She is so incidental in her one narrative appearance that she is scarcely noticed. And yet, the article suggests, she is the pivotal character who makes this entire narrative of chapter 5 possible.

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This "young girl" is further identified only as a "captive." Presumably she had been taken captive by the Syrians in one of their many, seemingly incessant, military engagements with Israel. Indeed, Israel's own rules of military conduct regarded as legitimate the seizure of an enemy woman (Deut 20:14; 21:10-14--on the Israelite laws that pertain to such transactions, see Pressler: 9-15 and passim). We do not know how old the "young girl" is in the narrative or how long she has been held by the Syrians or how old when first taken. We are not told whether she was "beautiful," as specified in Deuteronomy 21:11. While she could have been a second wife to the Syrian general (as the Israelite statute suggests she might have been), in this narrative she is not presented in that role. It is, however, not a far stretch to imagine that she might have been used and abused before her assignment to her present role as servant to the wife of the general. (It does not seem to me a far stretch to suggest a parallel to her status and the character offered by Margaret Atwood.)

Such an extrapolation is, to be sure, not necessary or required by the narrative. All that is clear is that she is a captive and that she is cast in a menial role that makes her quite incidental to the narrative. Indeed, her performance is so brief and so insignificant as almost not to be noticed, unless one is on the alert for a "remnant" of Israel. For all of that, however, she evidently wishes her master well, enough so to communicate to her mistress, the general's wife, practical information concerning healing. The young girl is a captive of Syria who is perhaps not abused, but in any case evidences concern for the well-being of her captors.

For all of the circumstance of her captivity and subservience, she is deliberately, resolvedly, unashamedly an Israelite. Of her brief performance in her single verse of the narrative, we may make the following observations.

Linkages to Samaria and the Northern Kingdom

First, she has linkages to Samaria and the Northern Kingdom of Israel. We are not told of any specific connection, whether the city was her home place or whether she was connected to it by stories told and remembered. In any case, it is clear that she has rootage there, that she remembers the city as her place of belonging. Her forced relocation into Aram has not eradicated or diminished her sense of her true place of belonging. Her capacity to remember may be taken as a mode of acceptable resistance to any Syrian redefinition of her as a slave girl. She is not, in her self-presentation, a slave girl, but rather a well-rooted child of Samaria.

Her Remembered Identity

Her remembered identity, however, is more than geographical or political, though that itself is important, as we shall see, in the final form of the text. Beyond the geographical and the political, her rootage that evoked resistance is theological. This is evident in her use of Israel's traditional vocabulary, "the prophet." The term is deeply freighted in her utterance, though the narrative offers only the signal of the word itself. She does not name the prophet, but the reader of this collection of narratives is sure to know that she refers to Elisha and may infer even further thant she knows the name and intends a specific reference to Elisha.

Of course the term prophet, on the lips of an Israelite, never stands alone even if uttered alone. The term in its utterance is theological; this is a prophet of YHWH. The utterance of the young woman is an understated testimony to the God of Israel, who authorizes this prophet and who is, as will be clear by the end of the narrative, the God to whom despairing Syrians will also submit. Thus the young girl is, by inference, an explicit, determined witness to YHWH who offers, in this ostensibly Syrian narrative, her bold testimony to YHWH. She holds firmly, albeit with manifest verbal restraint, to her Yahwistic confession and to her Yahwistic identity. She holds to them in what must have been an environment that was profoundly hostile to all things Israelite, for war was the enduring state of affairs between the two realms. And because "religion" was so attached to the state and the ruling house, that hostility may well have extended to matters theological.