Elijah

• 1. Introduction

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  Every Saturday evening, as the Sabbath ends, Jewish families perform the Havdalah ceremony and sing a plea for Elijah to arrive. The hymn goes: "Elijah the Prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah from Gilead. Let him come quickly, in our day with the messiah, the son of David."

  The man being summoned was a prophet and miracle worker of the northern kingdom of Israel. According to the Books of Kings, he lived during the reign of King Ahab, in the 9th century BC.

  Few ancient figures are called upon in so many places. His name turns up in Sirach, the New Testament, the Mishnah and Talmud, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, and Baháʼí writings. Yet the biblical record introduces him with almost nothing. There is no family, no childhood, and no hometown beyond a single word: Tishbite.

  What did this stranger do to a king and a queen that made him impossible to forget? How did a man who, in the biblical telling, rose to heaven alive become a guest at Jewish tables? And why do faiths that disagree about nearly everything all keep a place for him?

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• 2. Drought and Ravens

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  Omri, king of Israel, bought his kingdom some security with a wedding. His son Ahab married Jezebel, a princess of Sidon in Phoenicia who worshipped Baal.

  By then, Solomon's united kingdom had split into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah, which kept Jerusalem and its Temple. Omri continued policies dating back to Jeroboam that pulled religious attention away from Jerusalem. They included local altars for sacrifice, priests drawn from outside the family of the Levites, and temples to Baal, an important Canaanite deity. The arrangement brought security and prosperity for a time. It did not bring peace with the prophets, who demanded a strict reading of religious law. Under Ahab the tension grew. He built a temple for Baal, and Jezebel brought a large entourage of priests and prophets of Baal and Asherah into the country.

  In 1 Kings 17:1, Elijah the Tishbite appears and warns Ahab that a drought is coming, so severe that not even dew will form. His Hebrew name means "My God is Jah," and it may be a title he earned through this challenge. The target was well chosen. Baal was the Canaanite god responsible for rain, thunder, lightning, and dew. By announcing the drought, Elijah defied Baal, and also Jezebel, her priests, Ahab, and the people of Israel.

  God then sends Elijah out of Israel to a hiding place by the brook Chorath, east of the Jordan, where ravens feed him. Readers have long doubted those ravens. The Hebrew word at 1 Kings 17:4-6 is ōrvīm, which means ravens, but with a different vocalization it could mean Arabs. The Septuagint reads ravens, and other traditional translations followed it. Adam Clarke, who died in 1832, already treated the alternative as a discussion of long standing. Objections to ravens are that they are ritually unclean, and it is hard to imagine a method of delivery that is not disgusting. The scholar John Gray chooses Arabs because it fits the sequel, where Elijah is fed by an alien Phoenician woman.

  When the brook dries up, God sends Elijah to a widow in the town of Zarephath, in Phoenicia. She tells him she lacks enough food to keep herself and her son alive. Elijah answers: "The jar of flour will not be used up, and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land." She feeds him the last of her food, and the promise comes true.

  Some time later her son dies, and she cries out that Elijah has come to bring her sin to remembrance and to cause the death of her son. Elijah prays that God will restore the child, so that the trustworthiness of God's word may be shown. The text says the life of the child came into him again. This is the first instance of raising the dead recorded in Scripture, and the widow declares, "the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth."

  After more than three years of drought and famine, God tells Elijah to go back to Ahab. On the road he meets Obadiah, the head of Ahab's household, who had hidden a hundred prophets from Jezebel's violent purge. Obadiah fears that if he reports where Elijah is, Elijah will vanish and Ahab will execute him. Elijah reassures him and sends him to the king.

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• 3. Contest on Carmel

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  Ahab greets Elijah with an insult, calling him the "troubler of Israel." Elijah throws the charge straight back. The real troubler, he says, is the king, who allowed the worship of false gods.

  At Elijah's instruction, Ahab summons the people of Israel, 450 prophets of Baal, and 400 prophets of Asherah to Mount Carmel. Elijah scolds the crowd for going along quietly with Baal worship. "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?" he asks.

  His proposal is a public test. He and the prophets of Baal will each take one of two bulls, prepare it for sacrifice, and lay it on wood without lighting a fire. Whichever god answers with flame is the true one. Asherah and her prophets vanish from the story at this point and never return.

  The prophets of Baal go first. They pray from morning until noon, and nothing happens. Then Elijah begins to taunt them. "Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." They shout louder and slash themselves with swords, spears, knives, and sickles. They keep going until evening, and still no fire comes.

