Elisha and the Widow's Jars of Oil

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There is a woman standing in her kitchen with a jar, and the jar is very small.

It is the only thing in the house worth mentioning. There is no flour in the cupboard, and there is no money in the box. There are two boys, who are hungry. And outside the door there is a man who has come to collect what he is owed, and who has let it be known that if he cannot have the money he will take the boys.

She has a jar of oil. That is all. And she is about to be asked what she is going to do with it.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the second book of Kings, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. The neighbours, the weather and a few small thoughts of two women are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me begin with a prophet.

His name is Elisha. Some of you will remember him from the night we told about Naaman and the seven dips in the Jordan, and some of you will remember his teacher, Elijah, and the still small voice on the mountain. Elisha took up Elijah's cloak when the older prophet was taken away, and he has been walking the roads of the northern kingdom of Israel ever since. He is not a king and he is not a priest. He is a man of God, and in those days that meant that people came to him when they had nowhere else to go.

Around him there is a company of people the book calls the sons of the prophets. They were something like a community, men who had given themselves to the Lord's service and who lived and worked and prayed together, and some of them had families. They were not rich. Most of what they had, they shared.

And one of them has died.

The book says it quite simply. A woman, the wife of one of the sons of the prophets, cries out to Elisha. "Your servant my husband is dead," she says, "and you know that your servant feared the Lord."

I would like you to notice that she begins with him. Not with the problem. She begins with who her husband was: a man who feared the Lord. She wants it known, before she says anything else, that this was a good man, and that his family has not stopped being his family because he is gone.

And then she says the hard thing.

"But the creditor has come to take my two children as slaves."

Now, a word about that, because it may be a surprise to hear it said so plainly at bedtime.

In the world of this story, when a family fell into debt and could not pay, a creditor could take a person to work off what was owed. The law of Moses did not pretend this never happened. It tried to keep it from becoming cruel. In the book of Leviticus, a poor man who has sold himself is not to be worked like a slave, but is to be treated as a hired worker, and he is to go free in the year of jubilee. But that was for a good year. This is not a good year. And there is a woman whose husband is dead, and whose boys are, in the creditor's eyes, the only thing she owns that can be sold.

You and I may be thinking that it is a terrible thing. It is. The book does not say otherwise, and it does not need to. It lets her say the sentence, and it lets the sentence stand.

And what does Elisha say?

I want you to hear it, because it is not what we expect. He does not say, I will pay the debt. He does not say, I will speak to the creditor. He does not say, do not worry. He asks her a question, and the question is a kind of gift.

"What shall I do for you?" he says. "Tell me, what do you have in the house?"

It is the second question that matters. She has just told him she has nothing, and he asks what she has. And I have thought, over a good many nights, that this is one of the kindest things anyone can do for a person in trouble. He does not hurry past her to the solution. He asks her to look. To go through the house, in her mind, cupboard by cupboard, and see what is there.

And she says: "Your servant has nothing in the house at all, except a jar of oil."

Let me tell you about the jar.

The word the book uses is a small one. Some translators call it a flask, and some a jar, and some a little pot. It is the kind of thing a household kept on a shelf for the lamp, or for rubbing on the skin after a day in the sun, or for the bit of cooking that every kitchen needs. It is not a barrel. It is not a great store. If you held it up to the window, you could see, I think, about a finger's width of oil at the bottom, and not much more.

She said, I have nothing except. And then she names it. I love that "except." It is the sound of someone who has gone through the house, and found the one thing, and almost did not mention it, because it seemed too small to count.

And Elisha does not tell her it is too small. He says:

"Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbours, empty vessels, and not just a few."

Think about that, for a moment, because I think it is the funniest instruction in the whole book, and I do not think it is meant to be a joke at all.

She is a woman in very great trouble. Everyone in the street, I would guess, knows that the creditor has been seen at her door. And the prophet's advice is that she go from house to house and ask for empty pots.

I imagine her standing at the first door. A neighbour opens it, and sees her, and is perhaps already a little sorry for her, and she says, "Could I borrow a pot?"

"Of course," says the neighbour. "What are you cooking?"

And she says, "Nothing. I need it empty."

I do not know what the neighbour says to that. The book does not tell us. I think there may have been a pause. I think there may have been some looking at one another. But the book does tell us what she did, and what she did was go on to the next door, and the next, and ask again.

