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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - 2 King 8:10 - 8:10
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According to the Chethîb חָיֹה לֹא, Elisha's answer was, “Thou wilt not live, and (for) Jehovah has shown me that he will die;” according to the Keri חָיֹה לֹו, “tell him: Thou wilt live, but Jehovah,” etc. Most of the commentators follow the ancient versions, and the Masoretes, who reckon our לֹא among the fifteen passages of the O.T. in which it stands for the pronoun לֹו (vid., Hilleri Arcan. Keri, p. 62f.), and some of the codices, and decide in favour of the Keri. (1) because the conjecture that לֹו was altered into לֹא in order that Elisha might not be made to utter an untruth, is a very natural one; and (2) on account of the extreme rarity with which a negative stands before the inf. abs. with the finite verb following. But there is not much force in either argument. The rarity of the position of לֹא before the inf. abs. followed by a finite verb, in connection with the omission of the pronoun לֹו after אֱמֹר, might be the very reason why לֹא was taken as a pronoun; and the confirmation of this opinion might be found in the fact that Hazael brought back this answer to the king: “Thou wilt live” (2Ki 8:14). The reading in the text לֹא (non) is favoured by the circumstance that it is the more difficult of the two, partly because of the unusual position of the negative, and partly because of the contradiction to 2Ki 8:14. But the לֹא is found in the same position in other passages (Gen 3:4; Psa 49:8, and Amo 9:8), where the emphasis lies upon the negation; and the contradiction to 2Ki 8:14 may be explained very simply, from the fact that Hazael did not tell his king the truth, because he wanted to put him to death and usurp the throne. We therefore prefer the reading in the text, since it is not in harmony with the character of the prophets to utter an untruth; and the explanation, “thou wilt not die of thine illness, but come to a violent death,” puts into the words a meaning which they do not possess. For even if Benhadad did not die of his illness, he did not recover from it.