2 Kings 3:26-29 (linked from the same 'God is Not All Powerful' row): when the king of Moab's assault fails, he sacrifices his firstborn son as a burnt offering on the city wall, 'and great wrath came upon Israel, so they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.' Read as: the child sacrifice to the Moabite god Chemosh worked, driving off Yahweh's army — i.e., either a rival god's power defeated Israel's God, or God himself proved powerless to secure the victory Elisha had promised (2 Kgs 3:18-19).

This is a genuinely difficult text, and the honest scholarly response concedes that much before answering it. The phrase *qetsef gadol* ('great wrath/indignation') is grammatically unattributed in the Hebrew — the text does not say 'the wrath of Chemosh' or 'the wrath of the LORD.' Commentators are divided, and no single reading commands consensus (see Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, *II Kings*, Anchor Bible; John Gray, *I & II Kings*, OTL; Iain Provan, *1 and 2 Kings*, NIBC). Three responsible readings exist, none of which requires conceding either Chemosh's reality or Yahweh's defeat: 1. **Human, not divine, wrath.** *Qetsef* is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for human indignation and revulsion, not exclusively divine anger (e.g., Esth 1:18). On this reading — favored by a number of commentators — the 'great wrath' is the horrified, demoralized reaction of the besieging coalition itself at witnessing a father immolate his own son before their eyes; disgust and a collapse of military will, not a supernatural act, produced the withdrawal. This requires no claim about Chemosh at all. 2. **Narrated without endorsement.** Israelite historiography routinely reports what happened in a military or political episode without thereby affirming the theological framework of the pagan participants (the narrator can report 'Moab believed X happened' or 'a disaster befell the coalition' without asserting that Chemosh caused it ontologically). This is standard practice throughout Kings, which elsewhere flatly denies the reality of the gods of the nations even while narrating episodes involving them (cf. the polemic against Baal in 1 Kgs 18). 3. **Within the canon's own theology, even a 'divine wrath' reading does not concede Chemosh's power.** Scripture consistently treats the gods of the nations as non-entities or, at most, as the objects behind which malevolent spiritual powers operate (Deut 32:17, 'they sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods they had never known'; Ps 96:5, 'all the gods of the peoples are idols'; 1 Cor 10:20, Paul explicitly reframing pagan sacrifice as offered to demons, not to competing deities with independent ontological standing). So even granting the maximally unfavorable reading — that *something* happened after the sacrifice — the text's own canonical framework does not license the inference 'Chemosh is real and defeated Yahweh's army'; at most it would be evidence of a permitted, subordinate spiritual reality operating within, not against, God's sovereign providence (cf. the book of Job's own frame, where hostile spiritual agency operates only within limits God sets). Note too that Elisha's oracle (3:18-19) promised the defeat of every fortified city, the felling of every good tree, the stopping of every spring, and the ruin of every good field with stones — a campaign of devastation, not a guarantee of an unconditional, cost-free siege of Kir-hareseth to the last man. Verses 24-25 record that this oracle was in fact substantially fulfilled: Moab was routed in the field, its cities struck down, its land ravaged. The anomalous ending concerns the final push against the last fortress, not the entire promised outcome.

Read in context, 2 Kings 3 is a story that vindicates Yahweh's power through the middle of the chapter (vv. 9-20, water supplied by miracle exactly as Elisha predicted; vv. 24-25, total rout of Moab in the field exactly as predicted) and then, rather than tidying up the ending into triumphalist propaganda, reports an ambiguous, uncomfortable historical event without forcing a theological gloss onto it. This restraint is itself evidence of the text's historiographical honesty. It is worth comparing the Mesha Stele (the Moabite Stone), Mesha's own inscription commemorating this same war from the Moabite side: royal inscriptions in the ancient Near East as a genre routinely credit the national deity with total, unqualified victory and suppress inconvenient defeats (Mesha's stele credits Chemosh with restoring Moab and says nothing of a son sacrificed in desperation on a city wall). The biblical narrator, writing about Israel's own campaign, does the opposite — reporting an awkward, only partially successful outcome candidly. That asymmetry (Israel's own scriptures narrating their own campaign's limits honestly, against the ANE convention of self-glorifying royal propaganda) is itself a point in favor of the text's basic historical reliability, and it cuts against, not for, the idea that the passage was constructed to advance an inflated claim about a rival god's power.