Death in the Pot
Feb 5th, 2021 | By Shayley Martin DC ‘22
You may know the God who led an entire people out of slavery by splitting a sea. Or who made a couple loaves of bread and some fish into a meal for more than 5,000 people. But there’s another story that you don’t hear about as often. It’s about the same God, but for me it makes the whole rest of the Bible hit different. I want you to meet the God of exploding cucumbers.
The story is in 2 Kings. It’s only four verses. There was a prophet in Israel named Elisha, who lived during a time when Israel’s king wasn’t really listening to God. God did miracles through Elisha that Christians usually only associate with Jesus, like raising people from the dead. And after one such passage, in which he brings a foreign woman’s son back to life, there’s this unassuming little section:
Elisha returned to Gilgal and there was a famine in that region. While the company of the prophets was meeting with him, he said to his servant, “Put on the large pot and cook some stew for these prophets.”
One of them went out into the fields to gather herbs and found a wild vine and picked as many of its gourds as his garment could hold. When he returned, he cut them up into the pot of stew, though no one knew what they were. The stew was poured out for the men, but as they began to eat it, they cried out, “Man of God, there is death in the pot!” And they could not eat it.
Elisha said, “Get some flour.” He put it into the pot and said, “Serve it to the people to eat.” And there was nothing harmful in the pot.
– 2 Kings 4:38-41
Elisha had just come from a different region—no famine is mentioned there. But these prophets in Gilgal were probably scraping by, tired and hungry. They were desperate enough, at least, to eat unknown wild gourds.
Around the Mediterranean there grows a wild vine called the exploding cucumber. When you press on an exploding cucumber, its large seeds squirt out in a “stream of mucilaginous liquid” [1]. Every part of the vine is toxic and causes vomiting, diarrhea, and sometimes death [2]. It’s not certain that the “gourds” in 2 Kings were exploding cucumbers, but many commentators think they were because the Hebrew word used is paqqu’ah, which comes from the verb paqa’ meaning ‘to split, spring off, burst’ [3, 4]. Either way, that’s what the prophets were up against: not an invading army or a gaggle of demons, but a weird-looking, noxious wild vegetable.
The passage doesn’t say outright that God is the one who made the soup suitable to eat, but that’s the clear implication. Flour alone can’t neutralize the poison in an exploding cucumber (nor the other kind of gourd that some scholars think the prophets gathered). This particular reversal from deadly to edible was a miracle.
Yet the gourd story stands in stark contrast to the miracles on either side of it. The previous miracle is about God using Elisha to bring a woman’s son back to life when he dies of a mysterious sickness. In a dramatic scene, Elisha lays himself on the boy, “mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands” (2 Kings 4:34). The boy revives and sneezes seven times, and his grateful mother falls at Elisha’s feet. That’s the preceding story.
The next story is very short—a little bit of bread becomes enough to feed a hundred people after God says, “‘They will eat and have some left over’” (2 Kings 4:43). And in the story after that, God uses Elisha to heal the leprosy of a foreign commander. He tells the commander to wash seven times in the Jordan River, and the commander gets angry because that seems too simple. But the commander’s servants convince him to follow Elisha’s instructions. He is healed and decides to worship only God (2 Kings 5:1-15).
All three of those miracles would make good movie scenes. God spoke; people both cried out to Him and doubted Him openly; healing was accentuated with dramatic gestures. The gourd story wouldn’t be nearly as fun to watch. Besides the prophets calling Elisha “man of God,” nobody invoked God at all, and God didn’t speak aloud. And all that Elisha did to fix the situation was drop in a handful of flour. It probably would have looked to a passerby like he was just thickening the soup a little.
Yet because of God’s simple intervention through Elisha, one hundred people were saved from death, or at least from terrible sickness.
This is the God of exploding cucumbers.
The prophets made a pot of soup that, instead of filling their stomachs, would have turned them inside out and emptied them completely. They didn’t just botch the soup—they reversed its original purpose. But God, quietly and unceremoniously, fixed it. They got to eat a meal together without having to forage and cook again, even though they shouldn’t have been able to eat what they had prepared at all. He took their mistake, their ineffective and harmful attempt at feeding themselves, and made it into something good. There was nothing harmful in the pot.
Many of us are lucky enough not to lack food like the prophets did, but we still lack things like time, energy, and security, or we feel them threatened. And like the prophets, we grab the first thing that looks helpful, never suspecting that it will turn us inside out and scrape us dry. For me, I like to grab onto the feeling that I’m being helpful, that I’m needed. But instead of sustaining me, that feeling gradually twists my thoughts until I reorganize my life around it and derive all my self-worth from it. And that’s damaging. If I prove unhelpful, if something or someone fails despite having my help, I feel empty and useless.
We all grab onto life-sucking solutions. I used to think of Jesus’s horrible, people-inflicted death as reflecting some sadism that we all have in common. But of course, the religious leaders didn’t harm Him just for the sake of harming Him. They harmed Him for the same reason that most people do most things—because they thought it would help them. They felt their power and security and sense of normalcy threatened, and they grabbed what looked like a good solution, for them and maybe even for their whole nation.
Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.
– John 11:47-53
The religious leaders’ solution turned out to be a nasty exploding cucumber. If Jesus’s death had somehow been final—if we had really managed to separate ourselves from God completely—we would not only have
destroyed our chances of getting the security and normalcy and unity we were looking for, but we would have emptied ourselves of everything good.
But then, God did more than just fix our mess—He made it into the greatest gift ever given! Just as He made the purge-inducing stew into a meal that the prophets could share, He used our mistake to destroy the last barrier between us and Him. When Jesus died, he suffered the punishment that should have been ours. When he came back to life, he defeated death.
Here’s a much smaller personal example. As I mentioned, too often I like the feeling of helpfulness more than the chance to help people for their own sake. And sometimes that backfires because I spend tons of time and effort angling for that feeling, only to fail or feel unappreciated or realize I haven’t been helpful at all. About a month ago, I stressed and scraped so much that I got sick. I laid in bed for a solid two weeks with the shades drawn, doing nothing. And I realized that the world didn’t fall apart. I realized that everyone was fine. I moved to a spot by the window, stretched out in the sun and truly rested for the first time in a while.
That’s the God of exploding cucumbers—when we cook up nasty things, when there’s death in the pot and we’re preparing to feast, He doesn’t just click his tongue and throw our food in the trash. He makes poison into sustenance.
Notes
[1] Barki, Beste. “Ecballium elaterium.” The Nature of My Memories. Blogger, December 7,2015. http://natureofmymemories.blogspot.com/2015/12/ecballium-elaterium.html
[2] “Cucurbitaceae,” Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs, 16th ed. (Elsevier, 2016).
“2 Kings 4:39.” Bible Hub. Accessed November 1, 2020.
[3] “2 Kings 4:39.” BibleHub. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/4-39.htm.
[4] The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, 1979, s.v. “ פקע.”
[5] All All Biblical quotations from the NIV translation.
