2 Kings 3:13
2 Kings 3:1313Elisha, however, said to the king of Israel, “What have we to do with each other? Go to the prophets of your father and of your mother!” “No,” replied the king of Israel, “for it is the LORD who has summoned these three kings to deliver them into the hand of Moab.”
JWs do not cite as a standalone proof-text. Elisha's words to the king of Israel — "What have I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and to the prophets of your mother" — surface in the Watchtower treatment only as a literal-reading comparison, because the rs book reads similar phrasing in ("Woman, what have I to do with thee?") as Jesus's blunt rebuke of Mary's spiritual authority. The Hebrew-idiom pattern across the OT goes unacknowledged.
anchors one of the five main Old Testament occurrences of the Hebrew idiom mah-li va-lak ("what to me and to you"), which stands behind the Greek phrase John renders as "ti emoi kai soi" at Cana. The idiom appears in (Jephthah to Ammonites), (David to sons of Zeruiah), (widow of Zarephath to Elijah), here (Elisha to king of Israel), and (Neco to Josiah). In every case it signals distance of intent or non-alignment of agenda — not contempt, not rebuke, not rejection.
When Jesus uses the same idiom at Cana in , he is telling Mary that his messianic timing is not set by her social cue — his hour has not yet come. Verse 5 shows Mary calmly directing the servants to "do whatever he tells you." Verse 7 shows Jesus performing the miracle. If 2:4 were a rebuke, 2:7 would contradict it. And the same Greek word gynai ("woman") Jesus uses at Cana is the word he uses from the cross in — the tenderest moment in John's Gospel. The literal-rejection reading of is linguistically unsustainable once the Hebrew-idiom parallels are read.