A Floating Axe, That's Weird Series

Well, Eli must have been having a bad day because he curses the teens and two bears come out and maul them. That seems weird and a little excessive, but hey I’m not bald, so who am I to judge?

It was Elisha who healed Naaman of leprosy. And like his mentor, he provided miraculous oil to a widow and her two sons and raised a boy from the dead. During a famine, we are told that Elisha once fed hundreds of people with just 20 loaves of bread. And those are cool things.

But the story that was read to us earlier is where we are going to park for the rest of the morning. And it’s a simple story, you probably picked up most of it when it was read.

Elisha has gathered a group of prophets in training around him and the number grew until they found themselves in need of a larger building. And so, they embark upon a building campaign of sorts. They go down to the edge of the Jordan River where the trees were plentiful and begin cutting the lumber they will need for the project.

In the process of chopping down the wood, the head flies off one of the axes and is lost in the river. Opps.

A fairly simple story and not all that strange, we’ve all lost or broken things before. But it’s after the axe head falls into the river that things start to get weird.

2 Kings 6:5 But as one of them was cutting a tree, his ax head fell into the river. . .

So let’s start with The Axe My first thought when I was preparing this message was God cares even about the little things in our lives, like a lost axe. If you lose an axe head you go to Canadian tire or Princess auto and replace it for 30 bucks.

But three thousand years ago, during the Iron Age, a metal tool was a thing of great value. It would have been handcrafted from a valuable resource. So this wasn’t just a nuisance, this was a disaster. And it wasn’t a matter of carelessness, this was obviously something that was a semi-regular occurrence with these axes. Must have been a design flaw.

There is actually a mention in the Jewish law that deals with this very thing.

In the book of Deuteronomy, there is a section that gives instructions about Cities of refuge and we read in Deuteronomy 19:4-5 “If someone kills another person unintentionally, without previous hostility, the slayer may flee to any of these cities to live in safety. For example, suppose someone goes into the forest with a neighbour to cut wood. And suppose one of them swings an axe to chop down a tree, and the axe head flies off the handle, killing the other person. In such cases, the slayer may flee to one of the cities of refuge to live in safety.

So, I asked Mr Google to show me pictures of 3000-year-old axes, and while there wasn’t a lot of pictures, a lot of them had the axe head simply lashed to the handle, so you can probably understand how the lashing might come loose and allowed the axe head to be lost.

And maybe the axe head was lost not because the student was careless but because he was careful. That he was standing and working in such a way that if the head came off his axe it would land in the river and wouldn’t hurt one of his friends. Maybe he simply misjudged how far it would fly.