Justified True Belief

(●) The prophet who made a whole nation choose between the Lord and Baal, and who left the world without dying. + His name in Hebrew is Eliyahu, and it is a sentence: "The Lord is my God." Whatever his parents meant by it, the man spent his life arguing that one clause, in a kingdom that had decided it could have the Lord and the local weather god both, and had put the second one’s temple up in the capital. He matters to a question about evidence for a reason that has nothing to do with his fame. The contest on Mount Carmel is the Old Testament’s clearest example of a religious claim tested in public. Both sides agree the terms beforehand, both sides can see the altars, the condition of success is stated out loud, and either it happens or it does not. Whatever a reader concludes about the account, its author is plainly not describing a private inward feeling that no one else could check. He wrote nothing. There is no book of Elijah, and the only words preserved as something he set down are four verses of a letter in 2 Chronicles. Yet the Old Testament closes with a promise that he is coming back (Malachi 4:5-6), the New Testament names him about thirty times, more often than it names Isaiah, and the two men Scripture takes out of the world without a death are Enoch and this one.

(●) c. 870 BC: He walked in from a village east of the Jordan and told King Ahab it would not rain. + Most prophets get an introduction. Isaiah gets a throne room, a burning coal and a year to date it by; Jeremiah gets a word from God about the womb. Elijah gets half a sentence. "Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab" (1 Kings 17:1), and that is the whole of it: no father, no tribe, no call, no age. Gilead is the rough hill country east of the Jordan, sheep and stone and steep wadis, which are the stony stream beds that lie dry all summer and then run hard for a day after rain. It was a long way from anywhere that mattered, and nobody has ever identified Tishbe with certainty. He arrives the way weather arrives. The king he arrives in front of is Ahab, seventh king of the northern kingdom, and there was a northern kingdom because the country had come apart. After Solomon died the nation had split: ten tribes in the north kept the name Israel, and the south kept Jerusalem and the name Judah. The northern capital in Ahab’s day was Samaria, a hill his father Omri had bought and built on. Ahab had married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and had gone further than any king before him: an altar for Baal in a house of Baal, built in Samaria, and an Asherah made besides (1 Kings 16:31-33). An Asherah is a thing as well as a name. Asherah was the mother goddess of Canaan, wife of the high god El in the old Canaanite stories, and the word in Kings usually means the object that stood for her at a shrine, a wooden pole or a carved tree set up beside the altar. Baal is worth knowing before the story starts, because everything Elijah does is aimed at him. He was the storm god of Canaan and Phoenicia, and clay tablets dug out of a mound at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, the old Canaanite city of Ugarit, written centuries before Ahab was born, call him the rider of the clouds and tell how the rain and the grain come from his hand. So the first thing Elijah says is not a general threat. It is a claim with an address on it: no dew, no rain, except at the word of a Gileadite nobody. If Baal runs the sky, a shut sky is a public failure of the one thing he is for. Ahab is not only a character in a Bible story, either. An Assyrian monument cut for King Shalmaneser III and found at Kurkh lists the kings who met him in battle at Qarqar in 853 BC, and among them is Ahab the Israelite, fielding two thousand chariots, the largest chariot force the inscription credits to anyone on that side.

(●) c. 870 BC: He was hidden by a brook, then kept alive through the famine by a starving foreign widow. + Having announced a drought, he was sent away from it. First to the brook Cherith east of the Jordan, where ravens brought him bread and meat morning and evening and he drank from the stream until the stream dried up like everything else. Ravens are on the law’s list of unclean birds, which is the sort of detail the narrator drops without comment and lets the reader notice. Then came the harder posting. "Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there" (1 Kings 17:9). Zarephath sat on the coast between Tyre and Sidon: Jezebel’s own country, Baal’s home ground. The man who had shut the sky over Israel was to be fed inside the territory of the god he was arguing with, by a woman who had nothing. She tells him so plainly. She is out at the gate gathering a couple of sticks to bake the last of her flour for herself and her son, she says, so that they can eat it and die. She feeds him first, and the jar of flour is not spent and the jug of oil does not run empty, day after day, for the length of the famine. Later her son falls ill and stops breathing, and she turns on Elijah with the raw question of every bereaved parent who has let a holy man into the house: what have you against me, have you come to bring my sin to remembrance and kill my son? He carries the boy up to his own room, stretches himself over him, and prays, and the child lives. Her verdict is the first confession of faith anyone makes in these chapters, and it comes from a Gentile widow: "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth" (1 Kings 17:24). The famine and the widow both surface again in the New Testament, nine centuries downstream. James, writing to Christians of his own day, fixes the drought at three years and six months (James 5:17). And when Jesus preached his first sermon in his home synagogue at Nazareth, this was the story he chose: there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, and he was sent to none of them, only to a woman in Sidon (Luke 4:25-26). The congregation tried to throw him off a cliff.

