¹³ One of his officers replied, “We had better send out scouts to check into this. Let them take five of the remaining horses. If something happens to them, it will be no worse than if they stay here and die with the rest of us.”

⁴ “We will starve if we stay here, but with the famine in the city, we will starve if we go back there. So we might as well go out and surrender to the Aramean army. If they let us live, so much the better. But if they kill us, we would have died anyway.”

³³ While Elisha was still saying this, the messenger arrived. And the king^[a] said, “All this misery is from the Lord! Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?”

¹³ But his officers tried to reason with him and said, “Sir,^[a] if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, ‘Go and wash and be cured!’”