  Now Elijah repairs the altar of Yahweh using twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. He digs a trench around it and prepares the second bull. Then he orders the sacrifice and the altar to be drenched with water from four large jars, poured three times, until the trench is full as well. He asks Yahweh to accept the offering.

  Fire falls from the sky. It consumes the sacrifice, the stones of the altar, the earth, and even the water in the trench. The people declare that the Lord is God. Elijah orders them to seize the prophets of Baal, and he brings them down to the River Kishon and kills them. Then the rains begin, and the famine is over.

  The scene has attracted a long line of explanations. J. Robinson noted that some scholars read the pouring of water as sympathetic magic. Hugo Gressmann suggested the fire was lightning. Ferdinand Hitzig and others wondered whether the water was really flammable naphtha. The Baptist scholar H. H. Rowley rejected both views, and Robinson argued that Baal's priests would have recognized naphtha. Julian Morgenstern rejected the magic idea but backed white naphtha lit by a glass or mirror focusing the sun, pointing to the sacred fire described in 2 Maccabees 1:18-22.

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• 4. The Still Small Voice

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  Jezebel, enraged that Elijah has killed the prophets of Baal, threatens to kill him. Elijah runs to Beersheba in Judah, then goes on alone into the wilderness. He sits down under a shrub, prays for death, and falls asleep.

  An angel of the Lord wakes him gently and tells him to eat. He finds bread and a jar of water, eats and drinks, and goes back to sleep. The angel returns a second time with the same command, adding that the journey ahead is long.

  Elijah walks for forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb, the mountain where Moses had received the Ten Commandments. Several centuries had passed since Moses and his generation left it. Elijah is the only person in the Bible described as going back. He takes shelter in a cave.

  There he is told to stand on the mountain, because the Lord is about to pass by. A mighty wind comes, then an earthquake, then fire. Yahweh is in none of them. He comes instead as a still, small voice.

  The voice sends Elijah onward to Damascus. His tasks are to anoint Hazael as king of Aram, Jehu as king of Israel, and Elisha as his own successor.

  Rabbinic tradition read the scene as a rebuke. A midrash says Elijah had to appear before God as Israel's accuser, and that he realized he should have appealed to God's mercy instead. Because he remained relentless in his zeal and severity, God commanded him to name a successor.

  The same tradition found a lesson in the wind, the storm, and the fire. The vision gave Elijah a picture of the destinies of human beings, who must pass through "four worlds." The wind meant that the world disappears like wind. The storm was the day of death, before which a person trembles. The fire was the judgment in Gehenna, and the stillness was the last day. According to the midrash, Elijah was "translated" three years after this vision.

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• 5. Judgment and Departure

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  Naboth of Jezreel owned a vineyard, and King Ahab wanted it. Ahab offered either a better vineyard or a fair price. Naboth refused, saying God had told him not to part with the land, and Ahab accepted the answer with sullen grace.

  Jezebel found another way. She sent letters in Ahab's name to the elders and nobles near Naboth, instructing them to hold a feast and invite him. At the feast, false witnesses were to accuse Naboth of cursing God and the king. The plot worked, and Naboth was stoned to death. Jezebel then told Ahab to go and take the vineyard.

  God sent Elijah to meet him with a question and a prophecy: "Have you murdered, and also taken possession?" and "In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood." Ahab opened by calling Elijah his enemy. Elijah replied that Ahab had made himself the enemy of God. He foretold that the kingdom would reject Ahab, that dogs would eat Jezebel within Jezreel, and that Ahab's family would be consumed by dogs in a city or by birds in the country. Ahab repented so sincerely that God held back, directing the punishment instead at Jezebel and at her son by Ahab, Ahaziah.

  In 2 Kings 1, Ahaziah is badly hurt in a fall and sends messengers to the priests of Baalzebub in Ekron to ask if he will recover. Elijah intercepts them with a pointed question: "Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?" Ahaziah asks what the man looked like. The messengers describe a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist, and the king recognizes Elijah at once.

  Ahaziah sends three groups of soldiers to arrest him. Fire called down from heaven destroys the first two groups. The leader of the third begs for mercy for himself and his men, and Elijah agrees to go with them. He delivers his prophecy to the king in person, and Ahaziah dies of his injuries, as Elijah had said.

  According to 2 Kings 2, Elisha and the sons of the prophets knew beforehand that Elijah would be taken up. Elisha asked for a double portion of Elijah's spirit. Elijah agreed, on the condition that Elisha see him taken. At the Jordan, Elijah rolled up his mantle and struck the water, which divided so that the two crossed on dry ground. Then a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared, and a whirlwind lifted Elijah away. His mantle fell, and Elisha picked it up.