(●) c. 867 BC: On Mount Carmel he made the country choose in public, on terms both sides agreed in advance. + Carmel is the long wooded ridge that runs down to the sea near modern Haifa, high enough that a man standing on it can watch the Mediterranean for weather. Ahab gathered all Israel there, along with the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah who ate at Jezebel’s table (1 Kings 18:19). The king had opened the meeting by calling Elijah the troubler of Israel, and Elijah had handed the title straight back to him. His question to the crowd is the sentence the whole day turns on: "How long will you go limping between two different opinions?" The verb is the ordinary Hebrew word for hobbling, and the narrator uses it again a few lines later for the prophets of Baal as they limp around their own altar. The picture is a man with a bad leg trying to walk two roads at once, and it is not flattering, and it was not meant to be. Then the terms, and the terms are the point. Two bulls, two altars, wood on both, fire on neither, each side calling on its own god. "The God who answers by fire, he is God" (1 Kings 18:24). Both sides agreed, out loud, in front of witnesses, before anything happened. The people said, "It is well spoken." Baal’s prophets went first and had from morning until noon, and then past noon. They called, they limped around the altar, they cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood ran, and the text records the result flatly and twice over: there was no voice, and no one answered. At midday Elijah started heckling. Cry louder, he says: he is a god, so perhaps he is musing, or relieving himself, or away on a journey, or asleep and needs waking. That last suggestion has teeth in it. In the Ugaritic stories Baal really does die and go down into the underworld, and El sits on the ground and mourns him, and he really does have to be brought back before he can do anything for anybody. At the hour of the evening offering, which is mid-afternoon, the time of day when the daily sacrifice was going up at the temple in Jerusalem, Elijah repaired the Lord’s altar with twelve stones, one for each tribe of a nation that was currently two, dug a trench around it, and had the whole thing drenched with water until the trench was full. His prayer runs to two sentences and asks for one thing, that the people would know whose God this is. The fire fell and took the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust and the water in the trench, and the whole assembly went down on their faces: "The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God." What follows is not printed on Sunday school walls. Elijah had the 450 seized, brought down to the brook Kishon at the foot of the ridge, and killed there (1 Kings 18:40). The narrator sets it down and passes no verdict. Two things belong beside it, and neither is an excuse. Israel’s own law treated a prophet who called the nation after other gods as a capital matter (Deuteronomy 13:1-5), so this was the law of the land applied by a man who believed it. And the killing was not one-sided: Jezebel had been cutting off the prophets of the Lord for years, and a hundred of them were alive at that moment only because a court official had hidden them by fifties in a cave (1 Kings 18:4). Then Elijah told Ahab to go and eat, because he could hear rain coming. He climbed the ridge, put his face between his knees, and sent his servant to look at the sea seven times, until the seventh time brought back a cloud the size of a man’s hand. The sky went black, the rain came in a wall, and Elijah gathered up his robe and ran the seventeen miles to Jezreel ahead of the king’s chariot.

