Church Voices

In 2 Kings 5 we have the story of Naaman. He was an extremely successful general in the service of his country which happened to be Aram (modern day Syria). Life is good for Naaman, except for the fact that he has leprosy. Long story short he ends up becoming penpals with Elisha who tells him to dunk himself in the Jordan 7 times.

Naaman gets a little bit upset at this, because, apparently he’s got some perfectly good rivers in Aram that should do the job just fine.

The lack of explanation for why Naaman gets all hot and bothered about which river will cure his leprosy always bothered me. I mean, the dude has his skin rotting and falling off of him, and he’s flying off into a rage about which river he’s going to bathe in (alright, true, it could have been a less severe form of leprosy, or some other skin disease, but whatever it was it was a big enough of a problem he was willing to travel a pretty good distance and bring lots of cool stuff with him to give to whoever it is that cures him).

Some have suggested that Naaman simply wanted the clearer streams of his native land rather than the muddy waters of the Jordan. Could be I suppose.

One commentary puts it down to patriotism. Another possiblity.

Or it could be a matter of religious ideology. Pagan gods in that area of the world at that time were believed to have rule over particular geographic areas. You can see this with Baalam. After he tries to curse Israel, but instead blesses them he moves to a different place thinking he can get away from whichever god is protecting the Israelites by traveling. Of course that doesn’t work out.

It could be that by using the Jordan Naaman would be ruling out completely the possiblity of his own gods being worthy of woship. After all, it seems he wouldn’t have had a problem if Elisha had waved his hand over him and prayed for a cure (maybe that would have signified the importance of the man rather than of God). Perhaps by tying the healing with a geographic feature strongly tied to Israel God was making a religious point. Because it seems like Naaman got the point pretty strongly towards the end of the story when he confesses God as the only God.

I don’t know if that’s it, a lot of really smart people publishing books and articles don’t seem to see that as a possiblity, or at least they didn’t write about it if they did. But it still bothers me why Naaman “went off in a rage” about dipping himself in the Jordan.