2 Kings 2:23-25
"23 He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” 24 And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. 25 From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria."
This has been a greatly misunderstood story, and subject to strenuous objection and criticism for its alleged cruelty and barbarousness. Part of this might have been obviated if the phrase 'little children' had been translated correctly, and part if the general significance of the incident had been realised. For it was a band of young hooligans, not a group of innocent children, that set upon the prophet that day, analogous to the razor-slashing gangs of modern days, young desperadoes who were the product of the almost incredible corruption and vice of Bethel. Nor only so; this was a time of crisis, when everything, spiritually speaking, was in the balance, and the Spirit of God was brooding upon the land. It is in this context that the jeering insults and blasphemous attitudes of these young men must be understood. They were in fact scorning and deriding the grace of God, and insulting His majesty in their contemptuous treatment of His servant. The words, 'Go up' may be a mockery of the rapture of Elijah who went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, and if this be so, then it is not surprising that the divine anger kindled at such an attitude. The New Testament takes up the teaching of this story in Romans 1 where Paul says that God gives men over to a reprobate mind when they persist in their evil ways, and when this happens even the protection of common grace is withdrawn from them, and they become a prey to all kinds of evil and disaster. Thus it was with these young men. They paid dearly for their blasphemous treatment of the Lord's anointed.