"No Forest & No Bears" in the Living Word

[Elisha] He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!”

 When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.  From there he went on to Mount Carmel and then returned to Samaria.   

 2 Kings 2:23-25 NRSVue 

There is stiff competition for the most disturbing passage in scripture but one of the top three has to be the story of Elisha, the prophet, calling on bears to massacre children who taunted him with the term "baldy." Now, as a baldy I appreciate the sensitivity, but come on. This is such a grisly tale -- grizzly? -- that it's offensive and indefensible in virtually every way, although, bizarrely,  some commentators attempt to defend it. 

The pastor and writer Brian Zahn tweeted out the annotation to this passage by the esteemed Hebrew scholar, Robert Alter who calls the story "morally scandalous" and points out that through the centuries the rabbis have dismissed it as never having happened. In fact they coined a phrase "no bears and no forest" to not only sum up their opinion but as a general term for something that is fiction: 

No bears and no forest 

 No truth to it.  Doesn't exist.  There's no "there" there.  A complete fiction.  SOURCE: Stutchkoff, Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh. The first phrase is in Hebrew and usually stands alone. It is followed by a tongue-in-cheek paraphrase in Yiddish. Refers to a commentary on the story in 2 Kings 2:23-24, in which Elisha's curse called two bears out of a forest to attack youths who had mocked him. According to one interpretation, this was a double miracle because there existed in the area neither forest nor bears.

I have a high regard for scripture as the Living Word, but I'm not a literalist who chooses to engage in theological gymnastics to defend every strange passage. Nor do I feel that the values of another age must be applied universally for our time. Anyway, we are seeing many supposedly "bible believing" Christians across the border and here in Canada essentially abandoning scripture, including the teaching of Jesus, in favour of a quasi-religious White Supremacist cult. God help us all. 

Satirical depiction of Elisha and the Children