Pots and jars and basins. Wide ones and narrow ones, chipped ones, cracked ones, a good one from a woman who is a little proud of it. And Elisha has said, and not just a few. Which means he has asked her to ask for more than is comfortable. More than she thinks she needs. More than looks sensible, and more than will make her look sensible to anyone who is watching.

I think that is the hard part. Not the believing that something will happen, but the going to the next door.

And now the instruction, and it is a quiet one.

"Then go in," Elisha says, "and shut the door behind you and your children, and pour into all these vessels. And when each is full, set it aside."

Shut the door. I would like you to notice that. Whatever is going to happen, it is not going to happen as a show. There is no crowd. There is no one watching from the street. The prophet himself is not in the room. There is a woman, and two boys, and a row of borrowed pots on a kitchen floor, and a door that has been closed, and outside it the ordinary noise of a village in the afternoon.

The book says: "So she left him and shut the door behind her and her sons. They brought the vessels to her, and she poured."

The boys carry the pots. She does the pouring. That is the whole arrangement. I like to think that the oldest boy was the one who set them out in a line, and that the younger one carried the first, and that they were both a little frightened and trying not to show it.

And she tips the little jar over the first pot.

I will tell you what the book says next, and I will say it slowly, because I do not want to put a word in that is not there.

The oil comes.

The book does not describe it. It does not say there was a light, or a sound, or a smell of something sweet. It does not say how the oil looked as it fell. It says only that she poured, and that when the first vessel was full she said to her son, "Bring me another."

And he said to her, "There is not another."

And the oil stopped.

I have thought a great deal about that sentence.

She did not stop pouring because the jar had run dry. She stopped because the pots had. The oil did not run out. The room ran out. There were no more empty vessels to put it in.

And that, I think, is the whole heart of the story. The oil was never the limit. The limit was how many pots she had been willing to go and ask for. She had gone to every door she had the courage to knock at, and she had borrowed what she could, and the Lord had filled every one of them. And if she had borrowed twice as many, the oil would, as far as the book gives us any reason to think, have filled those too.

I do not say this to make anyone feel bad about the doors they did not knock at. I say it because it is a gentle thing to know. We are very often, I think, afraid that there will not be enough. And here, in the plainest possible way, the book says that the supply was never the trouble. The Lord is not running out. We run out of vessels.

Now, who did it?

I think it is worth saying, because this is a story in which a prophet is standing close by, and it would be easy to remember it as the story of Elisha's trick with the oil. It is not. The book is careful. Elisha tells her what to do, and he is not in the room. Saints pray, and God acts. A prophet is a messenger. What happens in that kitchen happens because God is generous, and the woman trusted him enough to go next door and ask for a pot.

You may remember that it has happened before. When Elijah was a guest in the house of a widow at Zarephath, there was a jar of flour and a jug of oil that did not run out, day after day, through a famine. It is told in the first book of Kings. The two stories are cousins, and the book seems to want us to notice it. The Lord who fed one widow through a hard season has not forgotten the other.

The woman goes to tell the man of God.

I like that too. She does not keep it. She goes back to the one who sent her, and she tells him what has happened, and the book does not give us what she said. It gives us only what he says in answer, and it is brisk, and kind, and practical.

"Go," he says, "sell the oil and pay your debt, and you and your children can live on the rest."

Pay your debt. Not "keep it all." Not "be rich." He tells her to sell enough to pay what is owed, and the boys are safe, and the creditor has no further claim. And then: live on the rest. There is enough for the future. There is enough for the ordinary days that come after the miracle, when the pots are back on their shelves and the neighbours are asking what on earth that was about.

And that is where the first story ends. It is a very small story. It takes about seven verses. And I think it is one of the most comforting in the Bible, because the problem in it is not a battle or a plague or a tyrant. It is a bill. It is the kind of trouble that a real person has on a real Tuesday, and the book says that the Lord is interested in that.

Now we come to the second story, and it is a different sort of story altogether. This one begins with a day, and a road, and a meal.

The book says that one day Elisha went on to a place called Shunem. It was a town in the north, in the plain below the hills, on a road a traveller might well take. And there, the book says, was a woman of means. The older translation says "a great woman," and some scholars think that means she was wealthy, and some that she was well respected, and I think it may well mean both. She is not named. We are never told her name. But the book says she urged him to eat some food.

Think of that. A well-known prophet is passing through, tired, dusty, probably hungry, and a woman he has never met steps out of her gate and says, please, come in and have something to eat.

