In war, the healing voice of a girl
Like a warm breeze on a perfect summer morning, a voice of grace and compassion rings across more than 3,000 years in this Sunday’s reading from the Hebrew Bible. The voice doesn’t belong to a grown man or to a woman full of years. It is the voice of a child—a girl who was kidnapped and carried away as a spoil of war.
We don’t know if she is eight or 12 or in between; we don’t even know her name. We do know that she is a child of the covenant: a daughter of the Hebrew people. Carted off to enemy territory, she was put into service as a slave, working for the wife of Naaman, the commander-in-chief of the Aram-Damascus army.
Did Naaman pick her off as she was fleeing the carnage of her village? Did he look over a field of dozens, perhaps hundreds of captive girls, and select her? Did his soldiers kill her father and brothers? We will never know.
