A brief moment for a one-person remnant (2 Kings 5:2-3).

Abstract

The positive use of "remnant" in the First Testament characteristically refers to a self-conscious, self-aware, and often self-serving community that claims the future of Israel for itself (see Hasel). This article considers a "remnant" figure who is not self-conscious or self-aware, and certainly not self-serving. It refers to the "young girl" in 2 Kings 5:2-3. Her appearance in Israel's text is brief. She is assigned no important role by the text and is given no name. Moreover, her appearance is confined to two verses, and she is nowhere remembered or cited in any subsequent text. She is so incidental in her one narrative appearance that she is scarcely noticed. And yet, the article suggests, she is the pivotal character who makes this entire narrative of chapter 5 possible.

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This "young girl" is further identified only as a "captive." Presumably she had been taken captive by the Syrians in one of their many, seemingly incessant, military engagements with Israel. Indeed, Israel's own rules of military conduct regarded as legitimate the seizure of an enemy woman (Deut 20:14; 21:10-14--on the Israelite laws that pertain to such transactions, see Pressler: 9-15 and passim). We do not know how old the "young girl" is in the narrative or how long she has been held by the Syrians or how old when first taken. We are not told whether she was "beautiful," as specified in Deuteronomy 21:11. While she could have been a second wife to the Syrian general (as the Israelite statute suggests she might have been), in this narrative she is not presented in that role. It is, however, not a far stretch to imagine that she might have been used and abused before her assignment to her present role as servant to the wife of the general. (It does not seem to me a far stretch to suggest a parallel to her status and the character offered by Margaret Atwood.)

Such an extrapolation is, to be sure, not necessary or required by the narrative. All that is clear is that she is a captive and that she is cast in a menial role that makes her quite incidental to the narrative. Indeed, her performance is so brief and so insignificant as almost not to be noticed, unless one is on the alert for a "remnant" of Israel. For all of that, however, she evidently wishes her master well, enough so to communicate to her mistress, the general's wife, practical information concerning healing. The young girl is a captive of Syria who is perhaps not abused, but in any case evidences concern for the well-being of her captors.

For all of the circumstance of her captivity and subservience, she is deliberately, resolvedly, unashamedly an Israelite. Of her brief performance in her single verse of the narrative, we may make the following observations.

Linkages to Samaria and the Northern Kingdom

First, she has linkages to Samaria and the Northern Kingdom of Israel . We are not told of any specific connection, whether the city was her home place or whether she was connected to it by stories told and remembered. In any case, it is clear that she has rootage there, that she remembers the city as her place of belonging. Her forced relocation into Aram has not eradicated or diminished her sense of her true place of belonging. Her capacity to remember may be taken as a mode of acceptable resistance to any Syrian redefinition of her as a slave girl. She is not, in her self-presentation, a slave girl, but rather a well-rooted child of Samaria.

Her Remembered Identity

Her remembered identity, however, is more than geographical or political, though that itself is important, as we shall see, in the final form of the text. Beyond the geographical and the political, her rootage that evoked resistance is theological. This is evident in her use of Israel's traditional vocabulary, "the prophet." The term is deeply freighted in her utterance, though the narrative offers only the signal of the word itself. She does not name the prophet, but the reader of this collection of narratives is sure to know that she refers to Elisha and may infer even further thant she knows the name and intends a specific reference to Elisha.

Of course the term prophet, on the lips of an Israelite, never stands alone even if uttered alone. The term in its utterance is theological; this is a prophet of YHWH. The utterance of the young woman is an understated testimony to the God of Israel, who authorizes this prophet and who is, as will be clear by the end of the narrative, the God to whom despairing Syrians will also submit. Thus the young girl is, by inference, an explicit, determined witness to YHWH who offers, in this ostensibly Syrian narrative, her bold testimony to YHWH. She holds firmly, albeit with manifest verbal restraint, to her Yahwistic confession and to her Yahwistic identity. She holds to them in what must have been an environment that was profoundly hostile to all things Israelite, for war was the enduring state of affairs between the two realms. And because "religion" was so attached to the state and the ruling house, that hostility may well have extended to matters theological.

