Elijah (33 page)

But what of the quiet, tender voice? Can a prophet proclaim judgment to the unrepentant and speak gently to the rest? Can people understand gentleness in the midst of judgment? The question was imponderable. The prophet had little in his experience or in Israel’s history to weigh the effectiveness of gentle dealings. At last, he thrust the problem from his mind. Perhaps time would explain the paradox.

The next morning was brilliant. The gulf waters were transparent in the sun; the eastern peaks were jagged, massive shadows and crags rising above the sea. Ahead, on the west side, the granite hills were aflame with the dancing colors of their minerals. The walls of the Tih shone yellow in the distance. They rumbled down toward the shore but were blocked by the copper granite cliffs, capped by sandstone that burned red in the dawn light.

Elijah enjoyed the ease of travel. Seashells, from the tiniest size up to several pounds in weight, lay all along the shore.

Late in the afternoon he came to the Bay of Taba. Four slender Sudanese palms rose to a height of sixty feet above the sandy plain. Young palms, dwarfed by their parents, were scattered around the taller trees. Perhaps the Israelites had camped here, but if they did, Elijah thought, they must have brought water from somewhere else. The water of Taba’s well was too brackish to drink.

Soon Elijah could see the opening of the Arabah, the Valley of the Smiths, the deep cleft that ran south from the Dead Sea for one hundred miles to the Gulf of Aqabah.

A heavily traveled road from the west touched the narrow gulf at its northwest corner. The several caravan trails that crossed the Sinai converged at that point to complete their journey to Ezion-geber. Several roads met at the smelter city. Elijah would take one of them, the important caravan road that ran the length of the Arabah.

The road was packed hard by the hooves of donkeys that carried the ore from the scattered mines. Elijah frequently met them as he traveled north. They were scattered all along the road, traveling singly and in twos, driven by dirty, sweaty men who walked alongside them. The drivers were mostly Israelites whose luck or birth had put them at the lowest rung of Judean life, but they were free. The mining itself was done by slaves, expendable beings who had been captured in warfare.

Elijah passed the main mine, at Timneh, late in the afternoon. The entire operation was enclosed by strong walls to keep the slaves from escaping. Even the black slag was emptied inside the walls, for the ore was partly smelted in numerous small stone furnaces to reduce the weight and bulk that had to be carried to Ezion-geber. Guards were frequent and cautious all through the area, but occasionally one waved at Elijah in recognition of his prophet’s garb.

The prophet reached the fountain of Gharandal by nightfall. A few palm trees clustered around the spring. The water was warm but drinkable. The day had been hot, even the wind that blew down the Arabah was hot. Elijah’s tunic was sweated through, and his mantle, which he had carried on his arm or slung across his shoulder, was streaked with salt. He bathed his face and arms in the warm water, then drank his fill.

The night was hot. Elijah slept on his back on his spread-out mantle, his arms and legs outstretched to avoid the sweating contact with his own skin. He rose early, unrefreshed but less tired, to resume his journey.

The wadis on the west became more frequent now, each one dry except for rare fountains known to the caravaneers and travelers. Occasionally a donkey driver passed with his ore-laden donkey, his clothes smudged with black and red dirt, his eyes heavy and watery, his face sullen. Elijah could not help but feel a tinge of conscience for Israel and Judah. Even Judah, with its good King Jehoshaphat, known for his justice, allowed men to labor their forgotten lives away in the oppressive heat until the old ones died or the young ones ran away to join the bandit gangs that roamed the hills. And the slaves, shut up inside the walled enclosures where the heat was worse than that of the valley itself, their lives were hideous beyond words.

Shortly past noon Elijah came to the southwest corner of the Dead Sea. To his left the salt hill of Jebel Usdum rose nearly six hundred fifty feet. It was six miles long, a wind- and storm-carved array of fantastic mounds and pillars. The old men taught that Usdum was destroyed Sodom, city of evil, companion to Gomorrah, and that one of the strange salt pillars was Lot’s wife.

