Elijah (25 page)

The eight young men stood by their four large jars. “Do it again,” Elijah ordered. Incredulous but obeying, the men hoisted their jars and worked their way to the pool. When they poured the water the second time onto the altar, the earth no longer could hold the wetness, and the water trickled on all sides into the ditches.

To the astonishment of the young men, Elijah ordered them a third time to fill the jars. Low, subdued conversation moved throughout the audience.

The men returned, sweating profusely now, their legs aching from the threefold climb, their shoulders and biceps burning from the weight of the threefold burden. They did not question Elijah this time, not even by so much as a glance, when he simply pointed to the altar. Each team in turn, they poured the water onto the meat and wood. It ran in quick streams down the altar and across the soaked ground into the surrounding ditches. The fourth jar filled the ditch to its brim.

It was done. Four jars, the number symbol for the world with its four winds and four corners. Three times emptied, the number symbol for the divine Yahweh. The message was clear to the people. Yahweh controls the earth.

Elijah motioned the men away and cautioned the crowd to move back, then he stood near the altar, his face upturned. His voice was loud but even, and the people below could hear the words from the prophet they could not see. “Yahweh Elohim,” he called, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Israel. Let it be revealed today, and known to all, that you are God, the only God, in Israel, and that I, Elijah, am your servant. Let all Israel know that the drought spoken by my mouth and all that happens here today is not my doing, but is done at your command and by your power.”

The people, the leaders of Israel, the great men of the nation, stood straight and silent as the prophet spoke.

“
Hear me, O Yahweh,” he continued, his hairy arms outstretched, “hear me, that all these people, all the people of Israel, may know that you are the Lord God. Let them know that by this act you turn their hearts from Baal back to you.”

Elijah moved backward toward the cliff until he stood at its edge. He raised his arms upward. The people below could see him now, a lone figure small against the sky. The audience nearer him hardly breathed, so electric was the contrast between the lone, calm prophet and the frenzied Baal multitude.

The sun was over the Great Sea to the west. Without a trace of cloud, the clear sky was a blue expanse that stretched as far as the eye could see. The people followed Elijah’s gaze upward. All nature was silent, without a breeze to rustle a leaf. Then it happened. Lightning streaked from the cloudless blue to touch the altar. The thunderclap was instantaneous and awesome, the thundering voice of Yahweh in answer to the prophet’s prayer. The whole area exploded into flames. A blue fire rose in a roar from the wood and meat and altar, as if sucked upward into an invisible chimney. Electricity crackled like fire among the trenches, and on the wet ground the white-hot flame burned the water from the blackened ground in frightening, fast-moving streaks. The flame burned still on the wood and meat, and between the stones hot electricity sizzled with its white flame.

All was over in a minute, even before the people recovered from the horrendous shock of the thunderclap. The intense heat left the stones broken into small pieces, and the wood and meat were completely consumed.

The people fell to the ground and pressed their faces against the earth. The people below, too, saw the lightening and the leaping flames. The thunderclap jolted them as sternly as it did the people closer to the altar, for they saw the lone prophet standing with upraised arms against the backdrop of fire. They, too, fell to their faces, even before word passed down to them of the total destruction of the altar. The chant started almost immediately from the mountain, but it spread quickly to the people below. “Yahweh, the only God. Yahweh, the only God.” The people said it with their heads still bowed to the earth, then as they recovered from their shock they shouted it louder still, “Yahweh, the only God!”

Elijah had not moved, but he lowered his arms and pointed toward the Baal prophets who lay amid their mumblings, still dazed. He shouted above the din, “Take the prophets of Baal. Do not allow a single one to escape.” A few closer men heard the command and quickly obeyed. As others watched them move, Elijah screamed out the command again and a mass of men moved into action against the prophets.

Exhausted and still hypnotized by their ecstatic dancing and screaming, the prophets offered little resistance as the horde of men caught them up bodily. The servant Elisha led the way, mercilessly shoving a naked, bleeding prophet down the ravine past the pool and on down the steep slope to the Kishon River. Sliding down the rocky path, rolling and tumbling, the prophet of Baal was a mass of lifeless bruises and torn flesh by the time Elisha plunged a borrowed knife into his heart and threw the body into the narrow, muddy river.

