Comic Relief in the Old Testament: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”

Here is one of my favorite passages of the Bible, where there is a couple moments of comic relief in an otherwise horrific situation.

We pick up the story in 2 Kings 6:

Afterward, Ben-hadad king of Syria mustered his entire army and went up and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria, as they besieged it, until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung for five shekels of silver.  Now as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!”  And he said, “If Yahweh will not help you, how shall I help you? From the threshing floor, or from the winepress?”  And the king asked her, “What is your trouble?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’  So we boiled my son and ate him. And on the next day I said to her, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him.’ But she has hidden her son.”  When the king heard the words of the woman, he tore his clothes—now he was passing by on the wall—and the people looked, and behold, he had sackcloth beneath on his body—and he said, “May God do so to me and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today.”

Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. Now the king had dispatched a man from his presence, but before the messenger arrived Elisha said to the elders, “Do you see how this murderer has sent to take off my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door and hold the door fast against him. Is not the sound of his master’s feet behind him?” And while he was still speaking with them, the messenger came down to him and said, “This trouble is from Yahweh! Why should I wait for Yahweh any longer?”

But Elisha said, “Hear the word of Yahweh: thus says Yahweh, Tomorrow about this time a seah of fine flour shall be sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel, at the gate of Samaria.” Then the captain on whose hand the king leaned said to the man of God, “If Yahweh himself should make windows in heaven, could this thing be?” But he said, “You shall see it with your own eyes, but you shall not eat of it.”

Now the story shifts scenes to outside of the city being besieged.  This part struck me as a very funny bit of dialogue:

Now, there were four men who were lepers at the entrance to the gate. And they said to one another, “Why are we sitting here until we die? If we say, ‘Let’s enter the city,’ the famine is in the city, and we shall die there. And if we sit here, we die also. So now come, let us go over to the camp of the Syrians. If they spare our lives, we shall live. If they kill us, we shall but die.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! =D

The story concludes with another fun scene of comic relief:

So they arose at twilight to go to the camp of the Syrians. But when they came to the edge of the camp of the Syrians, behold, there was no one there.  For the Lord had made the army of the Syrians hear the sound of chariots and of horses, the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, “Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Egypt to come against us.”  So they fled away in the twilight and abandoned their tents, their horses, and their donkeys, leaving the camp as it was, and fled for their lives.  And when these lepers came to the edge of the camp, they went into a tent and ate and drank, and they carried off silver and gold and clothing and went and hid them. Then they came back and entered another tent and carried off things from it and went and hid them.

Does anyone else find this mental-picture hysterical, where the exiled lepers with destitute lives get to have a romp-roaring party?  Ha!

Of course, they decide to tell the king, and everyone finally gets to eat some food again.

God has a great sense of humor ;-D