At the north end of the salt hill Elijah came on a party of salt diggers. There were four of them, all stocky, all naked, with dark brown skin. They stopped their work to stare at the prophet. Their eyes were wild and despairing, their muscles bunched in prominent sinews about their shoulder sockets. Sweat rolled from every part of their bodies. Their hair was cut well above their shoulders; all of them had shaved two or three days before their journey into the valley and now supported stubby beginnings of whiskers.

“I am Elijah, prophet of Yahweh,” he announced. “Where can I find water?”

The four of them stared at him without expression.

“Where can I find water?”

One man laughed. He pointed to the large skins near the hobbled donkeys. Elijah moved toward the skins, nodding his thanks. He pulled the waterpouch from his shoulder and knelt down, but then was interrupted by a loud “No,” growled fiercely by one of the men. He looked around. “You want water. You pay us with salt.” He pointed to an iron spearlike rod. “There. Dig for your payment.”

Elijah shrugged. The men were Judeans, but of the same poor class that drove donkeys in the Arabah, unafraid of a prophet’s curse because their lives already were cursed. He walked past the four men and picked up the tool. He shoved its point against the hard salt hill and scraped. Slowly, he etched out a two-foot square block as his iron dug out a narrow trench around it. Then he scraped under the block shape to free it at the bottom. The task required an hour to complete. After sweating in the furnace heat, he found that the added labor pulled perspiration in rivulets from his body. His tunic was plastered against his skin and stained heavily with rings of salt. The powder from his tool settled in his hair and beard, which itched fiercely from the heat. In spite of himself, he licked the salt from his cracked lips occasionally, an act that added greatly to his thirst.

Finally, he lifted the shaped block and laid it on the stack beside the donkeys. He turned to the waterskins. The men laughed and moved in front of him, blocking his way. Elijah fought back his rage. “Give me water for payment,” he said. The men laughed again. The prophet’s anger prodded him almost to the point of pronouncing a curse on them, for an affront to a prophet was believed everywhere to be a direct affront to the god he served. But he recalled the watery eyes of the beaten donkey drivers in the Arabah and thought,
These men at least still have spirit
. He turned without speaking to pick up his mantle and waterpouch. As he walked away he heard the low laughter of the salt diggers.

Elijah did not attempt to drink from his waterpouch until he was out of sight. Then his fears were realized. While he was at work cutting out the salt block, one of the men had emptied the little remaining supply. The nearest fountain was at Engedi, twenty-five miles farther, and his throat already screamed for water. Not even on the Tih had he felt the intensity of thirst that he felt now. The salt dried on his body and clothes. His lips cracked in the heat. His tongue swelled to fill his mouth with thickness. His eyes burned from the salt he had brushed into them, and he could not keep himself from further aggravating the constant, painful itch.

The night was dark. He scarcely could see the lines of cliffs on his left. The sea, too, was dark, but the white, salt-crusted shore marked a distinct ribbon in the moonlight for him to follow. He grew more angry as his tiredness and thirst increased, more angry because of the affront to Yahweh and to himself. Had he not been a prophet the salt diggers might have attacked him. He was thankful for that much. But what must the four men think of Yahweh now? They would boast of the incident to their friends. Rather than recognize the compassion of Yahweh for his refusal to retaliate, they would talk of God’s weakness.
What now
, he thought,
of the gentle voice?

Elijah reached Engedi long after midnight, slowed by his fatigue and thirst, having to force his legs to function over an unfamiliar and dark road. His throat scraped with each breath. His lips bled from wide, wrinkled cracks. He knelt at the edge of the wadi and lapped water from his cupped hands. He drank slowly, and only a little. An urge to gorge himself rose like a sheet of fire inside him. The water stung his lips terribly, but the wetness on his swollen tongue was the greater sensation. He swallowed with difficulty. Only slowly did his throat open to receive the warm water.