Matching YHWH and the Prophet to Leprosy

Third, beyond the implied testimony to YHWH as the true God, she matches the unexpressed YHWH and the expressed though unnamed prophet to leprosy, the general's distressing affliction. She matches the incomparable God of Israel to the incomparable disease of leprosy, for leprosy is, as well as disease, a metaphor for excommunication and the forfeiture of social existence. (On the social significance of disease, see the suggestive discussion of Sontag.) YHWH and the prophet of YHWH, she does not doubt, are an effective antidote to leprosy. She has no doubt of the match-up and links prophetic reference to the verb cure (v 3--it is important to note that the term cure here is `sph [vv 3, 6, 7, 11] and not the more conventional term rph'). She knows, in her theological affirmation, that there is transformative power rooted in holiness carried by this unnamed but closely attested human agent.

Her affirmation is astonishing, because we have no available data that YHWH's prophet can counteract leprosy. Perhaps she can make this claim because she is rooted in Israel's doxological recital of YHWH's transformative miracles. She knows that this God is capable of such inversions, so unlike the gods of Syria is YHWH, the Israelite God in Samaria. Or perhaps she is privy, as are her readers, to the "resurrection" wrought by Elisha in the preceding chapter 4. For if the prophet can counter death, leprosy is surely an easier case. In her terse affirmation that stops just short of explicit doxology, she voices an uncompromising assertion of her Israelite, Yahwistic identity and conviction. To be sure, she does so in a most pragmatic and concrete way, a way calculated to evoke a positive response from her mistress without risking any resistance by making an explicit mention of the deity. Her testimony is shrewdly suited to her circumstance, but for all that, sure and bold in its terse and unqualified character. There is no tentativeness, no hedging of possibility. Transformation is assured in the environs of a prophet-inhabited Samaria.

Rootage, Theological Affirmation, and Transformation

These three factors constitute the sense of her utterance. In that utterance she denies in quick order (a) the viability of her Syrian locus, (b) the credibility of Syrian gods who lack such an effective prophet, and (c) the need to endure the status quo of leprosy. The boldness of her claim, surreptitiously triumphant, is matched by her readiness of articulation. She is willing to say it! While she lacks, as I suggest, self-consciousness, she lacks nothing of the consciousness of a witness. She is prepared, in this brief utterance, to confound in toto the Syrian sense of deathliness and to offer an alternative.

The alternative she has to offer is risky precisely because it calls into question the Syrian arrangement of reality. She exposes herself as a dissenter to given reality, for in her utterance she nullifies the presumed world of Syrian despair with a counter assertion of Israelite possibility. She states an "or" that confronts the general and his wife with an inescapable "either/or" (see Brueggemann 2000b). The fact that the wife, mistress of the young girl, and her husband assent to her offer does not diminish her risk. It rather attests to the depth of their desolation. They will try an alternative because their Syrian resources have run out. The young girl is the voice of an alternative upon which the following narrative depends completely. The narrative is possible because it is the working out of a Yahwistic alternative that was not on the Syrian horizon, an alternative available only because of this bold, resistant young girl who knows who she is and is not afraid to say so. She now disappears from the narrative. But her single utterance reverberates through the narrative, making possible a Yahwistic alternative to a Syrian condition of death.

The Interpretive Trace

The performance of the "young girl" is quickly over and done with. But her impact on the narrative, unlike her specific performance, is immense and long term. On the surface, of course, Elisha is the star player in this drama, a judgment further underscored by the larger collection of Elisha narratives in which this one stands. The star role of Elisha in this narrative, however, is made possible only by the bold testimony of the young girl, without which Elisha would never have been in contact with the Syrian commander. It is suggestive, therefore, to consider the impact of the "young girl" upon each of the principal characters in the narrative.

The Leprous Syrian Commander

Her impact on the leprous Syrian Commander is, of course, decisive for the narrative. She has no direct contact with him, her testimony being mediated to him by the wife of the commander, even though the narrative never has the wife explicitly relay the transformative news from wife to husband. At last in verse 4, the commander reports to his king the assertion of the young girl, though the identification of the young girl as the source of the new data is offered by the narrator rather than by the commander himself.

