A strange and lovely one, because it points two chapters together in a single stroke. Long after the prophet Elisha is dead and buried, a burial party is interrupted by raiders, and the frightened mourners fling their own corpse into the dead prophet’s open grave — and the dead man, the very instant he touches Elisha’s bones, stands up alive (2 Kgs 13:20–21).
A resurrection worked through a relic: the bone is the pointer, the restoring still comes from outside the bone, and the man lives. It is the clearest case in the older scriptures that the source stays external even when a venerated object mediates — the relic that restores without ever being the restorer.
Be precise, though: this is a revivification (the man will grow old and die again like any other), not the imperishable rising — hauled back into the mortal loop, not carried clean past it. Same operation (a real cut, a life given back from a source the dead could not supply), different destination.
Sources. 2 Kings 13:20–21 (the man revived on touching Elisha’s bones); contrast the imperishable rising of 1 Corinthians 15. Search: 2 Kings 13 Elisha bones dead man revived.
Appears in: Resurrection · The Relic