Commentaria in IV Regum
Wherefore, as heretics now deride Priests and Monks, and call them shaved and bald, according to the saying of one of them: “A throng of priests, the head shaved at the crown:” so also these boys, instructed by heretical and idolatrous parents, seem to have called Eliseus and his disciples, as Nazarites and hence hermits, and therefore with heads shorn and shaved, “bald,” in mockery. For these boys were the sons of the idolatrous Bethelites, worshippers of the golden calf; as St. Augustine testifies, whose words I shall presently cite. Mocking Eliseus, therefore, as a religious man, they cried out: “Go up, thou bald head,” namely, up the mountain of our city Bethel, or even, go up into the air, as thy master Elias went up, as if to say, May some evil spirit snatch and carry thee off into the winds, as it carried off Elias thy master: follow, as disciple, thy master, that thou mayest cease to be troublesome to us, and no longer chastise and rebuke us for the worship of the golden calf. So, he says, they uttered this by way of detraction of the assumption of Elias, as if they said: may the spirit cast thee also upon the pathless, inaccessible ridges of the mountains, as it cast him, that we may likewise be freed from thee, as we were freed from him.
Moreover these boys are called little, because they were not youths, but boys of nine or ten years, and therefore capable of malice and guilt, as is plain both from their very petulant and slanderous mockery, and from its most severe punishment.
Allegorically, the Jews mocked Christ, stripped of His hair and crowned with the crown of thorns, saying: Go up upon the cross. Whence St. Bernard, sermon 4 to the soldiers of the Temple, chapter i, says: “Our bald one therefore went up upon the cross, exposed to the world for the world, and with face uncovered and brow laid bare making purgation of sins, was no more ashamed of the ignominy of a disgraceful and bitter death than He shrank from its pain, that He might rescue us from everlasting reproach and restore us to glory. Nor is it a wonder; for what would He be ashamed of, who has so washed us from our sins, not indeed as water washing and retaining the filth, but like a ray of the sun drying and keeping the purity? For the wisdom of God reaches everywhere by reason of its cleanness.”
24. AND LOOKING BACK, HE SAW THEM, AND CURSED THEM IN THE NAME OF THE LORD,—that is, Eliseus called down upon them from God just punishment and vengeance. Eliseus did this out of a just zeal of religion: first, because when the servants and prophets of God are mocked, God Himself is mocked. So St. Thomas, II-II, Question CVIII, article 4, reply to 4. Second, he wished to punish the parents rather than the boys; for idolatrous parents instilled into their boys their idolatry and contempt for the true God and His prophets. For as St. Augustine says, sermon 204 On the Seasons: “The insolent boys are to be believed to have done it at the instigation of their parents. For they would not have cried out if it had displeased their parents.” And St. Justin, Question LXXX cited: “God,” he says, “scourged the parents by the slaughter of the boys, and at the same time warned posterity to bring up their sons in the true worship of God, in modesty and uprightness, lest they be chastised in like manner.” Whence St. Gregory, book IV of the Dialogues, chapter xviii, relates that a little child who was accustomed to blaspheme was snatched from his father’s bosom by demons. “That his father,” he says, “might acknowledge his guilt, who, neglecting the soul of his little son, had nourished a little sinner for the fires of hell.” The author of the Wonders of Holy Scripture, book II, chapter xxii, adds that perhaps these boys had been consecrated by their parents to the golden calf and the idols. Third, Eliseus took good counsel for the boys; for he brought it about that they should not become worse through impunity, says Theodoret, Question XIII. For if they had lived longer, they would have turned out more wicked and idolaters by the teaching and example of their parents, and therefore would have been the more gravely condemned.
AND TWO BEARS CAME OUT OF THE FOREST, AND TORE OF THEM FORTY-TWO BOYS.—Fittingly God sent bears to devour the boys before the faces of their fathers, that those whom they had neglected to imitate in the training of their boys they might find to be the executioners in their destruction. For He showed that these parents, who had been slothful, nay impious, in forming their sons, were worse than bears. For bears form and shape their shapeless cubs by licking them, as Pliny testifies, book VIII, chapter xxxvi, and book X, chapter lxiii. Whence St. Ambrose: “The she-bear,” he says, “fashions her young (by licking) to her own likeness; canst thou not train thy sons to be like thee?”
Allegorically, Abulensis, Serarius and others commonly say: Eliseus ascending the mountain is a type of Christ ascending Mount Calvary and there crucified; the 42 boys mocked him, that is, the Jews, saying: “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Christ cursed them, ordaining for them as a punishment the destruction of Jerusalem, so that after forty years from the ascension of the Son of God, namely into heaven, two bears should come from the forest of the Gentiles, namely Titus and Vespasian, to tear and destroy them. So Angelomus, Eucherius, Bede, Rupert, and St. Jerome on the title of Psalm XLI: “Eliseus,” he says, “bears the figure of Christ; the boys, of the Jews who said: Hail, King of the Jews: the bears are properly understood as demons; because they devoured their hearts, and therefore that Psalm is inscribed for the sons of Core, who are the sons of the Bald.” And St. Augustine, book XII Against Faustus, chapter xxxv: “Eliseus,” he says, “the boys insulting and crying: Bald head, bald head, beasts devour; the little boys, in folly deriding Christ crucified in the place of Calvary, are seized by demons and perish.” Tropologically Origen, homily 4 on Ezechiel, takes by the two bears the demons and the beasts of the vices, which are sent upon the sinful soul. Finally Marcion the heresiarch, to prove that Moses was contrary to Christ, and the Old Testament to the New, the one brought forth by an evil and cruel God, the other by a good and kind one, said: Christ bids us be as little children; but that old God sent bears upon little children who mocked Eliseus: he is therefore contrary to Him. Tertullian answers, book IV Against Marcion, chapter xxiii: “A sufficiently shameless antithesis, since it compares things so different, little children and boys; an age innocent, and one already capable of judgment, which could revile, not to say blaspheme. Because, therefore, God is just, He spared not even impious boys, exacting honour for the older age, and surely more from the younger. But because He is good, He so loves little children that in Egypt He did good to the midwives who protected the Hebrew births, endangered by the edict of Pharaoh. So this affection of Christ is the same as that of the Creator.”