What interests us is that the commander believes her assertion and is prepared to act upon it immediately. No doubt his readiness is a measure of his anxiety and deprivation, his readiness to try anything, likely having exhausted conventional Syrian remedies. His readiness, his appeal to the Syrian king, and the consent of the Syrian king all quickly accomplished, however, do not cause us to miss the spectacular turn of the narrative (1) that a Syrian should seek Israelite remedy, and (b) that a commander should act on the word of a young, non-Syrian slave girl (The needfulness of the Syrian commander and eventual reliance upon the word of the slave girl is not unlike the final, desperate plea of Pharaoh in Exodus 12:32, on which see Wolff.)

The dire need of the commander is enough to explain his response. But beyond that, surely, the narrative wants to attest to the irresistible cruciality of the Israelite prophet and the God of the Israelite prophet who is the healer of the nations. What is narratively credible becomes a vehicle for a self-conscious Yahwistic attestation by the narrator. The chance for the prophet, offered on the lips of the young girl, overrides conventional resistances of both class (commander and slave girl) as well as ethnicity (Syrian and Israelite). The attestation of the young girl opens a story that could not otherwise occur and a healing that was not otherwise available.

Elisha, the Israelite Man of God

It is the attestation of the young girl that opens a chance for Elisha, the Israelite man of God, to ply his trade as an inscrutable force and as counter-point to the Israelite king, who is no help at all in this narrative (see v 7). The young girl and the man of God between them manage the transformation of the Syrian commander, with the Israelite king as a narrative irrelevance. The young girl's word got the commander as far as the presence of the Israelite king (vv 5-6); the prophetic initiative brings the commander the rest of the way to Elisha's house of healing (vv 8-9). Between them, as coconspirators for the healing God of Israel, the young girl and the awesome prophet have cooperated in transferring the Syrian commander into the zone of Yahwistic healing. For the journey of the commander from leprosy to cure, the force of the young girl is as decisive as is the work of the prophet. She has gotten the commander half-way there, propelled by her simple, unqualified confidence in the prophet of yhwh. She is the agent who makes possible the prophetic performance that lies at the heart of the narrative. Without her there would be no prophetic wonder enacted, as later remembered and retold in Israel.

The Commander, Again

By the time we get to verse 14, the young girl has dealt with the commander in his emergency, prior to the prophetic intervention that she made possible. After the prophetic wonder of healing, the narrative returns to the commander, now made clean and whole again. The characterization of the restored general, restored in the flesh and restored to his proper and important public role, is stunning. He is restored like "the flesh of a young boy" (v 14). His leprous skin--marred, broken, unattractive, likely rancid to the smell--is now promptly, prophetically displaced by "baby skin," whole, sweet, soft, and smooth. As noted by many commentators and nicely exposited by Burke Long, the commander's newly given, non-leprous skin like that of a "young boy" is phrased by reference back to the "young girl" (Long: 66-76). The skin of the commander is like the skin of a "young boy," on which see the "young girl" in v 2).

The narrator presents the young girl quite intentionally as the model and anticipation for whom the leprous Syrian general will become when he submits to the Israelite prophet and when he is prepared, as in verse 15, to sing an unencumbered doxology to the God of Israel--that is, when he recognizes himself as healed and situated in the orbit of YHWH's life-giving authority. The commander gladly reaches that point with his newly given skin. The parallel phrasing of the two characters wants us not to miss the point. Where the commander has fully arrived, in the healing orbit of YHWH, the young girl has always been. She has been there, her Syrian captivity notwithstanding; she has never forgotten that rootage and its resources, and has never yielded her sense of identity and belonging there. She has accepted that zone of Yahwistic well-being, even though culturally and geographically removed from Samaria and all that it signifies. She is the antecedent and forerunner of the military commander, showing him the way to new life. And he finaly has, unwittingly and even with resistance, caught up with her, received new skin, new public life, new doxology, and new future, none of which was available to him except by her. The parallel phrasing surely intends to bind him in astonishment and gratitude to her. And even if perchance he does not make that connection, the reader must not ignore it. His response is one of gratitude and astonishment about which she already knows, on which she has long relied, and to which she has regularly appealed; this is gratitude and astonishment that he, drawn out of his old categories, now exuberantly asserts. He has become like her, both in skin and in faith.

