2 Kings 8:10

10. Thou mayest certainly recover The Hebrew text, in accordance with a majority of Hebrew MSS., reads thus: Go, say, thou certainly shalt not live; or more literally, living thou shalt not live. Instead of לא , not, the Keri has לו , to him, and this reading our English translators, as well as the Septuagint, Vulgate, Syriac, Arabic, and Chaldee versions, have followed. The external evidence would seem to favour this latter reading, but the internal is certainly against it. In the very next sentence Elisha says, The Lord has shown me that he shall certainly die. The howbeit of the English version is in the Hebrew simply the copulative ו , and. The translation, thou mayest certainly recover, (that is, as some explain, it is possible for thee to recover from thy sickness, this disease shall not cause thy death,) is only a lame effort to escape the obvious inconsistency and contradiction that exists in the reading adopted by most of the versions. How unnatural and inexplicable that Elisha should order Hazael to go, and, in a matter of so solemn moment as death, deceive his king by uttering a positive falsehood! It is much more natural to suppose that Hazael, informed that he is destined to be king, went and deceived Ben-hadad by misconstruing Elisha’s words. See on 2 Kings 8:14. We therefore adopt the reading of the Hebrew text, and translate Elisha’s words thus: Go, say, Thou surely shalt not live. And Jehovah has shown me that he shall surely die. These words were doubtless uttered with much emotion, and this fact sufficiently explains the change from the second to the third person in the two sentences, and the insertion of the copulative and.