(●) c. 867 BC: One message from Queen Jezebel sent him into the desert asking to die. + Jezebel heard what had happened at the brook Kishon and sent a messenger with an oath: by this time tomorrow, your life for theirs. That was all it took. The man who had faced down a king, a court and 450 prophets in front of the nation, and who had outrun a chariot the same evening, got up and ran for his life. He ran the length of two kingdoms, to Beersheba at the southern edge of Judah, left his servant there, and went another day’s journey into the wilderness on his own. Then he sat down under a broom tree, which is a desert shrub with a thin grey canopy and nothing much in the way of shade, and asked God to kill him. "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers" (1 Kings 19:4). The great scene on Carmel was only days behind him. What happens next is worth slowing down for, because it is not what a reader braced for a rebuke expects. There is no sermon. There is no reminder of the fire. An angel touches him and there is a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water at his head, and he eats and drinks and lies down again. And it happens a second time, with a reason attached: the journey is too great for you. Bread and sleep, twice, before a word of theology. Then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, which Exodus also calls Sinai, the mountain where Moses had received the law and had once fasted forty days himself.

(●) c. 867 BC: At Horeb the wind, the earthquake and the fire went by, and God was in none of them. + He found a cave on the mountain and slept in it, and the question came: what are you doing here, Elijah? His answer is a complaint with a long grievance in it and a headcount at the end. He has been very jealous for the Lord; the people have forsaken the covenant, thrown down the altars and killed the prophets; "and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away." He was told to go out and stand on the mountain. A wind came that tore the mountains and broke the rocks, and the Lord was not in the wind. An earthquake followed, and the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then fire, and the Lord was not in the fire. Then, after the fire, "the sound of a low whisper." The Hebrew is three words, qol demamah daqqah, something close to a sound of thin quiet, which is why the older English Bibles say a still small voice. That was the one he covered his face for. And the voice asked the same question it had asked in the cave, and Elijah gave the same answer, word for word, the complaint and the headcount unchanged. The narrator does not tidy this up. A man is given the most famous private audience in the Old Testament and comes out of it saying exactly what he said going in. What he is given is not comfort but work, and three names: Hazael to be king over Syria, Jehu to be king over Israel, Elisha son of Shaphat to be prophet in his place. And one correction, to the arithmetic rather than the mood: seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed to Baal. He found Elisha plowing behind the twelfth of twelve yoke of oxen, a rich man’s field, and called him by walking past and throwing his cloak over him without a word. Of the three names, that is the only one Elijah himself ever acted on. Years later it was Elisha who told Hazael in Damascus that he would be king of Syria, and a young man Elisha sent who poured the oil on Jehu’s head at Ramoth-gilead (2 Kings 8:7-15; 9:1-10). The commission outlived the man who received it.

(●) c. 855 BC: He met the king again in a stolen vineyard, over a neighbour who had been murdered for it. + Ahab had a second palace at Jezreel, and next to it was a vineyard belonging to a man named Naboth. The king offered a better vineyard or a fair price in silver, which by the standards of any court in the ancient world was generous. Naboth said no: "The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers" (1 Kings 21:3). He was not being awkward. The Hebrew word is nachalah, inheritance, and in Israel a family’s land was not a commodity at all. It was that family’s share in the promise, allotted tribe by tribe when the nation came into the country, and the law was explicit about why it could not simply be sold off: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine" (Leviticus 25:23). Naboth was obeying. Ahab went home, lay down on his bed with his face to the wall and would not eat, which is the behaviour of a spoilt child and is recorded as such. Jezebel, raised in a Phoenician court where a king who wanted a vineyard had a vineyard, asked him the obvious question: do you now govern Israel? Then she wrote letters in his name, sealed them with his seal, proclaimed a fast, seated Naboth at the head of the people, set two worthless men opposite him to swear he had cursed God and the king, and had him taken out and stoned. It was done entirely within the forms of the law, which is the detail that ought to frighten anyone. Elijah met Ahab in the vineyard while the king was still walking round his new property. Ahab saw him and said, "Have you found me, O my enemy?" The sentence that came back was on the whole house, and it was specific enough to be checked later: dogs in the place where they had licked Naboth’s blood, and dogs for Jezebel within the walls of Jezreel. Then the turn nobody expects. Ahab tore his clothes, put sackcloth on his skin, fasted and went about dejectedly. Sackcloth is coarse goat-hair cloth, the stuff grain sacks were made of, and a mourner wore it against the body because it was miserable to wear and the misery was the point. The word came to Elijah that because the king had humbled himself the disaster would not fall in his days but in his son’s. The worst king in the list gets a stay of execution for a spell of genuine misery whose length the narrator never gives, which says something about what the threats had been for all along.