The men followed Elisha in the orgy of slaughter. Mangled bodies, with arms and legs at grotesque angles, their throats slashed or stabbed through the heart, were piled into the Kishon until the muddy water turned brown-red. The path was clear from the sacred ground of Carmel down to the river, the slope marked with blood left on the trees and rocks. And the reddened Kishon slowed sluggishly toward the Sea to regurgitate the contagion of the land into the home of the Tyrian god.

Ahab, with Obadiah at his side, had not moved throughout the massacre. Stunned by the enormity of God’s display of fire, he was mute to the slaughter. He thought instead of Jezebel.

Elijah had not moved, either, but his face held a glow of victory. Through he had expected God to answer, even in his certainty the loud and thorough response was a shock. He felt as though his soul was outside his body, observing with joy the purge of the land, watching with anticipation the proclaiming of Yahweh. But there was more to be done.

He called to some older men who still remained, “Go and slay and prepare a young bull for a feast. Your king must eat.” Then he shouted across the demolished altar to Ahab, “Follow the men higher up the mountain. They will prepare a feast. Eat your fill and drink deeply of the good water. Celebrate the end of the drought, for my ears ring with the sound of a great, abundant rain.”

Ahab turned without a response and moved lethargically in the direction Elijah pointed. Obadiah walked silently at his side, the royal train following close behind. Thoughts whirled in the king’s mind, thoughts of Yahweh as the God of Israel, thoughts of the drought’s end, thoughts of Jezebel. Of all, Jezebel loomed most important. What would she do? Would the slaughter of the Baal prophets cause Tyre to break their alliance? How could he promote Yahweh worship in Israel without breaching the terms of his marriage to Jezebel? The development was not a religious problem to Ahab so much as an administrative one. How would he administer the zeal now toward Yahweh and hold together the pieces of the mutually profitable alliance with Tyre?

Elisha returned as Ahab’s company disappeared among the trees.

“
Come with me,” Elijah ordered.

The two men walked up to the crest of Carmel. The sea still was not visible when they stopped, hidden by another peak a few minutes to the west. Elijah sat on the ground. He buried his face in his drawn up knees and clasped his hands around his legs. “I will pray,” he murmured to Elisha. “Go up higher and look out to the sea.”

With quick obedience, Elisha broke into a run. The climb was not overly steep, but the winter air held enough chill to bring pain to his throat from the exertion. Even so he ran with excitement, his own head dizzy with the sudden and decisive victory. On the peak, he looked beyond the yellow-sanded gulf shore below him and out to the western horizon. He cupped his hands over his eyes to break the late afternoon sun, and for several minutes he looked, with increasing disappointment. As far as he could see, the sky was clear.

He descended the peak at a disappointed walk and reported to his master. “There is nothing. I don’t see a thing.”

Without looking up, Elijah waved his hand toward the sea. “Go, look again.”

The servant nodded, unseen by Elijah, and returned to the peak. Again he searched the sky. He squinted against the bright sun and looked carefully. Still, the sky glared clear. Despondently, he returned to Elijah with his discouraging report. Again, Elijah motioned him back to the peak. Again, the sun-dominated sky glared with its dry stare.

Elisha made several trips. Each time, Elijah repeated his unspoken gesture for his servant to look again, with hardly an interruption of his prayers.

Below, by the Kishon, the wild excitement of the slaughter was over for the people. They talked of the spectacle of the Baal prophets, and spoke in tones of awe of the act of Yahweh, and laughed about the prophets’ naked bodies that forced the river to work its way around them.

The sun sank lower toward the horizon with each of Elisha’s trips. On the seventh trip the servant saw a cloud far in the distance. The seventh trip. Elisha felt a current run through his body. The number was fitting. Seven was the number most sacred to the Hebrews, the number made up of four plus three, the number to symbolize the perfect union of earth with heaven. He wiped his watering eyes to see it more clearly. The cloud was there, tiny and far away, but it was there. The servant ran recklessly back down from the peak, the bushes and trees grabbing at him in his rush. He was breathless when he came to Elijah, and spoke his report through a heaving chest. “There is a tiny cloud far away,” he reported, gasping, “no larger on the horizon than a man’s hand.”

