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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 2 King 2:11 - 2:11
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Elijah's ascension. - 2Ki 2:11. While they were walking on and talking to each other, “behold (there suddenly appeared) a fiery chariot and fiery horses, and separated the two (by driving between them), and Elijah went up in the tempest to heaven.” As God had formerly taken Enoch away, so that he did not taste of death (see at Gen 5:24), so did He also suddenly take Elijah away from Elisha, and carry him to heaven without dying. It was בַּסְּעָרָה, “in the tempest,” that he was taken away. The storm was accompanied by a fiery phenomenon, which appeared to the eyes of Elisha as a chariot of fire with horses of fire, in which Elijah rode to heaven. The tempest was an earthly substratum for the theophany, the fiery chariots and fiery horses the symbolical form in which the translation of his master to heaven presented itself to the eye of Elisha, who was left behind.
(Note: All further questions, e.g., concerning the nature of the fiery chariot, the place to which Elijah was carried, the day of his ascension, which C. a Lap., according to the Romish martyrology, assigns to the 20th of July in the 19th year of Jehoshaphat, and others of the same kind, which have been discussed by the earlier commentators, are to be set down as useless trifles, which go beyond the bounds of our thought and comprehension.)
The ascension of Elijah has been compared to the death of Moses. “As God Himself buried Moses, and his grave has not been found to this day, so did He fetch Elias to heaven in a still more glorious manner in a fiery chariot with fiery horses, so that fifty men, who searched for him, did not find him on the earth” (Ziegler). This parallel has a real foundation in the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Christ on the mountain of transfiguration, only we must not overlook the difference in the departure from this life of these two witnesses of God. For Moses died and was to die in the wilderness because of his sin (Deu 32:49.), and was only buried by the hand of the Lord, so that no one has seen his grave, not so much for the purpose of concealing it from men as to withdraw his body from corruption, and preserve and glorify it for the eternal life (see the Comm. on Deu 34:5-6). Elijah did not die, but was received into heaven by being “changed” (1Co 15:51-52; 1Th 4:15.). This difference is in perfect harmony with the character and position of these two men in the earthly kingdom of God. Moses the lawgiver departed from the earthly life by the way of the law, which worketh death as the wages of sin (Rom 6:23; Rom 7:13); Elijah the prophet, who was appointed to admonish for future times (ὁ καταγραφεὶς ἐν ἐλεγμοῖς εἰς καιρούς), to pacify the wrath before the judgment, to turn the heart of the father to the son, and to restore the tribes of Jacob (Ecclus. 48:10), was taken to heaven as the forerunner of Christ (Mal 4:5-6; Mat 11:10-11) without tasting of death, to predict the ascension of our Lord, and to set it forth in Old Testament mode; for as a servant, as the servant of the law, who with his fiery zeal preached both by word and deed the fire of the wrath of divine justice to the rebellious generation of his own time, Elijah was carried by the Lord to heaven in a fiery storm, the symbol of the judicial righteousness of God. “As he was an unparalleled champion for the honour of the Lord, a fiery war-chariot was the symbol of his triumphal procession into heaven” (O. v. Gerlach). But Christ, as the Son, to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth, after having taken away from death its sting and from hell its victory, by His resurrection from the grave (1Co 15:55), returned to the Father in the power of His eternal deity, and ascended to heaven in His glorified body before the eyes of His disciples as the victor over death and hell, until a cloud received Him and concealed His figure from their sight (Luk 24:51; Act 1:9).
(Note: The actual truth of this miraculous departure of the prophet is strongly confirmed by the appearance of Elijah, as recorded in Mat 17:3-4 and Luk 9:30, upon which the seal of attestation is impressed by the ascension of our Lord. His ascension was in harmony with the great mission with which he, the mightiest of all the prophets, was entrusted in that development of the divine plan of salvation which continued through the centuries in the interval between Moses and Christ. - Whoever is unable to do justice to the spirit and nature of the divine revelation of mercy, will be unable to comprehend this miracle also. This was the case with Josephus, and even with Ephraem the Syrian father. Josephus, for example (Ant. ix. 2, 2), saying nothing about the miracle, and simply states that Ἠελίας ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἠφανίσθη· καὶ οὐδεὶς ἔγνω μέχρις τῆς σήμερον αὐτοῦ τὴν τελευτήν, and adds that it is written of Elijah and Enoch in the sacred books, ὅτι γεγόνασιν ἀφανεῖς. θάνατον δὲ αὐτῶν οὐδεὶς οἶδεν. Ephraem, the Christian father, passes over the last clause of 2Ki 2:11, “so Elijah went up in the whirlwind to heaven,” in his exposition of our chapter, and paraphrases the rest of the words thus: “There came suddenly from on high a fire-storm, and in the midst of the flame the form of a chariot and of horses, and separated them from one another; one of the two it left on the earth, the other, namely Elijah, it carried up on high (Syr. ‛alı̂ lȧmerawma'); but whither the wind (or Spirit? Syr. rôha') took him, or in what place it left him, the Scriptures have not told us. They say, however, that some years afterwards an alarming letter from him, full of threats, was delivered to king Joram of Judah.” Following the lead of such predecessors as these, J. D. Michaelis, who boasts so much of his orthodoxy, informed the “unlearned” (in the Anmerkungen to his Bibel-übersetzung) that Elijah did not go to heaven, but was simply carried away from Palestine, and lived at least twelve years more, that he might be bale to write a letter to king Joram (2Ch 21:12), for “men do not receive letters from people in heaven.” This incident has been frequently adduced since then as a disproof of the ascension of Elijah. but there is not a word in the Chronicles about any letter (ספרים, ספר, or אגרת, which would be the Hebrew for a letter); all that is said is that a writing (מכתב) from the prophet Elijah was brought to Joram, in which he was threatened with severe punishments on account of his apostasy. Now such a writing as this might very well have been written by Elijah before his ascension, and handed to Elisha to be sent by him to king Joram at the proper time. Even Bertheau admits that, according to the chronological data of the Old Testament, Elijah might have been still living in the reign of Joram of Judah; and it is a priori probable that he both spoke of Joram's sin and threatened him with punishment. It is impossible to fix the year of Elijah's ascension. Neither the fact that it is mentioned after the death of Ahaziah of Israel, which he himself had personally foretold to that ungodly king, nor the circumstance that in the war which Jehoshaphat and Joram of Israel waged with the Moabites the prophet Elisha was consulted (1 Kings 3), warrants the conclusion that Elijah was taken from the earth in the interval between these two events. It is very obvious from 2Ki 3:11, that the two kings applied to Elisha simply because he was in the neighbourhood, and not because Elijah was no longer alive.)
2Ki 2:12
When Elisha saw his master carried thus miraculously away, he exclaimed, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and horsemen thereof!” and as he saw him no more, he took hold of his clothes and rent them in two pieces, i.e., from the top to the bottom, as a proof of the greatness of his sorrow at his being taken away. He called Elijah אָבִי, “my father,” as his spiritual father, who had begotten him as his son through the word of God. “Chariot (war-chariot) and horsemen of Israel,” on which the Israelitish kings based the might and security of their kingdom, are a symbolical representation of the strong defence which Elijah had been through his ministry to the kingdom of Israel (cf. 2Ki 13:14).
2Ki 2:13
He then took up Elijah's prophet's mantle, which had fallen from him when he was snatched away, and returned to the Jordan. The prophet's mantle of the master fell to Elisha the disciple, as a pledge to himself that his request was fulfilled, and as a visible sign to others that he was his divinely appointed successor, and that the spirit of Elijah rested upon him (2Ki 2:15).