(●) c. 852 BC: He crossed the Jordan on dry ground, went up in a whirlwind, and left his cloak to Elisha. + Ahab’s son Ahaziah fell through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and lay injured, and sent messengers to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would recover. Ekron was a Philistine town. The king of Israel, lying hurt, sent past the God of Israel to consult a Philistine idol, and Elijah met the messengers on the road and turned them around. A captain and his fifty men were sent up the hill to bring him in and were consumed by fire, and then a second captain and his fifty, and the same thing happened. The captain of the third company came up and went down on his knees and asked that his life and the lives of his fifty be precious in Elijah’s sight, and the angel of the Lord told Elijah to go down with him and not be afraid. That is the last king he confronts. What comes after it is the last day, and the narrator tells it slowly, because it is a walk. Gilgal, then Bethel, then Jericho, then the Jordan, and at every stop Elijah tells Elisha to stay behind and Elisha refuses in the same words. Fifty men from the prophetic guild stand off at a distance to watch. Kings calls them the sons of the prophets, which does not mean anyone’s children: it is the ordinary term for a company of men living together under a prophet and learning the work from him, the nearest thing that century had to a seminary. Elijah rolls up his cloak, strikes the water, and the two of them cross over on dry ground, which is the Jordan crossing Israel had made in the opposite direction under Joshua, run backwards by two men. On the far side Elijah asks what he can do for Elisha before he is taken, and Elisha asks for a double portion of his spirit. That is not a request for twice the power. A double portion was the firstborn son’s share of an estate under Israelite law (Deuteronomy 21:17): Elisha is asking to be treated as the heir. Elijah calls it a hard thing and makes it conditional on whether Elisha sees him go. He sees. Chariots of fire and horses of fire come between them, and Elijah goes up by a whirlwind into heaven, and Elisha is left shouting after him, "My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" Then he tears his own clothes in two, picks the fallen cloak up off the ground, walks back to the river and strikes the water with it, asking where the God of Elijah is. The water parts, and the men watching from Jericho say that the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. One loose end the text leaves lying. A letter from Elijah reaches Jehoram king of Judah in 2 Chronicles 21:12-15, and Jehoram’s reign is usually placed after this. The common reading is that the letter was written before the ascent and delivered afterwards. The chronology of these reigns is genuinely difficult and the Chronicler does not explain himself.

What He Taught

(T1) The Lord is God, and a nation cannot follow him and Baal at the same time. + Picture a farmer in a bad decade who keeps up his subscription to the parish church and also, quietly, pays into something else that is supposed to be better with rain. He has not renounced anything. He has hedged. That is what Elijah was arguing with, and it is easy to miss, because a modern reader assumes the northern kingdom had swapped one religion for another. It had not. It had added. Ahab built the Baal temple in Samaria and named his own two sons Ahaziah and Jehoram, and both of those names have the Lord’s name inside them: the Lord has grasped, the Lord is exalted. The Baal house and the Yahwistic nursery were the same building. Scholars use the word syncretism for this, which simply means running two religions together and keeping the parts of each you like. Elijah’s demand on Carmel is not that the Lord is better, or truer, or more useful. It is that the two claims cannot both be lived. If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal is, follow Baal; but stop hobbling. And the crowd’s response is the most human line in the chapter, because it is not a response at all: "the people did not answer him a word." They wanted both, and there was no way to say so. Christian teaching keeps the same edge and applies it to gentler idols. No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). The risen Christ tells a comfortable church that lukewarm is worse than cold (Revelation 3:15-16). The commandment Israel had first is still first.

(Q) "How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him." + Source: 1 Kings 18:21 (English Standard Version). Spoken on Mount Carmel to the assembled nation before either altar was built, with the king and the prophets of Baal standing there. The verse ends by noting that nobody replied (T1).