Counterpoint: Gehazi

The counterpoint to the narrative concerning Gehazi in verses 19b-37 is perhaps an addendum. In any case Gehazi has no close connection to or contact with the young girl at all. If, however, we consider the way in which the narrator makes her luminous, we may notice how she is to be seen when contrasted with Gehazi. Because Gehazi is properly in the orbit of the prophet (on which see chapter 4), we may assume that he is a Yahwist (There can hardly be any doubt of this; yet his apparent intimacy with the Israelite king in 2 Kings 8 4-5 may suggest that his commitment to Yahwism was not as passionate and singular as one might expect from one so close to the prophet.)

Gehazi is a Yahwist, however, who understands nothing of the transformative faith to which the narrative attests. He is remarkably unlike the young girl on two counts. First, whereas she is willing to witness to the transformative power of Yahwism (via the prophet) and has no interest in advancing her own interest, he is an extortioner who wants to capitalize on the free Yahwistic gift of healing enacted by Elisha in which he has played no role. Remarkably, his attempt at extortion is given extended narrative expression; by contrast the deep confidence of the young woman is matched rhetorically by a most laconic statement. She seeks nothing but only gives the secret of Yahwistic well-being. He seeks everything for himself and has nothing to give.

Second, as a consequence, he ends afflicted with leprosy, "white as snow," skin no doubt cracked, scarred, broken, likely smelly to those around (v 27). His skin is surely contrasted to that of the Syrian commander whose skin is that of a "young boy." Thus Gehazi is contrasted both to the healed commander with his new skin and to the young girl who, like him, is a witness to YHWH. Whereas Gehazi seeks to turn the wonder of the prophet to profit, the young girl seeks nothing, but only gives an account of what she knows and who she is.

The performance of the young girl, I submit, becomes the interpretive trace that lets us understand in turn the smitten commander, the holy prophet, the "converted" commander, and finally the extortioner-cum-leprosy. None of the male characters in the narrative allude to her, or thank her, or commend her. An attentive reader is required to notice and take into full account what none of the men in the narrative have recognized: their more dramatic roles are all informed and made possible by her initial bold and compelling declaration that is pure gift without return.

The Expatriate Remnant

The narrative of chapter 5 is a fully self-contained unit, stranding on its own. It belongs of course to the larger collection of Elisha "wonders" to which Gehazi alludes in the reflective summary of 8:4-5 concerning Elisha's "great things." No doubt the entire Elisha collection, along with the Elijah narratives, functions as a narrative deconstruction of royal claims and royal pretensions that shape the larger narrative of Kings (see Brueggemann 2000a). Indeed, this specific narrative briefly portrays the Israelite king in a characteristic role for the horizon of the prophetic narratives: ineffective, incompetent, and quickly irrelevant to the narrative (5:7). That characterization would seem to be a Leitmotif of the prophetic narratives as they are situated in the context of royal posturing.

Beyond that, however, I want to ask about this narrative generally, and the young girl in particular, in the final form of the text. In their final form of the books of Kings, the targeted readers in Judaism were either in exile--displaced from their proper place--or "at home" in a fundamentally hostile environment presided over by an alien imperial power. (I am aware that readers of the "final form of the text" can be in any time and circumstance after the final form is fixed. Here I assume that the text reached its final form in exile or thereabouts, and refer to the first readers of the final form in exile or soon thereafter.)

If we take the cipher "exile" as a referent to self-perception (regardless of historical circumstance), in their situation (home or away), we may imagine that a careful hearer of our narrative might recognize this displaced girl as a model and example of how to conduct oneself in an alien environment (I state the matter of the historicity of the exile in this way because I am here speaking of Israel's self-discernment; I wish to beg the question of historicity in this context. I am, however, persuaded of arguments like those of Daniel Smith-Christopher (7-36) concerning its historicity, and remain unpersuaded by arguments that exile is primarily an ideological term.)