Elijah arose. “It is enough,” he said. “Now, go to Ahab at the feast. Tell him to hurry to his chariot and hitch up his horses. Tell him to get down from off the mountain and hurry to Jezreel so he will not be caught in the storm.”

Ahab’s laugh rang among the trees. Jubilantly, he clapped Obadiah’s back then rose to hurry to his chariot, leaving his governor to oversee the return of equipment and animals to their proper places, a difficult task in the rain, for the lava soil of the valley could become boggy with the wetness. Horses and carts would find the travel slow and laborious.

Elijah already had started down the mountain and was on Jezebel’s plain by the time Ahab had his chariot prepared and ready to start. His tunic ends tucked into his wide leather girdle, the prophet ran hard toward the city, seventeen miles away at the foot of Mount Gilboa, across the hard-packed, thirsty valley floor. Asherah had a temple there, built by Jezebel to house the four hundred prophets of the goddess. They surely would claim credit for the breaking of the drought. He must outrun the rain, so it would follow close at his back, as though he delivered it in Yahweh’s stead. The gatekeepers must see that the rain belonged to Yahweh.

The clouds gathered quickly behind him, dark and heavy in the late afternoon, and they brought dusk before its time. The thunder rumbled in the distance toward the sea. Its sound forced its power into his limbs. He ran in a straight line, cutting across the cracked fields, while Ahab’s chariot followed the turns in the road. He ran with fury, accepting the challenge of the chariot, racing to see Ahab’s face when the king entered Jezreel’s gates. His short, muscular legs pumped rapidly to propel him across the wide expanse of the basin in short steps rather than in the long strides of a thin runner.

He arrived at the gates just before Ahab, with the storm pressing close behind. He stood at the side of the gate to wait for the king. The wind came in gusts now to announce the impending rain. It snapped the folds of his tunic and blew his hair wildly. His chest rose and fell with his heavy breath and he flexed his muscles in his legs to the point of strain to fight back the threatening cramps. Ahab’s chariot careened toward the gate only moments after the prophet arrived, and Elijah raised his hand in greeting. Ahab pulled hard on his reins to stop the horses. He did not speak as he stared down at the strange, bare-armed, hairy prophet. The rain came with him, and it struck suddenly and with fury, a blowing rain that soaked both of them in seconds. Elijah raised his face and arms toward the rain, felling the wetness wash away the dust from his skin and soak into his beard and hair and plaster his tunic against his flesh. He began to laugh. “Well, my beloved king,” he shouted through the storm to Ahab, “Yahweh indeed showed himself today.”

The king felt the rain pelt his face and back and rush at his sandaled feet to flow out the back of his chariot, but he did not smile. He wanted to tell Elijah how he felt, that as an Israelite he was glad Yahweh had won, but the burden of being king was the greater force within him. He could only think of Jezebel and the alliance with Tyre. Without speaking, he snapped his reins and moved through the gates.

He sent word immediately for the queen to join him. She had waited anxiously for word about the contest, and so came to his chambers quickly. Ahab was changing from his wet clothes when she was announced. He rubbed his hair and beard vigorously with a towel as she entered.

“
The storm is ferocious,” she said, her cheerfulness guarded and cautious.

“
Yes,” Ahab answered, “but it is not Baal who sent it. The rain is Yahweh’s.”

The queen’s face revealed brief shock, but she quickly suppressed the feeling and asked evenly, “How so?”

“
Elijah challenged your prophets to prepare a sacrifice and pray to Melkart to send fir from the sky to light the wood. They prayed all day, from morning until the time of the afternoon sacrifice. In all my life I have not seen such a display. Your prophets were frantic. They ended up by cutting their own flesh with knives and rolling in the dirt. They not only were tired, they were out of their minds. Either they are crazy or their god is.”