Acknowledgments
As a first-year undergraduate at Bar-Ilan University I took courses in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People on the hagiographic stories about Hasidic masters, taught by the late Prof. Gedalyah Nigal. I am eternally grateful to him for opening my eyes to this genre and providing me with the knowledge that was essential when I later began dealing with the stories about the prophet Elisha.
Three decades ago I had a course on biblical narrative with Prof. Uriel Simon. This introduced me to the unique qualities of the stories about Elisha. My dissertation on the topic, which I wrote under his direction, is the basis for the present volume. I can never fully express my gratitude to my dear teacher, Prof. Simon, for his devoted guidance.
Even after I completed my doctorate and switched my focus to topics that have nothing to do with Elisha, he was always there, somewhere in the background. I kept tabs on all the new scholarship about him, in the hope that one day I would be able to turn the dissertation into a book. Given the long years that passed from the germ of the idea to its realization, I used to joke that I should watch out for bears—Elisha must certainly be angry with my dilatory progress. I owe particular thanks to my dear friend, the late Dr. Shimon Bar-Efrat, who kept pushing me to finish the job.
I would like to thank all my colleagues in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, my academic home, for the pleasant and supportive atmosphere; I could not dream of anything better. Most of all I am grateful to Prof. Ed Greenstein, who is always there with advice and is generous in sharing his vast knowledge.
Translating this book into English was not a simple matter. Notably, the standard English translations of the Bible frequently do not reflect aspects of the original that I wanted to bring out. Words cannot exhaust my appreciation of my long-time translator, Lenn Schramm, for taking up this challenge, deviating from the standard translation when necessary and rendering the biblical verses so that they do convey my reading. In places he massaged and expanded my text so that semantic and grammatical nuances that are readily understood by those who read the Bible in Hebrew would be comprehensible to persons not fluent in that language. He also contributed illuminating comments that found their way into the book.
I am profoundly grateful to my dear father, the late Robert Shemesh, who helped me translate material from French, to my dear mother, who assisted with Spanish sources, and to my beloved spouse, Yariv Gilboa, for his help in checking the indexes for the book. I am similarly indebted to the Goethe Institute which decades ago, when I was still a graduate student, awarded me a fellowship to study German in Konstanz, enabling me to draw on the extensive professional literature in that language.
Without the professional devotion of the editors of VTS at Brill, and especially Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, the VTS Series Editor, Nitzan Shalev, and Dirk Bakker, I would not have been able to share with the world the fruits of the years (decades!) in which Elisha was my constant companion. Many thanks also to the typesetter, Loretta Villamosa of Asiatype Inc., for the meticulous care and patience required to carry out this task.
I dedicate this book to my beloved mother, Sarah Estela Shemesh. From her I learned that some things are beyond our ken. This includes Elisha’s supernatural powers as recounted in the stories about him.