Naaman

(pleasantness, comeliness) (2 Kings 5:1, 2)—a Syrian commander, a contemporary of the prophet Elisha, who turned to him with a request to heal him of the leprosy from which he grievously suffered. The pleasures which he enjoyed by virtue of his high position were embittered by this monstrous disease. All remedies for its cure proved fruitless; and so it happened that a certain maidservant, a captive Israelite girl, who lived in his house, said to Naaman’s wife: “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria, he would recover him of his leprosy.” These words were reported to Naaman, and he told the king.

The king permitted him to go to Samaria and sent with him a letter to the king of Israel, that he should heal him of his leprosy. Such a strange request seemed to the king of Israel, who did not possess the gift of healing, a pretext for war. “He rent his clothes, and said, Am I God, to kill and to make alive?” The prophet Elisha, hearing of this, told him to send Naaman to him. The nobleman arrived with his horses and his chariot and stood at the entrance of Elisha’s house. The prophet sent word to him: “Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.” Such treatment of the Syrian nobleman by the prophet, such a seemingly empty piece of advice, such a simple remedy, seemed insulting to Naaman; he was enraged and said, “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?

may I not wash in them, and be clean?” But his servants came near and said to him: “My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?” On the advice of his sensible servants, Naaman went to the Jordan, plunged into it seven times, and his flesh became completely clean. Deeply struck by this miracle, he offered Elisha his gifts, but the prophet, notwithstanding all his urging, accepted nothing.

Then Naaman asked the prophet’s permission to take with him some earth of the land of Israel, so that in Damascus he might build on it an altar to the true God, since he would no longer offer sacrifice to any other gods except the God of Israel; and at the same time he asked forgiveness beforehand from the prophet, on behalf of the LORD, in that, in the course of his duty, accompanying the king to the temple of Rimmon, he would of necessity have to bow down there together with the king, when the king leaned upon his hand and prostrated himself before the idol.

The prophet reassured him: “Go in peace,” he said (2 Kings 5:1–19). According to Jewish tradition, Naaman was the very man who, at the battle of Ramoth-gilead, struck Ahab a mortal blow with an arrow shot at random. Perhaps it is precisely to this event that the following phrase in the Second Book of Kings refers: through him (that is, through Naaman) the LORD gave victory to the Syrians. The Lord allows us to see, in Naaman, a man of true faith, presenting him as an example for the Israelites of his time. “Many lepers were in Israel in the time of the prophet Eliseus,” says the Lord, “and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27).