1 Kings 13:31

And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones:

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Benson Commentary

1 Kings 13:31-32. When I am dead, &c. — Though he was a lying prophet, yet he desired to die the death of a true prophet. Gather not my soul with the sinners of Beth-el, but with this man of God: because, what he cried against the altar of Beth-el shall surely come to pass — Which he might easily conclude, both from the miracles wrought by the prophet of Judah, and from the wonderful particulars of his death. And against all the high places which are in the cities of Samaria — That is, of the kingdom of Samaria, as it was called, though not when this fact was done, yet before these books were written. Samaria was properly the name of one city; but, as it became the capital of the kingdom of Israel, that whole kingdom was so called from it. The prophet of Judah had not indeed threatened as much as the prophet of Beth-el here mentions, (unless he said more than is related 1 Kings 13:2,) but it might easily be inferred from what he had predicted. Thus, by the mouth of two witnesses, was it established, if possible, to convince Jeroboam.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

13:23-34 God is displeased at the sins of his own people; and no man shall be protected in disobedience, by his office, his nearness to God, or any services he has done for him. God warns all whom he employs, strictly to observe their orders. We cannot judge of men by their sufferings, nor of sins by present punishments; with some, the flesh is destroyed, that the spirit may be saved; with others, the flesh is pampered, that the soul may ripen for hell. Jeroboam returned not from his evil way. He promised himself that the calves would secure the crown to his family, but they lost it, and sunk his family. Those betray themselves who think to support themselves by any sin whatever. Let us dread prospering in sinful ways; pray to be kept from every delusion and temptation, and to be enabled to walk with self-denying perseverance in the way of God's commands.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

He laid his carcase in his own grave - As Joseph of Arimathaea did the body of our Lord Matthew 27:60. The possession of rock-hewn tombs by families, or individuals, was common among the Jews from their first entrance into the holy land to their final expulsion. A sepulchre usually consisted of an underground apartment, into which opened a number of long, narrow "loculi," or cells, placed side by side, each adapted to receive one body. The cells were 6 or 7 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 3 feet high. They were commonly closed by a stone placed at the end of each. Many such tombs still exist in Palestine.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

31. bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried—His motive in making this request was either that his remains might not be disturbed when the predicted events took place (see 2Ki 23:18), or he had some superstitious hope of being benefited at the resurrection by being in the same cave with a man of God.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

That I may be secured from that judgment threatened 1 Kings 13:2.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spoke to his sons, saying,.... He gave them the following charge:

when I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; as it was his own, it might be reasonably thought they would bury him in it without such a charge; but, lest they should not, he gives it:

lay my bones beside his bones; his view in this was, that when Josiah came to burn the bones of the priests, he would spare the bones of this man of God; and so his, lying by them, and mingled with them, would be spared also, and so it proved, 2 Kings 23:18.

Geneva Study Bible

And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones:

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

31. lay my bones beside his bones] Here the LXX. adds ‘in order that my bones may be preserved along with his bones.’ And Josephus expands this idea thus: “for he would not be outraged after his death if he were buried along with him, for the bones would not be recognized.” After which he adds to the story: “And having buried the prophet and given this charge to his sons, being wicked and impious he goes to Jeroboam and says: ‘Why wast thou troubled by the words of that foolish man?’ And when the king related what had happened to the altar and to his own hand, calling the man a truly divine and excellent prophet, he began to efface this opinion of him by calumnious words and by using misleading language about the things which had occurred, to weaken their real import. For he tried to persuade him that his hand had become numb through fatigue in lifting the victims, and that when relieved it had returned to its natural state; and that the altar being new and having so many large victims put on it was broken and fell to pieces by the weight of its load. He also pointed to the death of him who had foretold these signs, how he was slain by the lion.”

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 31. - And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre [Palestine, being of limestone formation, has a large number of caves. These, enlarged and adapted, were everywhere used for interments. ("The whole cliffs on its southern side [Hinnom] are honeycombed with tombs," Porter). In three sides of the cave vaults (loculi), each large enough to hold a body, were recessed in the rock, the entrance being closed by a slab of stone (see Conder, pp. 85, 96, 118, etc.) In the so called "tombs of the kings" and "prophets" we have such sepulchres on a large scale. A Paper on the Tombs of Palestine will be found in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, p. 66 sqq. It appears from 2 Kings 23:17 that a pillar was erected to mark this prophet's resting place] wherein the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. [That is to say, "Bury me in the cell next to his" (Rawlinson). But it is not absolutely certain that this arrangement (of loculi) obtained at this early period. The bodies may have been in much closer contact. See 2 Kings 13:21. The LXX. adds here, "That my bones may be saved with his bones;" an obvious gloss, founded on 2 Kings 23:18. This request throws some light on the yearning desire of the modern Jew to rest as near as possible to the bodies of the saints. See Porter, 1. p. 145.] 1 Kings 13:31

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

He thereupon had his ass saddled, and went and found the corpse and the ass standing by it, without the lion having eaten the corpse or torn the ass in pieces; and he lifted the corpse upon his ass, and brought it into his own city, and laid the corpse in his grave with the customary lamentation: אחו הוי, alas, my brother! (cf., Jeremiah 22:18), and then gave this command to his sons: "When I die, bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried, let my bones rest beside his bones; for the word which he proclaimed in the word of Jehovah upon the altar at Bethel and upon all the houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria will take place" (i.e., will be fulfilled). The expression "cities of Samaria" belongs to the author of these books, and is used proleptically of the kingdom of the ten tribes, which did not receive this name till after the building of the city of Samaria as the capital of the kingdom and the residence of the kings of Israel (1 Kings 16:24). There is a prophetic element in the words "upon all the houses of the high places," etc., inasmuch as the only other erection at that time beside the one at Bethel was a temple of the high places at Dan. But after such a beginning the multiplication of them might be foreseen with certainty, even without any higher illumination.