(T2) The word of the Lord decides whether it rains, and Baal decides nothing. + In the ancient Near East the weather was a god’s department in the way that the harvest is a farmer’s, and rain in particular was Baal’s. His own stories say so: he is the rider of the clouds, the one whose voice in the thunder makes the earth produce. Take rain away from Baal and there is not much of him left. So Elijah does not open with an argument about the nature of deity. He names a consequence, in front of the king, with a time limit attached: no dew and no rain except at his word. Then the sky stays shut for three and a half years, through a famine severe enough that the king of Israel and the man over his household went out personally to search the springs for grass. And when the rain finally comes, it comes on the afternoon a prophet of the Lord has just called down fire, and it comes at his word rather than at anyone’s ritual. The phrase he uses for himself is worth teaching. "Before whom I stand" is court language: it is what a servant does in the presence of a king, waiting on orders. Elijah is not claiming to control the weather. He is claiming to be the one currently standing in the throne room, and the weather is following what is said there. The apostle James picks this up and draws a conclusion no reader expects. He does not file the drought under what remarkable men can do. He files it under prayer, and goes out of his way to say first that Elijah was a man with a nature like ours (James 5:17-18).

(Q) "As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." + Source: 1 Kings 17:1 (English Standard Version). The first words Elijah speaks in Scripture, said to Ahab’s face with no introduction of any kind before them (T2).

(T3) God is not to be confused with his own displays of power. + Consider the position Elijah is in on Horeb. Weeks earlier he watched fire fall out of a clear sky and burn up an altar and the water round it. Now he is on the mountain where the law was given in smoke and thunder, and he is told to go out and stand, because the Lord is about to pass by. A reader knows what to expect, and so did he. What comes is a wind strong enough to break rocks, and God is not in it. An earthquake, and God is not in it. Fire, of all things, and God is not in that either. Then a sound of thin quiet, and that is the one that brings him to the mouth of the cave with his face wrapped in his cloak. Read carefully, this is not a claim that God never speaks in fire. He had done exactly that on Carmel, and on this same mountain to Moses, and the wind and the earthquake and the fire here are his: they go past because he is passing. The claim is narrower and harder. Elijah cannot read the spectacle and know from it that he has met God, and a prophet who has just staked everything on fire falling needs to hear that. The display is not the person. Christian thought has leaned on this passage for a very long time, and usually in the same direction: the caution against mistaking religious excitement for God himself. It is also of a piece with how God finally did come. Not an earthquake. A baby in a feeding trough, in a town nobody watched.

(Q) "And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper." + Source: 1 Kings 19:11-12 (English Standard Version). Spoken to Elijah at the mouth of a cave on Horeb, the mountain of the law, at the end of a forty-day walk (T3). Older English versions render the last phrase "a still small voice."

(T4) A king stands under the law like anyone else, and a neighbour’s field is not the crown’s to take. + Everything in the Naboth story is small. One vineyard, one stubborn neighbour, one sulking king, one queen who solves the problem in an afternoon. There is no theology in it anywhere until the prophet walks in among the vines. Jezebel’s question to her husband is the whole argument of the ancient world in five words: do you now govern Israel? She had grown up in a Phoenician court, and where she came from the answer was obvious. A king who wants a vineyard has a vineyard. What she could not have anticipated is a country in which the land itself was held to belong to God and lent to families, and in which a man could therefore say no to a king and be in the right. So Elijah in the vineyard is not merely announcing a punishment. He is standing for the proposition that there is a law above the king’s law and that somebody has the job of saying so out loud to his face. Nathan had done it to David over Bathsheba. Elijah does it to Ahab over Naboth. Centuries later John the Baptist does it to Herod over his brother’s wife and loses his head for it, which is the risk the job has always carried. The line runs a long way forward from that vineyard. When later Christians argued that rulers are accountable to a justice they did not invent and cannot repeal, this was one of the texts in their hands.

(Q) "I have found you, because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord." + Source: 1 Kings 21:20 (English Standard Version). Ahab had seen him among the vines and said, "Have you found me, O my enemy?" This is the reply, and it answers the king’s word back to him: found, yes, and here is what for (T4).

