He burned the plough

Where we are

The last of the three names Elijah was given on Horeb, and the only one of the three he carries out himself. He was told to anoint Hazael over Aram, Jehu over Israel, and Elisha as prophet in his place; Elisha will eventually see to the other two. The Elijah cycle leaves the weekday lectionary here, and Elisha's own cycle will be picked up later in the year.

What happens

Elijah set out and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat, as he was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen; he was following the twelfth. Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak over him. Elisha leaves the oxen, runs after Elijah and says, "Please, let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, and I will follow you." Elijah answers, "Go back! Have I done anything to you?" Elisha leaves him, takes the yoke of oxen and slaughters them; he uses the ploughing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gives it to the people to eat. Then he left and followed Elijah as his attendant.

What to notice

The number is not decoration. Shneim asar tsemadim — twelve pairs of oxen, and Elisha is at the twelfth, which means eleven other men are working the same field. A single yoke of oxen represented substantial capital; twelve implies a large estate and a workforce. The man Elijah is sent to find is not a poor labourer but the son of a landowner, working alongside his own hired ploughmen. The call costs him something specific and countable.

The call itself contains no words. Va-yashlekh addarto elav — he threw his cloak onto him — and that is the whole of it. Elijah does not stop, does not explain, does not say a sentence. The adderet is his identifying garment; it is what he will be taken up in and what Elisha will pick up at the Jordan and strike the water with. The commissioning is a piece of clothing landing on a man's shoulders in a field, and everything that follows is Elisha's inference.

His request is the request Luke refuses. Eshsheqah na le-avi u-le-immi — let me kiss my father and my mother — is almost exactly what a would-be follower asks in Luke 9:61, and there the answer is no one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the reign of Theos. Luke is quoting this scene; the plough is in both. Here the answer is different, and hard to read.

What Elijah says is genuinely ambiguous. Lekh shuv, ki meh asiti lakh — go, turn back; for what have I done to you? Three readings have been defended for centuries. It can be permission with a shrug: go ahead — nothing I did obliges you. It can be a rebuke: go back, then; clearly I have done nothing to you. Or it can be a disclaimer of authorship: what I have done to you is not the point; the claim on you is not mine. The Hebrew supports all three and the narrator declines to choose, which leaves the decision, quite deliberately, in the hands of the man standing in the field.

And what he does next is not a goodbye. He does not go home and kiss anyone; the text never mentions his parents again. He takes the pair he was driving, slaughters them, and cooks the meat using the keli ha-baqar, the oxen's equipment — the wooden yoke, the plough, the goad — as fuel. Then he feeds the people, presumably the eleven ploughmen and whoever else is at hand. He turns his means of livelihood into a farewell dinner and his means of return into firewood.

The economy of the gesture is exact. Two animals killed, not twelve — he is not destroying the estate, only his own place in it. The wood he burns is not the household's furniture but the tackle of his trade. Nothing in the scene is grand, and nothing in it is recoverable: you cannot un-eat an ox or un-burn a yoke. And it is a public act. The people eat.

The last word is a job title, not a rank. Va-yesharetehu — he ministered to him, the verb used of Joshua attending Moses and of priests serving in the sanctuary. Elisha is not made a prophet in this scene. He becomes somebody's attendant, and remains one until the whirlwind.