A well-off woman in Shunem persuades her husband to build a small room on their roof for Elisha, so the prophet has somewhere to stay whenever he passes through. She asks for nothing in return, but Elisha, wanting to repay her kindness, tells her that within a year she will hold a son of her own, a promise she initially resists believing.
The son is born as promised, grows old enough to work in the fields, and then dies suddenly in her arms, of what sounds like a sudden and severe headache.
She Built the Room Before She Ever Asked for Anything
The Shunammite woman’s generosity toward Elisha predates any promise made to her. She recognises him as a holy man of God passing through regularly and arranges lodging for him without angling for a blessing in return. Her kindness was not a transaction aimed at a future son. The son came afterward, as a response to a generosity she had already shown freely.
She Laid Him on the Prophet’s Bed and Said Nothing to Her Husband
When the boy dies, she carries him up to the room she had built for Elisha and lays him on the bed, then goes to her husband and asks for a donkey and a servant to hurry to the man of God, without telling him the boy is dead. She does not stop to explain her plan to anyone who might talk her out of it.
“It Is Well,” She Said, With Her Son Already Dead
Her husband asks why she is going to Elisha when it is not the new moon or the Sabbath, the usual occasions for such a visit. “It’s all right,” she says, or in some translations, “It is well.” Her son is dead in the room upstairs at the moment she says this. The statement is not denial. It is a decision about where she intends to take the problem before anyone else is told how bad it is.
She Would Not Leave Without an Answer
When she reaches Elisha, she grabs his feet and refuses to let go, even when his servant tries to push her away. When Elisha sends his servant ahead with his staff to lay on the boy, she refuses to accept a delegated solution: “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” She insists on the prophet himself, not merely something the prophet sent, and the boy is raised.
“‘Is your husband all right? Is your child all right?’ ‘Everything is all right,’ she said.”
2 Kings 4:26
She said it was well while she was still carrying her dead son up the stairs. She was not lying. She had simply already decided where she was taking the problem.