That is, the narrative may be reread in this later situation and have the young girl take a key role in the rereading. Thus I submit that the young girl, even in her brief role, is a remarkable model for displaced persons of faith who must always live a bilingual existence. (Such bilingual existence in Central American cultures is characterized as "mestizaje." I am grateful to my colleague, Carlos Cardoza, for clarifying this term for me.) I suggest two pertinent points for a later, displaced reader of the narrative, a reader who is him/herself situated as a remnant, as a knowing, self-conscious survivor in faith. (On exile as a circumstance of "survival," see Smith 1989 and Linafelt 2000.)

First, she remembers. She had forgotten nothing, even though her Syrian captivity over time might have lured her away from her Israelite identity. But she forgot nothing. And thus, upon hearing of the emergency of "my lord," she responds promptly, effortlessly about adequate resources for healing, resources rooted in Samaria, linked to the God of Israel, and carried by the prophet in Israel. The offer and identity of those resources is an easy, ready one for her, as though on the tip of her tongue, as though the resources of Samaria were a daily subject of her pondering, her remembering, and no doubt her hoping.

Indeed, though her reference is to Samaria in the North and not to Jerusalem, I imagine that the tenacity of her home reference is as intense and unresolved as the voice in Psalm 137:

   How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
   If I forget you, O Jerusalem
   let my right hand wither!
   Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
   if I do not remember you,
   if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy [vv 4-6].

A displaced person must deliberately keep faith and keep identity in an environment not hospitable to such faith and identity, and therefore remembering is an exercise in tenacity. She remembered concretely and leaves a model for other "remnants" who may subsequently not remember so readily.

But second, her tenacity for Samaria and all that it signifies Yahwistically to her, does not blind her to her Syrian locus where she has obligations and some lesser sense of loyalty she has to her Syrian connections. Her brief performance indicates that she is fully present in her immediate Syrian habitat, fully attentive tro what is going on around her. Her brief utterance is not cast in a tone of compassion, but only in a tone of neutral, non-commital information; nonetheless the very utterance makes clear that she knows of the commander's affliction and that she wills his well-being. She wills it enough to risk reference to her home-God and enough to share the benefits of her faith, even with a needful Syrian who apparently prevents her own return to her beloved Samaria and who regards Israel as an enduring enemy.

I suggest that she enacts the subsequent counsel that Jeremiah gives to his generation of exiles who will become a remnant that produces Judaism:

   Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.
   Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give
   your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply
   there, and do not decrease [Jet 29:5-6].

Like the voice of Jeremiah, the young girl has accepted Syria as the place where she is and where she will be. She gives no hint of any expectation that she will soon or ever return home to her beloved Samaria. This is where she is, and she will be a contributing member of that society out of her treasured memory. More than that, Jeremiah has urged:

   But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you in exile, and pray
   to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare
   [Jer 29:7].

We are not told in her minute that she "prayed" for the commander.

Nonetheless her quick but decisive intervention is not unlike a prayer for the well-being of Syria through this military commander. Her intervention is a mobilization of holy resources on behalf of Syria the enemy, not unlike a prayer for an alien city. Perhaps the young girl recognized, beyond the healing of the commander, that his healing would yield a more general well-being. Perhaps she calculated that the shalom of the Syrian commander is the necessary matrix for her shalom. Or perhaps that healing might even heal the long-standing hostility between Syria and Israel. We are told none of that, however, nor whether upon return home the commander was able to remember her triggering action for new possibility or generous enough to acknowledge it. It is congruent with the rest of her brief appearance in the narrative to accept that she is never mentioned in the recovery report and is never given a share in the shalom she has made possible and to which she is entitled.

In any case, she models perfectly the tension and generative interface between tenaciously remembering her place of true belonging and generously investing in her present locus. It is that tension and interface that constitute the role and responsibility of a generative remnant, practicing both the tenacity of Psalm 137 and the generosity of Jeremiah 29. She is an embodiment of the tenacity of exiles of faith under duress and of the generosity that permits others to benefit. Belated readers, if they noticed her at all, might have recognized in her a model for how to initiate a new narrative of well-being in a circumstance palpably marked by suffering and despair.