  The prophet's last mention in the Hebrew Bible is a puzzle. In 2 Chronicles 21:12, a letter under his name reaches Jehoram of Judah, accusing him of leading Judah astray and predicting a painful death. Elijah concerned himself with Israel, not the southern kingdom, and the letter seems to come after his ascension. It also opens with "Thus says YHVH, God of your father David," rather than the usual formula. Michael Wilcock suggested the name of a lesser known prophet may have been replaced by that of a better known one. John Van Seters rejected any link to the Elijah tradition. Wilcock countered that the letter addresses a very "northern" situation in the southern kingdom.

  The rabbinical Seder Olam says the letter arrived seven years after the ascension. The Christian ordering of the Old Testament ends with the Book of Malachi, so there his last appearance reads: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes."

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• 6. Legend and Ritual

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  Scholars generally agree that a prophet named Elijah lived in Israel during the reigns of Ahab and Ahaziah. They picture a religious figure of great personal dynamism and conservative zeal who led resistance to the rise of Baal worship in the 9th century BC. The biblical account, however, cannot be taken as historical documentation. It presents him through popular legend and later theological reflection, as a hero of heroic proportions.

  Jewish tradition then expanded the story enormously. The Aggadah, scattered through rabbinic literature including the Babylonian Talmud, created a new history of Elijah. It begins with his "translation" and ends only with the close of human history. Its three leading notes are Elijah the forerunner of the Messiah, Elijah the zealot for God, and Elijah the helper in distress. He appears across the world in the guise of a beggar or a scholar.

  Even his origins are disputed. The Aggadah offers three theories: that he belonged to the tribe of Gad, that he was a Benjamite from Jerusalem identical with the Elijah of 1 Chronicles 8:27, or that he was a priest. Many Church Fathers also called him a priest. Louis Ginzberg equates him with Phinehas, Aaron's grandson, and also with the archangel Sandalphon, whose four wings can carry him anywhere. Later Kabbalistic literature made him an angel in human form with no parents. The Midrash Rabbah on Exodus 4:2 disagrees, saying Elijah should have revived his parents as he revived the Zarephathite's son.

  At Jewish circumcision ceremonies, a chair is set aside for Elijah. The custom grows from his complaint at Mount Horeb: "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left." Rabbinic tradition judged his words untrue. Since he accused Israel of neglecting the covenant, God would require him at every circumcision.

  The Passover Seder gives him a cup. When rabbis faced conflicting laws they could not resolve, they set the matter aside "until Elijah comes." One such question was whether the Seder needed four cups of wine or five. Four cups match the four expressions of redemption in Exodus, but a fifth verse, promising the land, was fulfilled only a generation later. A cup was therefore left for Elijah, and today it is a celebration of future redemption. A place is reserved at the table, and the door is opened to invite him in.

  Folklore adds warm and strange stories. It is said that when dogs are happy for no reason, Elijah is nearby. In one tale, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi asks to travel with him on the condition that he never question the prophet's actions. Elijah prays for a poor couple's only cow to die, and it does. He prays for a miser's crumbling wall to be repaired. Joshua finally demands an explanation. The Angel of Death had come for the old woman, so the cow died in her place. The wall hid a treasure, and repairing it kept the treasure from the miser.

  Another story involves Rabbi Eliezer, who insulted an ugly stranger on a beach. The stranger was Elijah, and he refused to grant pardon until the entire city had asked the rabbi's forgiveness.

  In a third tale, Elijah meets Lilith, who in legend was Adam's first wife, on her way to kill a pregnant woman. He curses her: "I curse you in the Name of the Lord. Be silent as a stone!" Lilith bargains. She gives him her names to post in the houses of pregnant women or newborns, promising: "Where I see those names, I shall run away at once. Neither the child nor the mother will ever be injured by me."

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• 7. Forerunner and Saint

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  In the New Testament, Jesus tells those willing to believe that John the Baptist is the Elijah promised by Malachi to come before the "great and terrible day." Some English translations use Elias, the Greek form of the name. John looked the part. He wore a coat of camel's hair secured with a leather girdle and preached in wilderness areas near the Jordan River. In Luke, the angel Gabriel tells John's father, Zechariah, that his son will go forth "in the spirit and power of Elijah." In the Gospel of John, however, priests ask the Baptist, "Art thou Elias," and he answers, "I am not."

  All three Synoptic Gospels place Elijah at the Transfiguration. At the summit of an unnamed mount, Jesus' face shines, and the disciples hear God's voice call him "My beloved Son." Moses and Elijah appear and talk with Jesus. Peter is so struck that he offers to build three tabernacles, one each for Elijah, Jesus, and Moses. Some theologians see Moses standing for the law and Elijah for the prophets.

