An Old Prophet Rebukes the Man of God

¹¹ Now there was an old prophet who lived in Bethel, and his sons went to him and told him everything that the man of God had accomplished that day in Bethel, including the message that he had delivered to the king. ¹² “Which way did he go?” their father asked him, since his sons had observed the way that the man of God had taken to return to Judah from Bethel. ¹³ “Saddle my donkey for me!” he ordered.^[a] So they saddled the donkey for him ¹⁴ and he rode off after the man of God and found him sitting under an oak tree.^[b] “You’re the man of God who came from Judah, aren’t you?” the old prophet^[c] asked him.

“I am,” he replied.

¹⁵ “Come home with me and have a meal,” he told him.

¹⁶ But he replied, “I can’t go back with you to your home, be in your company, or even eat food or drink water with you in this place, ¹⁷ because I’ve been given a command in the form of this message from the Lord: ‘You are to eat no food, drink no water, and do not return to Judah^[d] by traveling the way by which you go there.’”

¹⁸ “I’m a prophet like you,” the old man replied, “and an angel spoke to me and delivered this message from the Lord: ‘Bring him back with you to your house and give him food and water.’” But he was lying, ¹⁹ and the man of God^[e] accompanied the old prophet^[f] back to his house, ate some food, and drank some water.

²⁰ Later, while they were sitting down at the table, a message from the Lord was delivered to the prophet who had brought him back, ²¹ so he cried out to the man of God from Judah: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Because you disobeyed a command from the Lord and haven’t done what the Lord your God commanded you to do, ²² but instead you returned to eat and drink in the very place that he told you “Eat no food and drink no water,” your body will not be buried in the same grave as your ancestors.’”

A Lion Kills the Man of God

²³ After the meal was over, and the man had eaten food and had drunk water, the old prophet saddled the donkey for him—that is, for the man of God whom he had brought back. ²⁴ Not long after the man of God^[g] had left, a lion met him along the road and killed him. His body was left lying in the middle of the road with the donkey standing beside it and with the lion also standing next to the body. ²⁵ When some men passed by and noticed the body lying in the middle of the road and the lion standing beside the body, they went straight to the city and told what had happened in the city where the old prophet lived.

²⁶ The prophet who had brought the man of God^[h] back from the road learned about it. “It’s the man of God who disobeyed the message from the Lord,” he said. “That’s why the Lord gave him to that lion, which mauled him and killed him, just as the message from the Lord told me to rebuke him.” ²⁷ Then he ordered his sons, “Saddle the donkey for me.” So they did. ²⁸ The old prophet^[i] went out and located the body on the road where the donkey and the lion were standing beside the body. The lion had not eaten the body nor mauled the donkey. ²⁹ The prophet picked up the body of the man of God, laid it on the donkey, and brought it back to the city where the old man lived so he could mourn and bury him.

³⁰ He buried the corpse in his own grave and his family mourned for him, crying out, “Oh, no! My brother!”

³¹ After he had buried the man of God,^[j] he gave these instructions to his children: “When I die, bury me in the same grave in which the man of God is buried. Place my bones beside his, ³² because what he predicted by a message from the Lord against the altar in Bethel and the temples built in the high places of the cities of Samaria will certainly come about.”