The conduct of the old prophet at Bethel appears so strange, that Josephus and the Chald., and most of the Rabbins and of the earlier commentators both Catholic and Protestant, have regarded him as a false prophet, who tried to lay a trap for the prophet from Judah, in order to counteract the effect of his prophecy upon the king and the people. But this assumption cannot be reconciled with either the divine revelation which came to him at the table, announcing to the Judaean prophet the punishment of his transgression of the commandment of God, and was so speedily fulfilled (1 Kings 13:20-24); or with the honour which he paid to the dead man after this punishment had fallen upon him, by burying him in his own grave; and still less with his confirmation of his declaration concerning the altar at Bethel (1 Kings 13:29-32). We must therefore follow Ephr. Syr., Theodor., Hengstenberg, and others, and regard the old prophet as a true prophet, who with good intentions, and not "under the influence of human envy" (Thenius), but impelled by the desire to enter into a closer relation to the man of God from Judah and to strengthen himself through his prophetic gifts, urged him to enter his house. The fact that he made use of sinful means in order to make more sure of securing the end desired, namely, of the false pretence that he had been directed by an angel to do this, may be explained, as Hengstenberg suggests (Dissert. vol. ii. p. 149), on the ground that when Jeroboam introduced his innovations, he had sinned by keeping silence, and that the appearance of the Judaean prophet had brought him to a consciousness of this sin, so that he had been seized with shame on account of his fall, and was anxious to restore himself to honour in his own eyes and those of others by intercourse with this witness to the truth. But however little the lie itself can be excused or justified, we must not attribute to him alone the consequences by which the lie was followed in the case of the Judaean prophet. For whilst he chose reprehensible means of accomplishing what appeared to be a good end, namely, to raise himself again by intercourse with a true prophet, and had no wish to injure the other in any way, the Judaean prophet allowed himself to be seduced to a transgression of the clear and definite prohibition of God simply by the sensual desire for bodily invigoration by meat and drink, and had failed to consider that the divine revelation which he had received could not be repealed by a pretended revelation from an angel, because the word of God does not contradict itself. He was therefore obliged to listen to a true revelation from God from the moth of the man whose pretended revelation from an angel he had too carelessly believed, namely, to the announcement of punishment for his disobedience towards the commandment of God, which punishment he immediately afterwards endured, "for the destruction of the flesh, but for the preservation of the spirit: 1 Corinthians 15:5" (Berleb. Bible). That the punishment fell upon him alone and not upon the old prophet of Bethel also, and that for apparently a smaller crime, may be accounted for "not so much from the fact that the old prophet had lied with a good intention (this might hold good of the other also), as from the fact that it was needful to deal strictly with the man who had just received a great and holy commission from the Lord" (O. v. Gerlach). It is true that no bodily punishment fell upon the old prophet, but this punishment he received instead, that with his lie he was put to shame, and that his conscience must have accused him of having occasioned the death of the man of God from Judah. He was thereby to be cured of his weakness, that he might give honour to the truth of the testimony of God. "Thus did the wondrous providence of God know how to direct all things most gloriously, so that the bodily destruction of the one contributed to the spiritual and eternal preservation of the soul of the other" (Berleb. Bible). - Concerning the design of these marvellous events, H. Witsius has the following remarks in his Miscell. ss. i. p. 118 (ed. nov. 1736): "So many wondrous events all occurring in one result caused the prophecy against the altar at Bethel to be preserved in the mouths and memories of all, and the mission of this prophet to become far more illustrious. Thus, although the falsehood of the old man of Bethel brought disgrace upon himself, it injured no one but the man of God whose credulity was too great; and, under the overruling providence of God, it contributed in the most signal manner to the confirmation and publication of the truth."

(Note: Compare with this the remark of Theodoret in his quaest. 43 in 3 libr. Reb.: "In my opinion this punishment served to confirm the declaration concerning the altar. For it was not possible for the statement of such a man to be concealed: and this was sufficient to fill with terror those who heard it; for if partaking of food contrary to the command of God, and that not of his own accord, but under a deception, brought such retribution upon a righteous man, to what punishments would they be exposed who had forsaken the God who made them, and worshipped the likenesses of irrational creatures?")

The heaping up of the marvellous corresponded to the great object of the mission of the man of God out of Judah, through which the Lord would enter an energetic protest against the idolatrous worship of Jeroboam at its first introduction, to guard those who feared God in Israel, of whom there were not a few (2 Chronicles 11:16; 2 Kings 18:3; 2 Kings 19:18), from falling away from Him by joining in the worship of the calves, and to take away every excuse from the ungodly who participated therein.