After a short drink, Elijah sat by the brook to wait for his stomach to accustom itself to the relief, then he drank again. Fatigue, held back desperately during his eight-hour march for water, swept over him now like a wave. He rose before the tiredness took complete command, hoping to make his way up the dark wadi toward its source. The fountain was not far from the sea, but it was up a long, steep, rocky bed. He struggled only for a few yards, then gave up the climb. He laid his mantle, girdle, and pouches, on the rocks, waded into the water, and sat down. The water flowed around his groin and legs, its warm wetness washing the caked salt from his lower body. He lowered his face forward into the water and shook his head vigorously. The wild hair flowed out and down. He raised his head and gasped. Then he lowered it again and rubbed his hair, scalp, and beard with his fingers. Some of the anguish passed from his fatigue into the stream, to be replaced with a more relaxed weariness. He struggled out of his tunic and held it in the water in front of him. The current stretched it flat in his hands. He waved it in the water to shake loose the caked salt, then he struggled naked to his sandaled feet, wrung out the tunic as best he could, and put it on again. He would wait until morning to clean his mantle.

The darkness blotted the growth of trees and bushes into an indistinguishable mass on the sides of the wadi. Elijah settled for the open rocks, at least until dawn, and arranged a reasonably smooth area near the stream. He was asleep in moments. His mantle protected his still-wet tunic from becoming soiled again and the wet cloth tempered the heat of the valley. The prophet slept until after dawn, but soon after sunup the heat caught in the red rocks and built rapidly. Still tired and groggy, Elijah moved to a sheltered area of acacia trees, taking care to avoid their thorns.

He slept for two more hours, but the breezeless heat then made comfort impossible. He threw his mantle over his shoulder and fastened his girdle around his waist, then went to the brook to fill his waterpouch. The ordeal of thirst and fatigue left him with a fierce headache that throbbed in his eyes and at the base of his neck. Scabs had formed along the cracks on his lips so that every change of expression brought stabs of pain.

The daylight revealed that Engedi was the most copious oasis along the west side of the Dead Sea. The fountain sprang from the limestone mountain several hundred feet to the west and cascaded down terraced shelves to the sea. Tall cane and acacia thickets formed a luxuriant jungle along much of the stream’s course, interspersed with other trees and low bushes. The apple of Sodom grew profusely in various spots along its length. Elijah started to laugh, but jerked at the pain his smile brought to his lips. The apples were like the Baal religion. Round and smooth, yellow when ripe, they hung in delicious clusters of three or four. Inviting in appearance and soft to the touch, the apple beckoned the hungry Elijah to a feast. But he knew that when its sides are pressed in an attempt to open it up, it bursts in a puffy explosion. The rind protected only a slender pod of silk and seeds. The hungry man would find nothing in it but air.

Water would be no problem during the rest of the journey, for two major public fountains lay along the sea. Elijah could reach the north end of the sea by midafternoon, then cross the valley plain to reach Jericho well before dark. He determined to walk at a comfortable pace.

By late morning Elijah passed the Kidron on his left, the holy brook that flowed by the Jerusalem Temple and down through barren brown hills into the perpendicular Valley of Fire on its way to the Dead Sea.

He could see the north shore easily now. Across the north end of the sea a ridge, looking from below like a mountain in its own right, jutted out from the Moabite plateau. It was Mount Nebo.

Moses was old when he stood on Nebo, one hundred twenty years old, with the vast nation of Israel behind him, but he was not infirm. He gathered all of Yahweh’s laws together and had them taught throughout the camps. God’s warning was austere and prophetic. Though he dealt generously with his people, they would turn to other gods as soon as they settled into the new land. And so they had; even still they did. The pattern had not changed; the warning had not been heeded.

Moses’ last act was to appoint a successor, Joshua. Then he walked from their sight into the land of valleys and gullies and crumbling rocks and slopes and silence and thistles and moaning wind. He walked into the land of God, never again to be seen, his body never to be found.

The walk across the plain to Jericho was dismal, untempered by the intriguing bleakness of the wilderness hills that had been companion to Elijah all along the Arabah and Dead Sea. The city had lost its greatness long before, and yet it was paradise to the traveler coming out of the wilderness. Huge date palms towered over the dwellings, and smaller palms filled the city’s gardens. The marketplace teemed with caravans trading for dates and balsam and buying provisions for their journeys.