Prophet: Elisha

After learning in the cave on Mount Horeb, that Elisha, the son of Shaphat, had been selected by Yahweh as his successor, Elijah set out to find him. On his way from Mount Horeb to Damascus, Elijah found Elisha ploughing with twelve yokes of oxen. Elisha became Elijah's close attendant until Elijah was taken up into heaven.

Elisha was responsible for numerous wonders...

By means of the mantle left to fall from Elijah, Elisha miraculously recrossed the Jordan and returned to Jericho, where he won the gratitude of the people by purifying the unwholesome waters of their spring and making them drinkable.

To relieve a prophet's widow harrassed by a creditor, Elisha multiplied a little oil as to enable her not only to pay her debt but to provide for her family needs. Tradition identifies the widow's husband as Obadiah, the servant of King Ahab, who hid 100 prophets of Yahweh.

Elisha obtained for a rich lady of Shunem the birth of a son. When the child died some years later, Elisha successfully resuscitated the him.

To nourish the sons of the prophets pressed by famine, Elisha changed a pottage made from poisonous gourds into wholesome food. He also fed a hundred men with twenty loaves of new barley, leaving some leftover, (similar to the miracles of Jesus in the New Testament).

Elisha cured the Syrian military commander Naaman of leprosy but punished his own servant Gehazi, who took money from Naaman. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus referred to Naaman's healing when he said, "And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet: and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian."

Elisha repeatedly saved King Jehoram of Israel from the ambushes planned by Benhadad, ordering the elders to shut the door against the messenger of Israel's ungrateful king, bewildering with a strange blindness the soldiers of the Syrian king, making iron float to relieve from embarrassment a son of a prophet, and predicting the sudden flight of the enemy at the siege of Samaria and the consequent cessation of the famine in the city,