23-25. When the meal was over, the prophet who had brought him back saddled his donkey for him. Down the road a way, a lion met him and killed him. His corpse lay crumpled on the road, the lion on one side and the donkey on the other. Some passersby saw the corpse in a heap on the road, with the lion standing guard beside it. They went to the village where the old prophet lived and told what they had seen.
26. When the prophet who had gotten him off track heard it, he said, “It’s the holy man who disobeyed God’s strict orders. God turned him over to the lion who knocked him around and killed him, just as God had told him.”
27-30. The prophet told his sons, “Saddle my donkey.” They did it. He rode out and found the corpse in a heap in the road, with the lion and the donkey standing there. The lion hadn’t bothered either the corpse or the donkey. The old prophet loaded the corpse of the holy man on his donkey and returned it to his own town to give it a decent burial. He placed the body in his own tomb. The people mourned, saying, “A sad day, brother!”
31-32. After the funeral, the prophet said to his sons, “When I die, bury me in the same tomb where the holy man is buried, my bones alongside his bones. The message that he preached by God’s command against the Altar at Bethel and against all the sex-and-religion shrines in the towns of Samaria will come true.”
33-34. After this happened, Jeroboam kept right on doing evil, recruiting priests for the forbidden shrines indiscriminately—anyone who wanted to could be a priest at one of the local shrines. This was the root sin of Jeroboam’s government. And it was this that ruined him.