He does. And from that day on, the book tells us, every time he passed that way, he stopped there for a meal. It became a habit. A road, a house, a table.

I would like you to pay attention to that, because it happens so easily and so quietly. Nobody organises it. Nobody asks. A woman is simply kind once, and then she is kind again, and in the end there is a place in the world where a tired man knows he will be welcome.

And then she says something to her husband.

The book has just told us about her kindness, and now it lets us hear her thinking out loud. She says to him, "Look, I am sure that this man who passes our way regularly is a holy man of God."

Holy man of God. Do you see what she has done? She has watched him, over many meals. She has noticed how he is. She has listened to him talk, and watched how he treats the servants, and seen how he prays. And she has come to a conclusion, which she says quietly to her husband, in the kind of voice you use when you have been thinking about something for a long time.

And then she says the practical thing.

"Let us make a small room on the roof, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us."

I would like to stop here for a moment and look at what is in that room, because the book has been very careful to list it.

A bed. A table. A chair. A lamp.

That is all. It is not a great chamber. It is not a guest suite with a carved door. It is a small room built on a flat roof, up a stair, away from the noise of the household, and it has exactly the things a person needs if he is tired and wishes to rest and read and pray. A place to lie down. A place to put a cup. A place to sit. And a lamp, so that when the evening comes, he will not be sitting in the dark.

I think a lamp is rather a wonderful thing to put on a list. It is a small flame in a clay dish, a wick floating in oil, and it makes the whole room into a place where somebody lives. We have lamps, here, on these nights, as we listen. I have always been fond of her for that lamp.

And do you notice, by the way, what the lamp would have burned? We spent the first half of the night with a woman and a jar of oil. The book does not point it out, and I am not going to say it means anything. But I like to think that in the town of Shunem, in a small room on a roof, a little light was kept burning for a stranger, and that it was fed with something very like the thing that kept a family out of slavery.

So they build the room. And the book says that one day Elisha came, and went up to the room, and lay down there.

Imagine that. A man who has spent months on the road, sleeping where he could, in a barn, in a doorway, in the house of whoever would have him. And now there is a stair he knows, and a door he can close, and a bed that is always made. I do not know what he said, the first time he lay down. I think he may have said nothing at all. I think he may have just lain there for a while, and looked at the lamp, and breathed out.

Then he does what a grateful person does. He wants to say thank you.

He says to Gehazi, his servant, "Call this Shunammite woman." Which is how the book describes her: the woman from Shunem. And she comes, and she stands in front of him.

"Say to her," he tells Gehazi, "See, you have taken all this trouble for us. What can be done for you? Would you like to be spoken for to the king or to the commander of the army?"

I want you to hear what he is offering. He is a prophet, and he has some standing. He is saying, I can put in a word for you. I can bring your name to the people who matter. If you ever need a favour from the palace, or protection from the army, or a hand in some matter of law, I can ask. It is a very real offer, and a very kind one, and a person of lesser character might have taken it at once.

And she says:

"I live among my own people."

That is her whole answer. Five words in the book, in some translations a few more. And it is one of the most beautiful sentences in the chapter.

What she means, I think, is: I have everything I need. I have my family, and my neighbours, and my place. I do not want to be spoken for to the king. I do not want to be noticed. I am content to be a woman in a town, among people I know, with a house I can be generous in. She had not built the room for a reward. She had built it because he was a holy man of God and he was tired, and the idea of a reward made her, I think, a little shy.

And Elisha, who is a good man and a thoughtful one, does not push. But he is uneasy. He does not like to leave a kindness unanswered. And so he turns to Gehazi and says, "What then is to be done for her?"

And Gehazi, who has been standing there all this time, says the thing that he has noticed.

"Well, she has no son, and her husband is old."

I would like you to hear that quietly, because it is not a thing that is said lightly, and I do not think Gehazi says it lightly. In that time and place, to have no child was a sorrow that a woman carried for her whole life, and it was often spoken of in a lowered voice. It is the same sorrow that Sarah carried, and Hannah, and Rebekah in her time. She has never mentioned it. In all her conversations with the prophet, she has not once asked him for it. And yet her servant's eye has seen it, and Gehazi, who is perhaps not always the best of men, is here at his best: he has noticed what she did not say.

"Call her," Elisha says.

