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

I suggest that she enacts the subsequent counsel that Jeremiah gives to his generation of exiles who will become a remnant that produces Judaism:

   Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.
   Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give
   your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply
   there, and do not decrease [Jet 29:5-6].

Like the voice of Jeremiah, the young girl has accepted Syria as the place where she is and where she will be. She gives no hint of any expectation that she will soon or ever return home to her beloved Samaria. This is where she is, and she will be a contributing member of that society out of her treasured memory. More than that, Jeremiah has urged:

   But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you in exile, and pray
   to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare
   [Jer 29:7].

We are not told in her minute that she "prayed" for the commander.

Nonetheless her quick but decisive intervention is not unlike a prayer for the well-being of Syria through this military commander. Her intervention is a mobilization of holy resources on behalf of Syria the enemy, not unlike a prayer for an alien city. Perhaps the young girl recognized, beyond the healing of the commander, that his healing would yield a more general well-being. Perhaps she calculated that the shalom of the Syrian commander is the necessary matrix for her shalom. Or perhaps that healing might even heal the long-standing hostility between Syria and Israel. We are told none of that, however, nor whether upon return home the commander was able to remember her triggering action for new possibility or generous enough to acknowledge it. It is congruent with the rest of her brief appearance in the narrative to accept that she is never mentioned in the recovery report and is never given a share in the shalom she has made possible and to which she is entitled.

In any case, she models perfectly the tension and generative interface between tenaciously remembering her place of true belonging and generously investing in her present locus. It is that tension and interface that constitute the role and responsibility of a generative remnant, practicing both the tenacity of Psalm 137 and the generosity of Jeremiah 29. She is an embodiment of the tenacity of exiles of faith under duress and of the generosity that permits others to benefit. Belated readers, if they noticed her at all, might have recognized in her a model for how to initiate a new narrative of well-being in a circumstance palpably marked by suffering and despair.

Conclusion

The subject of our study is only one young woman. She is an Israelite remnant in Syrian society. She is indeed a woman remnant, so that the category of "remnant" makes contact with a feminist interest. I would not want to insist upon a stereotype of vulnerable women in a masculine, military environment, but a "woman remnant" is worth special mention. At the outset I noted that this woman remnant is unlike the characteristic remnant of emerging Israel that is characteristically self-conscious, self-aware, often self-serving, and now we may add, surely masculine in its perceptions and practices. This young girl, available to readers in the final form of the text, is none of that. Perhaps the most typical such "remnant" is represented by Ezra and his movement, surely male in power and masculine in perception, ruthless in program and advancing particular interests that are in part self-serving (see Nehemiah 13:1-3, 23-27; it is worth noting that the phrasing of the harsh reformist demands of Nehemiah 13:26 is not unlike the positive urging of Jeremiah 29:5-6, even though the later text has a very different intention. The question is much the same in the later context, of course receiving a very different response.)