(T5) God keeps faithful people that nobody has counted. + Elijah’s census of the faithful comes to one, and he gives the figure three times: once in public on Carmel and twice to God on Horeb. "I, even I only, am left." It was not true, and he of all people knew it was not true. Obadiah, the man in charge of Ahab’s own household, had taken a hundred prophets of the Lord and hidden them by fifties in a cave and fed them with bread and water through the famine, and had told Elijah so to his face, on the road, only days before Carmel (1 Kings 18:13). The prophet was not lying. He had simply stopped counting anyone he could not see. The answer he gets is a number: seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him. Kissing the image was ordinary homage, the way a subject kissed a king’s hand, and it was the small public gesture that showed which way a household had gone. Seven thousand had not made it. Elijah had met none of them. Notice what the promise does not say. It does not say the faithful will be many, or visible, or that they will win. It says that the accounting is God’s and not the prophet’s, which is a colder comfort and a more durable one. Paul reached for exactly this verse when he needed to argue that God had not rejected Israel, and it is where the Christian idea of the remnant, the faithful minority God preserves through every collapse, gets its clearest text (Romans 11:2-5).

(Q) "Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him." + Source: 1 Kings 19:18 (English Standard Version). The last line of what God says to Elijah on Horeb, after the three names and the commission, and the only part of it addressed to the complaint rather than to the work (T5).

(Q) "You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it shall be so for you, but if you do not see me, it shall not be so." + Source: 2 Kings 2:10 (English Standard Version). His last recorded words, spoken on the far bank of the Jordan an hour or so before the whirlwind, in answer to Elisha’s request for the heir’s share of his spirit. The last thing he does is arrange for the work to go on without him, and that is the first thing everyone after him noticed: he left, and it did not stop.

How Israel and the Church Remembered Him

(†) Israel never treated him as finished, because the Old Testament ends by promising him back. + In the order Christians use, the Old Testament does not end with a summary or a blessing. It ends with a name and a road: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers" (Malachi 4:5-6). Then four centuries of silence, with a people watching for a man who had left in a whirlwind. They kept watching. Around 180 BC a Jerusalem scribe named Jesus ben Sira wrote a long book of wisdom, known as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. It sits in the Greek Old Testament that the early church read, which is why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles print it among the deuterocanonical books, the ones received into the canon later than the rest and held there with the same authority, while Protestant Bibles that print it at all set it in a section of their own called the Apocrypha, read with respect and not used to settle doctrine. He gives Elijah eleven verses, opening "Then stood up Elias the prophet as fire, and his word burned like a lamp," and turning near the end to Malachi’s promise, still outstanding (Ecclesiasticus 48:1-11, King James Apocrypha). A generation later the dying Mattathias, rallying his sons in 1 Maccabees 2:58, lists Elijah among the heroes of zeal and says it was for that zeal he was taken up into heaven. By the time the Gospels open, the expectation is so ordinary that nobody has to explain it. When the priests and Levites came out from Jerusalem to interrogate John the Baptist, the first thing he told them, before anyone had named the office, was that he was not the Christ, and the next thing they asked was "Are you Elijah?" (John 1:19-21). It was a normal thing to ask a prophet in the desert. Jewish households have gone on keeping the watch since. The cup poured for Elijah at the Passover table and the door opened for him are a custom of the medieval period and later rather than a practice of the Bible, but the thing they are doing is the thing Malachi left everyone doing.