  Elijah is mentioned four more times in the New Testament. In Luke 4:24-27, Jesus cites him as an example of a rejected prophet, noting he was sent to a widow in Phoenicia. In Romans 11:1-6, Paul uses him to show that God never abandons his people. Hebrews 11:35 pairs his raising of the widow's son with Elisha's miracle for the woman of Shunem. James 5:16-18 holds up his prayers, which started and ended the famine, as proof of a righteous person's power.

  The Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod commemorate Elijah on the 20th of July. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps the same date and reveres him as a model of the contemplative life. Since the 26th of August 1752, he has been the patron saint of Bosnia and Herzegovina, replacing George of Lydda at the request of Bishop Pavao Dragičević. The reasons are unclear, though he may have been chosen because Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians all honor him. Pope Benedict XIV is said to have approved with the remark that a wild nation deserved a wild patron.

  The Carmelites claim him as spiritual father and traditional founder of their order, which takes its name from Mount Carmel. In 1725, under Pope Benedict XIII, they were allowed to place a statue of the prophet in St. Peter's Basilica. In the 17th century, the Bollandist Daniel Papebroch called the claim of Carmelite origin insufficiently grounded. From 1681 to 1698, each side issued letters and pamphlets. The Carmelites were supported by a Spanish tribunal, and the Bollandists by Jean de Launoy and the Sorbonne. In November 1698, Pope Innocent XII ordered the controversy to end.

  In Lebanon, the Orthodox feast on the 20th of July, which falls on the 2nd of August in the Gregorian calendar, is a major holiday. People mark it with fireworks. There Elijah is called St. Elias the Living, because he is believed never to have died but to have ridden his fiery chariot to heaven.

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• 8. Many Faces Worldwide

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  In Greece, chapels and monasteries dedicated to Prophet Elias often crown mountaintops. Since the work of Wachsmuth in 1864, the usual explanation has been that Elias was merged with Helios, the sun. From the fifth century on, writers noted that the names sound alike in post-classical Greek and that both rode fiery chariots. The poet Sedulius played on the single letter that separates the names, though he did not identify the two.

  The source sees problems with that theory. Few shrines of Helios stood on mountaintops. A better fit is Zeus, with his mountains and his power over rain, thunder, lightning, and wind. Most mountain cults of Zeus, including Olympus and Lykaion, are now dedicated to Elias. Mount Carmel later became known as Mount St. Elias.

  Among Slavs, missionaries likely found Elijah a natural match for Perun, the god of storms. He became Elijah the Thunderer, Ilija Gromovnik. His feast, Ilinden, was the day chosen for the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising in 1903, and it is now Republic Day in North Macedonia.

  Among the Ossetians and Kabardians of the Caucasus, he became a thunder divinity. When lightning struck a person or animal, neighbors danced in a circle around the spot and called his name with the nonsense word "choppa." Survivors were dedicated to him.

  The Quran says, "And Elias was indeed one of the messengers," and it recounts his call to leave Baal for Allah in concise form. Most of his people rejected him, but a small number of devoted servants followed. Muslim tradition links him closely to the sage Khidr. One hadith says the two met every year in Jerusalem to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Some early commentators placed his mission in Baalbek in Lebanon, but scholars reject this, noting the link comes only from the first half of the city's name.

  The Druze honor Elijah as a prophet and identify him with al-Khidr. Two large Druze towns, Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya, stand on the slopes of Mount Carmel, and the Druze regard the Cave of Elijah as holy.

  His promised return is claimed in several ways. Christians say it was fulfilled by John the Baptist. The Baháʼí Faith holds that Elijah returned as John the Baptist and as the Báb, who founded the Bábí Faith in 1844 and is buried on Mount Carmel. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that Elijah appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple on the 3rd of April 1836, as a resurrected being. Joseph Smith said, "The spirit of Elias is first, Elijah second, and Messiah last." The Nation of Islam believes he returned as Elijah Muhammad. Jewish tradition still waits.

  The arts have followed him too. Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, composed and premiered in 1846, was criticized by members of the New German School but remains one of the most popular Romantic choral-orchestral works. From 1974 to 1976, the novelist Philip K. Dick believed himself possessed by Elijah's spirit.

  In Bosnia, a proverb captures the doubling of his name: "Ilija until noon - Alija after noon." The anthropologist Safet HadžiMuhamedović wrote an ethnography called Waiting for Elijah, about the shared harvest feast of Elijah's Day in the Field of Gacko. In it, the waiting for Elijah becomes a waiting for the restoration of home after nationalist violence.

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