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The Syrians, at any rate, thought they heard the approach of relieving armies. Tribes
from the great Hittite nation in the north, and bands, if not the armies of Egypt, had
been hired against them by Joram, and were now simultaneously advancing on them
from the north and the south. This would seem to explain how Samaria had held out
amid such terrible straits. They had been looking for this succor all along. Terror
peopled the night with the forms as well as the sounds of the dreaded host. We
imagine that the panic began at the extremity of the camp. Presently they were in full
flight, abandoning their horses, their asses, their tents, with all the provisions and
treasures which they contained, and hastening to put Jordan between them and their
imaginary pursuers.
When the four lepers reached the extremity of the Syrian camp, the fugitives were
already far away. They listened, but heard not a sound of living men. Cautiously they
looked into one tent, and finding it deserted, sat down to the untasted meal which lay
spread, ate and drank, and then carried away, and hid what treasures they found.
They entered the next tent, and found it similarly deserted. By the time they had
carried away and hid its treasures also, it became quite evident to them that, for some
unknown reason, the enemy had left the camp. It was, however, not so much the
thought that this was a day of good tidings to Samaria, in which they must not hold
their peace, as the fear that if they tarried till the morning without telling it, guilt
would attach to them, that induced them hastily to communicate with the guard at the
gate, who instantly reported the strange tidings. But so far from receiving the news as
an indication that the prediction of Elisha was in the course of fulfillment, the king
does not even seem to have remembered it. He would have treated the report as a
device of the Syrians, to lure the people in the frenzy of their hunger outside the city
gates. Foolish as the seeming wisdom of Joram was, there are only too many
occasions in which neglect or forgetfulness of God's promise threatens to rob us of
the liberty and blessing in store for us. In the present instance there were, happily,
those among the king's servants who would put the matter to the test of experiment.
From the few remaining troops, five^243 horsemen and two^244 chariots were to be
dispatched to report on the real state of matters.
The rest is soon told. They found it as the lepers had informed them. Not only was
the Syrian camp deserted, but all along the way to Jordan the track of the fugitives
was marked by the garments and vessels which they had cast away in their haste to
escape. And as the messengers came back with the tidings, the stream of people that
had been pent up in the city gate poured forth. They "spoiled the tents of the
Syrians." Presently there was abundance and more than that within Samaria. Once
more market was held within the gate, where they sold for one shekel two sacks of
barley, or else one sack of fine flour. And around those that sold and bought surged
and swayed the populace. Presumably to keep order among them, the king had sent
(^)