Conclusion

The subject of our study is only one young woman. She is an Israelite remnant in Syrian society. She is indeed a woman remnant, so that the category of "remnant" makes contact with a feminist interest. I would not want to insist upon a stereotype of vulnerable women in a masculine, military environment, but a "woman remnant" is worth special mention. At the outset I noted that this woman remnant is unlike the characteristic remnant of emerging Israel that is characteristically self-conscious, self-aware, often self-serving, and now we may add, surely masculine in its perceptions and practices. This young girl, available to readers in the final form of the text, is none of that. Perhaps the most typical such "remnant" is represented by Ezra and his movement, surely male in power and masculine in perception, ruthless in program and advancing particular interests that are in part self-serving (see Nehemiah 13:1-3, 23-27; it is worth noting that the phrasing of the harsh reformist demands of Nehemiah 13:26 is not unlike the positive urging of Jeremiah 29:5-6, even though the later text has a very different intention. The question is much the same in the later context, of course receiving a very different response.)

This remnant of one in our narrative is a very different presence in Israel's narrative, a deeply tenacious rootage, but remarkably attuned to the need, circumstance, and possibility for those beyond her own horizon of belonging. We know nothing of how the young girl fared in her gracious, compassionate role after this narrative mention, or whether she had any future at all. But there she is, in the narrative, embodying and enacting an attentive practice of remnant. Though rendered powerless in her alien context, she is nonetheless a strong woman remnant filled with power. Against her immobilizing context, she musters the imagination and courage to begin another narrative of transformation that reaches beyond conventional limit. It is odd and perhaps sad that she is not again taken up in the tradition. But then she would not have expected it and did not require it.

She did more than enough. She enacted in her moment of possibility both her tenacity in faith and her generosity in her context of captivity. Our brief reflection on her role is surely part of her due. But characteristically she would point away from herself to the prophet in Israel, to the new chance for the commander, to the new life the prophet in Israel might give to the commander in Syria. Having initiated that action, she had no need to reappear, to dominate the story, or to control subsequent events. That willingness to relinquish is perhaps a consequence of her stunning capacity for tenacity along with generosity and generosity along with tenacity.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. 1986. HANDMAID'S TALE. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Brueggemann, Walter. 2000a. 1 & 2 KINGS. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys.

2000b. An Imaginative "Or". JOURNAL FOR PREACHERS 23/3: 3-17.

Hasel, Gerhard E 1972. THE REMNANT: THE HISTORY AND THEOLOGY OF THE REMNANT IDEA FROM GENESIS TO ISAIAH. 2nd edition. Andrews University Monograph 5. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press

Linafelt, Tod. 2000. SURVIVING LAMENTATIONS: A LITERARY-THEOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE AFTERLIFE OF A BIBLICAL TEXT. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Long, Burke O. 1991.2 KINGS. The Forms of the Old Testament Literature 10. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Pressler, Carolyn. 1993. THE VIEW OF WOMAN FOUND IN THE DEUTERONOMIC FAMILY LAWS. BZAW 216. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.

Smith, Daniel L. 1989. THE RELIGION OF THE LANDLESS: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE BABYLONIAN EXILE. Bloomington, IL: Meyer Stone.

Smith-Christopher, Daniel. 1997. Reassessing the Historical and Sociological Impact of the Babylonian Exile (597/587-539 BCE. Pp. 7-36 in EXILE: OLD TESTAMENT, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS, edited by James M. Scott. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Wolff, Hans Walter. The Kerygma of the Yahwist. INTERPRETATION 20 (1966): 152-53.

Walter Brueggemann, Th.D. (Union Theological Seminary, New York) is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, P. O. Box 520, Decatur, GA 30031). He is author of several recent works, including TEXTS UNDER NEGOTIATION: THE BIBLE AND POSTMODERN IMAGINATION (Fortress, 1993), BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EVANGELISM: LIVING IN A THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE (Abingdon, 1993), and OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY: ESSAYS ON STRUCTURE, THEME, AND TEXT (Fortress, 1992). His article, The Hope of Heaven on Earth, appeared in BTB 29:99-111.