So she is called, and she comes to the door and stands in it. The book says, rather beautifully, that she stood in the doorway. She does not come in. She is at the threshold of her own guest room, with the lamp lit behind the prophet.

And Elisha says:

"At this season, in due time, you shall embrace a son."

I will tell you what she says, and then I will tell you what I think it means.

She says: "No, my lord, O man of God; do not deceive your servant."

Do not lie to me.

She does not say, how wonderful. She does not say, thank you. She says, please, do not do this to me, do not make me hope. She has spent a good many years putting this sorrow somewhere she does not have to look at it, and a kind man has just walked into that place and picked it up.

And I would ask you not to think less of her for it. It is one of the most honest things in the whole Bible. She has been kind to a prophet for years, and she has asked for nothing, and the first time he offers her what she most wants, she is afraid. I think anyone who has hoped for something for a long time and then been told it is coming knows what that fear is. It is the fear of being wrong. It is the fear that the door opens a little way and then closes.

But he does not take it back.

The book says: "The woman conceived, and she bore a son at that season, in due time, as Elisha had said to her."

That is the whole of it. No fuss. It does not tell us what her husband said. It does not tell us how she felt when she first knew, or what she told the neighbours, or whether she went up the stair to the little room and stood looking at the lamp. It does not say that she thanked anyone. It says, at that season, in due time, as Elisha had said. The promise was kept the way ordinary things are kept, by the passing of months.

And a child was born in a house that had, some years before, built a small room for a stranger.

I have thought, from time to time, about the order of it. The room came first. The woman did not build it because she expected a son. She did not know she would be given one. She built it because a tired man was passing by, and a bed and a lamp were a thing she could do. And it was only afterwards, when she had asked nothing, that the gift came which she had most wanted and least dared to ask.

I do not say that you can build a room and be paid for it. That is not what the book says, and it is not how the Lord works. She did not do it for that. She said no to a reward. What I take from it is simpler. That hospitality is a way of leaving a door open, and that the Lord has a way of walking through open doors.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's story about the widow and her sons, the creditor, the question "What do you have in the house?", the jar of oil, the empty vessels, the shut door, the filling of the vessels until there were none left, the selling of the oil and the paying of the debt, comes from the second book of Kings, chapter four, verses one to seven. Everything about the woman of Shunem, the meal, the little room with its bed, table, chair and lamp, Elisha's offer, her answer "I live among my own people," Gehazi's remark, the promise, her "do not deceive your servant" and the birth of the son at the time Elisha had said, comes from the same chapter, verses eight to seventeen. The words of the widow, Elisha, the Shunammite and Gehazi are told in plain paraphrase and not word for word.

What we invented is the neighbours and their questions, the weather, the sounds of the house, and the small thoughts of both women. The book does not say how the oil looked as it poured, or what the widow told Elisha when she came back, or how the husband of the Shunammite took the news, and we have not guessed.

A few details are worth being careful about. First, the book does not name either woman, and we have not named them. Second, the book calls the first woman's husband one of the sons of the prophets. That is the name of a company of people around Elisha, and does not mean the sons of a prophet in the family sense. Third, in the Greek numbering used by the Orthodox Church, this book is called the fourth book of Kingdoms, so if you look for it in an Orthodox Bible, that is where it is. Fourth, the lamp in the little room is in the chapter, but the observation that it may have burned oil like the widow's is our own, and we have said so, and it is not a teaching of the Church. Finally, the Church has often read the story of the oil as a picture of the generosity of God, who gives to the limit of our asking, and the Shunammite as a picture of hospitality. Those are readings, and not part of the text.

And a last note about the end of the chapter, which we left out. The child grows. One day he goes out to the field to his father, and he is taken ill, and what follows is long and very frightening, and has a happy ending, but it is not a bedtime story for tonight. It is in the Bible. We have not pretended otherwise. We have simply left it for another night.

That's the story of Elisha and the widow's jars of oil, and the little room at Shunem, for tonight. If you would like to remember the prophet Elisha in your prayers, the Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the fourteenth of June, and the Carmelite family in the Catholic Church honours him as well. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have a neighbour who gives you an empty pot without asking why. May you find the courage to knock on one more door than is comfortable. May the Lord fill every vessel you bring, and may you be wise enough to know that it is he who is pouring. May there be a small room in your house, with a bed and a table and a chair and a lamp, and may someone tired come and rest there. And may the thing you were most afraid to hope for be given in its season, as quietly as a month goes by.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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