I’ll just quote from the Bible course that I’m working through at the moment. (Shameless plug: it was written by my father.) We studied the story of Jephthah just the other week as our study of the second half of Judges, and the introduction to the worksheets says this:
Beware of thinking that every story in the Bible sets a godly example for us to follow. The
stories here certainly do not. They do contain glorious moments, but on the whole they testify
to disastrous decline in faith and morale, and stand as warnings. We may delight in some of
Samson’s heroic exploits in the power of the Spirit, for the Lord did indeed use him, but his
manner of life was no example for anyone.
Reading the story of the Elisha episode, I get the impression that these weren’t just young children – they sound more like juvenile delinquents in their mid teens, and they were probably being aggressive or even threatening towards Elisha. The fact that as many as forty-two of them were mauled sounds like a mob to me. It could potentially have been a pretty dangerous situation for him. Remember too that this was a time when morality had largely broken down – it was hard on the heels of the height of paganism in Israel under Ahab and Jezebel after all.
The fact of the matter is that the Bible tells it like it is, warts and all. It doesn’t make any effort to whitewash people, no matter how much God used them.