(†) The Gospels answer that expectation with John the Baptist, and then put Elijah himself on the mountain with Moses. + The answer arrives before the Baptist is born. Gabriel tells an old priest in the temple that his son will "go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children" (Luke 1:17), which is Malachi’s own sentence handed to one particular baby. The description sticks. When John turns up he is wearing a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist (Matthew 3:4), and a leather belt around the waist over a garment of hair is precisely how a messenger had described Elijah to a king nearly nine centuries earlier (2 Kings 1:8). Whether or not the crowds could read the sign, the writers expected their readers to. Jesus says it outright: "if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come" (Matthew 11:14), and again coming down the mountain, "Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they pleased" (Matthew 17:12). There is one apparent knot, and it unties easily. John himself, asked point blank whether he was Elijah, said "I am not" (John 1:21). The delegation was asking whether he was Elijah returned in person, and he was not. Jesus was saying that John filled the role Malachi had described, and he did. Two different questions, two true answers. Then comes the strangest honour paid to him, in the scene the church calls the Transfiguration, a name taken from the moment in it when the face and clothing of Jesus changed in front of his friends. On a high mountain, with Peter, James and John watching, two men appear and talk with Jesus, and they are Moses and Elijah: the law and the prophets, the man who led Israel out of Egypt and the man who left in a whirlwind. Luke alone tells us what they were discussing. They spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31), and the Greek word Luke chose for departure is exodos. Two veterans of one deliverance, standing with the man about to carry out another.

(†) The apostles used him for prayer and for the remnant, and the desert monks claimed him as their father. + The New Testament does two very practical things with him, and neither is hero worship. James wanted ordinary congregations to pray for each other and expect something to happen, and the example he reached for was the drought. But look at how carefully he sets it up: "Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain" (James 5:17). The Greek word behind that phrase means having the same feelings, the same susceptibilities. The whole force of the illustration depends on Elijah not being a different kind of creature from the reader. Paul reached for the seven thousand. Writing to Roman Christians who wondered whether God had given up on Israel, he retells the scene on Horeb, quotes the complaint and the reply, and draws the conclusion that there is a remnant now as there was then (Romans 11:2-5). The doctrine that God preserves a faithful minority through any collapse has its clearest proof text in that number. Then there is what the wilderness did with him. When Christians began going out to live alone in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, they did not think they were inventing anything; they thought they were going back to something. Jerome, writing to his friend Paulinus about the way of life he had chosen, tells him that each calling should follow its own models, and then goes back past Antony and Hilarion to Scripture: monks have their masters in Elijah and Elisha, and their leaders in the sons of the prophets, men who lived in open country and made themselves shelters by the waters of the Jordan (Letter 58.5). Eight centuries later, Latin hermits settled on Mount Carmel itself and took Elijah for their father, and the order they became still carries the mountain in its name. That is why Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, reforming the Carmelites in sixteenth-century Spain, write about a Gileadite prophet from two and a half millennia earlier as though he were a member of the household.

(†) Where his own record marks against him: the headcount, the fire on the fifties, and the commission he left unfinished. + Scripture is not protective of its prophets, and it does not tidy this one. Four things stand in his own ledger, from his own story. - The headcount. "I, even I only, am left" was not true when he said it, and he had been told so directly. Obadiah had hidden a hundred prophets by fifties in a cave and had described it to him on the road (1 Kings 18:13). Elijah repeated the claim twice more on Horeb after that conversation. God answers with a number rather than a reprimand, which is gentler than the mistake deserved. - The fire on the fifties. Two officers and a hundred men are consumed for delivering a king’s summons (2 Kings 1:9-12). The narrator reports it and passes no verdict, and the third captain who begs is spared. What Scripture does supply is a later scene: two of Jesus’ disciples propose calling fire down on a Samaritan village that will not receive him, in words that plainly echo this chapter, and are rebuked (Luke 9:54-55). A Christian reading the two passages honestly has to say the later word is the clearer one. - The unfinished commission. Three names were given at Horeb and he delivered one. Hazael heard his future from Elisha in Damascus years afterwards, and Jehu was anointed at Ramoth-gilead by a young man Elisha sent (2 Kings 8:7-15; 9:1-10). The text gives no reason for the gap, and it is fairer to notice it than to smooth it over. - The collapse. Not a sin the narrator names, and God treats it with food and sleep rather than reproof, but it belongs in an honest account of the man: one threatening message from a queen undid what fire from heaven had built the day before, and the prophet who had just seen a nation on its face asked God to end his life. None of this is offered as a demolition, and Scripture itself does not offer it that way. It is the reason James could hold him up as an ordinary man who prayed. A prophet who never miscounted, never overreached and never broke would be no use at all as an example to anybody.