Hermes and Elisha

The books of Reigns include a story wherein a Prophet miraculously restores to a woodcutter his lost axe, metonymed "the iron". In these books the Prophet is Elisha. The Gospels may refer to this miracle when they have Jesus walking on water and fishing Simon Peter out of that water.

The original story parallels an Aesopian fable. Here, after the woodcutter loses his iron axe, the Satan shows up. (In Greek this Divine Diabolos is Hermes.) First the Devil raises a gold axe; the woodcutter says, that ain't it. Then a silver one. Still no. Finally he raises up the iron. THERE you go! So the Devil, impressed with the woodcutter's honesty, lets him keep that. (Also blah blah the gold and silver, etc etc contrast with a less-honest woodsman yawn. This poast doesn't care about the sequel.)

William Hansen's 2002 Ariadne's Thread, a book I used to own but abandoned (stupidly), discusses the Aesopian version. It's in the first-century Collectio Augustana. The Greeks chose Hermes - this book says - because Hermes is the god of lucky finds and also a woodland deity. Hansen dismisses the importance of the river; he thinks the story is originally Greek. Vridar of course pounces on it all as a potential Biblical plagiary against classical Greece, because he wants a Hellenistic-era Bible.

Pace Hansen, I'd give more credence to Recension II (AD 300-499?) which explicitly associates this story's Hermes with that river. As he notes, a proverb came about that a river does not always bring axes. I suggest the story was of an Iron Age river spirit, first. We up in Colorado can report that rivers do sometimes bring gold, and can tell you through silver or iron oxides what other ores might sit upstream. Pace Vridar that would make this story... an old one. Iron fit for woodwork is available to the average Yosef, but still not exactly cheap. 800ish BC if truly Greek... maybe older if Lydian (note, Aesop himself will be - classically - considered more Lydian than Greek, and the lands of Midas and Croesus owned ores a-plenty back then).

The folktale was subsequently reässigned to a trickster-spirit: Pan or Hermes in Greek (and Phrygian?), the Satan in Canaan. As southern Canaan grew less henotheist, Israel re-re-assigned this tale to some prophet probably, still, more concerned with the woodcutter's honesty. Our edition of Reigns locked this to Elisha, thus erasing the moral of it. If the "Deuteronomist's History" thesis holds then this violence was done in King Josiah's court.

Which makes me wonder if the original prophet of Israel, who attracted the first cycle of edifying stories, say under Omri and Ahab: was no less than Balaam of the famous talking "donkie".