Elisha and the Double Portion

The Prophet Elisha (feast 14 June) received the mantle and a double portion of the spirit of his master Elijah, and became the great wonderworker of the Old Testament — a prophet whose life is a dense sequence of miracles that the Church reads as types of the healing and raising power of Christ. This file treats Elisha’s succession, his wonders, the reason the Church keeps his feast on 14 June, and his place among the prophets.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Double Portion

Elisha (Hebrew Elīshāʿ, “God is salvation”) the son of Shaphat was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen when Elijah passed by and cast his mantle upon him; Elisha slaughtered his oxen, burned his plough, and followed the prophet, “and ministered unto him” (1 Kings 19:19–21). He is thus, in the biblical narrative, the disciple par excellence — the one who leaves everything to follow his master, and who will not be parted from him. When Elijah is about to be taken up, Elisha refuses three times to turn back — “As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee” (2 Kings 2:2, 4, 6) — and when Elijah asks what he shall do for him before departing, Elisha answers, “I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me” (2 Kings 2:9). The “double portion” is the inheritance of the firstborn son (Deuteronomy 21:17): Elisha asks to be Elijah’s true heir in the prophetic spirit. As the fiery chariot bears Elijah up, the mantle falls, and Elisha takes it up, strikes the Jordan, and the waters part — “Where is the Lord God of Elijah?” — and the sons of the prophets declare, “The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha” (2 Kings 2:13–15). The Church reads this succession as a paradigm of spiritual fatherhood and the handing-on of grace from elder to disciple — the pattern later monasticism would live by (see Monasticism); and it hears in the request for the “double portion” a foreshadowing of the greater outpouring of the Spirit that the disciples of Christ would receive at Pentecost.

The Wonderworker of the Old Testament

Where Elijah’s ministry is dominated by the great confrontations, Elisha’s is dominated by wonders — his life is the densest concentration of miracles in the Old Testament, and it is chiefly as wonderworker that the tradition remembers him (2 Kings 2–13). He heals the poisoned spring at Jericho with salt (2 Kings 2:19–22); multiplies the widow’s oil to pay her debt (2 Kings 4:1–7); promises and then raises the dead son of the Shunammite woman, stretching himself upon the child (2 Kings 4:8–37); heals the poisoned pottage — “there is death in the pot” — with meal (2 Kings 4:38–41); feeds a hundred men with twenty barley loaves so that they eat and have some left over (2 Kings 4:42–44); cleanses the Syrian general Naaman of leprosy by sending him to wash seven times in the Jordan (2 Kings 5); makes the iron axe-head float (2 Kings 6:1–7); and strikes the Syrian army with blindness (2 Kings 6:18). Even after his death the wonder continues: a dead man cast hastily into Elisha’s tomb revives at the touch of his bones (2 Kings 13:20–21).

The Fathers read these miracles as types of the works of Christ. The multiplication of the barley loaves is read as a figure of the Gospel feeding of the multitudes (the twenty loaves and the “some left over” prefiguring the five loaves and the twelve baskets); the raising of the Shunammite’s son as a type of Christ’s raisings and of the Resurrection; the cleansing of Naaman in the Jordan as a type of baptism — a reading Christ Himself invites when He recalls that “many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27), pointing to the calling of the Gentiles. The reviving of the dead man at Elisha’s bones is a favored patristic proof of the power of the relics of the saints: if the bones of a prophet raised the dead, the Church argues, then the relics of the holy ones are truly vessels of grace (a standard argument in the defense of the veneration of relics; see Holy Icons, for the wider theology of holy matter). Thus Elisha the wonderworker becomes, in the Orthodox reading, a living icon of the healing, feeding, raising Christ, and a scriptural warrant for the Church’s veneration of the relics of the saints.

The Feast of 14 June

The Church keeps the Prophet Elisha on 14 June, and there is a specific and instructive reason for the date. In the older Constantinopolitan tradition the great prophets of the Elijah cycle — Moses, Aaron, and Elisha — were commemorated together on 20 July, the feast of Elijah, as the master and his companions. As the calendar developed, Elisha received his own separate day, and the tradition (transmitted through the synaxaria and discussed by modern liturgical writers) connects the choice of 14 June with the dedication of a church of the Prophet Elisha, the date on which his memory came to be fixed distinctly from that of his master (John Sanidopoulos, “Why the Prophet Elisha is Commemorated on June 14th,” johnsanidopoulos.com; Prophet Elisha, 14 June, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org). The point of interest is not merely calendrical: it illustrates a general feature of the prophets’ feasts, which often derive from the dedication of a church or the translation of relics rather than from any record of the prophet’s death — the liturgical commemoration is the Church’s act of veneration, hung on the history of the cult rather than on an archival biography (a principle treated at length for the prophets generally in The Prophets in Icon, Relic, and Legend).

Master and Disciple

Elisha’s whole significance is bound up with Elijah’s: he is the disciple who becomes heir, the one in whom the spirit of the great prophet continues and, in a sense, is doubled. The two together frame a theology of prophetic succession that the Church has read as a type of her own life — the grace of the Spirit handed down from father to child, elder to disciple, generation to generation, never the private possession of one man but a living inheritance in the community of the faithful. Where Elijah embodies the prophet’s zeal and his ascent to God, Elisha embodies the prophet’s compassion and his descent among the people — the wonderworker who heals the water, feeds the hungry, cleanses the leper, and raises the dead, in whom the tradition sees most clearly the merciful face of the God who sent him. Both are honored as saints of the Church, and both point beyond themselves to the Christ whose forerunners they were.

References

The Holy Bible, KJV (1 Kings 19:19–21; 2 Kings 2–13; Deuteronomy 21:17; Luke 4:27).
Prophet Elisha (14 June), Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast; the life; the double portion.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “Why the Prophet Elisha is Commemorated on June 14th,” johnsanidopoulos.com. (The origin of the 14 June date; the older joint commemoration with Moses, Aaron, and Elijah.)
“Elisha,” OrthodoxWiki. (The miracles; the succession from Elijah.)
The Menaion for 14 June, trans. tradition (the hymnography of the feast).