Bible Synapse
Was Gehazi a leper for ever, when he later talks with the king?
Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
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Elisha tells Gehazi: “The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever”; he goes out “a leper as white as snow”.
The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever. And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.
The king talks with “Gehazi the servant of the man of God”, who tells him how Elisha raised the Shunammite woman’s son.
And the king talked with Gehazi the servant of the man of God, saying, Tell me, I pray thee, all the great things that Elisha hath done. And it came to pass, as he was telling the king how he had restored a dead body to life, that, behold, the woman, whose son he had restored to life, cried to the king for her house and for her land. And Gehazi said, My lord, O king, this is the woman, and this is her son, whom Elisha restored to life.
The objection
For taking Naaman’s silver, Gehazi is struck with leprosy, and Elisha says it will cling to him and his descendants for ever (2 Kings 5:27). The law kept lepers apart from others (Leviticus 13:46). Yet three chapters later Gehazi is talking freely with the king of Israel, still called ‘the servant of the man of God’ (2 Kings 8:4). Either the leprosy did not happen, or the story has forgotten it.
The answer
The Elisha stories in Kings are grouped by subject, not always told in the order they happened, and 2 Kings 8:1–6 plainly looks back. It opens: “Now Elisha had spoken to the woman whose son he had restored to life” (WEB), and she had already spent seven years in Philistia. Keil and Delitzsch explain that these verses are rightly read in the past perfect: they set the scene for what happened when she came home. The seven-year famine had begun earlier still; the “dearth in the land” of 2 Kings 4:38 belongs to it. So the woman’s return, and Gehazi’s talk with the king, may well fall before Naaman came to be healed in chapter 5. Keil and Delitzsch and John Gill both date it so, because Gehazi is still serving Elisha and talking with the king. The writer puts the scene here to finish the story of the Shunammite woman, whose son Gehazi had seen restored (2 Kings 4:8–37).
The words “for ever” do not clash with this either way. The Hebrew le‘olam means ‘for a long, open-ended time’; said of a man and his descendants, it means as long as his line lasts. Nothing in 2 Kings 8 says Gehazi was healed, or that the curse had lapsed.
Ancient readers saw no conflict. A tradition in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 107b) even names the four leprous men at the gate of Samaria (2 Kings 7:3) as Gehazi and his three sons. That is not evidence, but it shows that Jewish readers took the curse as lasting and the stories as fitting together.
Other answers Christians give
After the leprosy, at a distance
Adam Clarke thought the scene fits the chronology better after Naaman’s healing. The law kept a leper outside the camp and away from touch (Leviticus 13:45–46), but not out of all speech; the four lepers of 2 Kings 7 call out their news to the gatekeepers, and it reaches the king (2 Kings 7:10–11). A king curious about Elisha’s wonders might well question, from a distance, the one man who had seen them all.
Still open
The text does not date the conversation, so whether it came before or after Gehazi’s leprosy cannot be settled. Either way the two passages fit together.
From the classic commentators
The seven years' famine occurred in the middle of Joram's reign, and the event related here took place before the curing of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5), as is evident from the fact that Gehazi talked with the king (2 Kings 8:4), and therefore had not yet been punished with leprosy.Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on 2 Kings 8:1–2 (1857–78)
Sources
- Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: 2 Kings 8 (1857–78), at Bible Hub
- John Gill, Exposition of the Bible: 2 Kings 8 (1746–1763), at Bible Hub
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible: 2 Kings 8 (1810–1826), at Bible Hub
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 107b (Gehazi and the four lepers), at Sefaria