When the
king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him seven
hundred swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of Edom; but they could
not. Then he took his firstborn son who was to succeed him, and offered him as
a burnt offering on the wall. And great wrath came upon Israel, so they
withdrew from him and returned to their own land. (2 Kgs 3:26-27 NRSV)
I have addressed this text previously on
my blog:
2
Kings 3:27 and the ontological existence of other gods
More
on the Plurality of the Gods in the Old Testament
Approaching things from a different perspective,
consider the following from John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton:
Most commentators on 2 Kings 3:27
address the question, “whose fury goes out against Israel?” Boyd assumes that
the fury is that of Chemosh (the god of Moab), but the text does not say—nor does
it specify to whom the sacrifice was offered—and other interpretations have
been proposed. One possible option is that the fury is that of the Moabite
army, who failed to “break through” in 2 Kings 3:27 but who are now
sufficiently motivated by the death of the crown prince that they try again and
succeed. The word translated “fury” is indeed used of human anger in 2 Kings
5:11 and 13:19, but the collocation “great fury” used here always refers to the
wrath of the LORD (Deut 29:28; Jer 21:5; 32:37; Zech 1:15; 7:12). This leads
some commentators to propose that the fury is that of Yahweh. This
interpretation states that Yahweh continues to rage against Omri’s dynasty and
therefore intervenes at the end to deny Ahab’s son a victory; the sacrifice in
this reading becomes more or less a coincidence. However, if this was the
intended message, we would expect the sacrifice not to be mentioned at all, and
instead some something to the effect of “but the LORD remembered the sins of
Ahab” (compare perhaps 2 Kgs 23:36). The context indicates that the sacrifice
is the more or less direct cause of the fury. A third option is that the wrath
is Israel’s against itself; disgusted with themselves by the extreme measures
to which they have pushed their enemies, they give up and go home. However,
this kind of empathetic emotional reaction towards enemies is unlikely in a
culture where besieging armies frequently force their victims to eat their children (Lev 26:29; Deut
28:53-55; 2 Kgs 6:28-29). Further, the use of the collocation “great wrath” to
indicate a divine subject and the nature of the inciting action as a sacrifice (a cultic act) combined with
the understanding of divine warfare that exists in the cognitive environment of
the time . . . indicates that we should indeed understand the fury to be that of
Chemosh or some other Moabite warrior god. Nonetheless, that in itself is not
sufficient to conclude that the message the passage wishes to convey is that
Chemosh is real and sometimes he is stronger than Yahweh . . . Since the
purpose of the narrative is to legitimate Elisha, the details supplied by the
Deuteronomist in 2 Kings 3:26-27 should be read as an explanation of why the siege failed, construed in such
a way that Elisha does not turn out as a false prophet. Consequently, the
explanation cannot be that Yahweh has decided that he will not grant final victory
to Ahab’s house; this reading would make Elisha a false prophet by definition,
since he has failed to accurately convey the intent of the gods. Further, it is
unlikely that the explanation is that Yahweh tried to do what he planned but
failed. Due to the conception of divine warfare in the minds of the original audience
of Kings—and also in the minds of the besieging army the narrative describes—it
would theoretically be possible for their God to lose in battle. However, the
purpose of the passage is not to explain the phenomena of a military defeat but
to vindicate Elisha, and the biblical authors never rationalize a failure on
the part of a human (an inaccurate prophecy) by appealing to failure on the
part of God (defeat in battle). Apart from theological considerations, such an
explanation would be unlikely to persuade and thus would not suit the document’s
purpose (or, said another way, proving that the god is weak would not serve to
exonerate the prophet. When Baal is shown to be the weaker of two gods in the
contest on Mt. Carmel in 1 Kgs 18:27-29 his prophets are not excused for their failure;
instead they are put to death [1 Kgs 18:40] in accordance with the fate of the
false prophets [Deut 13:5; 18:20]). The test of a true prophet is true prophecy
and the nature of the test is strictly empirical: “If that a prophet proclaims
in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the
LORD has not spoken” (Deut 18:22; compare also 1 Kgs 22:28). The most likely
explanation, then, is this: God has promised to “deliver Moab into [their]
hands” (2 Kgs 3:18), but he has not promised to strike down Moab on their behalf (contrast 2 Kgs 18:24). If Israel fights then they will win, but they still have to go and fight (see 2 Kgs
3:24). However, when faced with the (manifested or impending) power of the enemy
deity in response to the king’s sacrifice—that is, the “great fury against
Israel”—they do not fight, but instead they give up and go home: “they withdrew
and returned to their own land” (2 Kgs 3:27). If they had stayed to fight then
they would have won, but it is neither the fault of Yahweh nor the fault of
Elisha that they chose not to claim the victory that had been promised.
Therefore, 2 Kgs 3:26-27 does not
depict Yahweh being thwarted by the power of an enemy deity and does not offer biblical
proof that there are such things as deities who can successfully oppose the
will of Yahweh. However, the passage does depict a deity, presumably Chemosh,
accepting a human sacrifice. (John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology:
Reading the Biblical Text in its Cultural and Literary Context [Eugene,
Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2019], 169, 171-72)