Fire on Carmel

The drought has lasted three years.

Ahab is king of Israel. He is not weak by temperament — he is a builder, a soldier, a political strategist who constructed an alliance with Phoenicia through his marriage to Jezebel of Sidon — but he is weak in the specific way that matters here: he cannot say no to his wife’s religion and he cannot say no to the prophets of YHWH, and trying to satisfy both has brought him to the edge of a theological war. Jezebel has installed four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and four hundred prophets of Asherah in the royal court, fed at the queen’s table. The altars of YHWH have been torn down. His prophets are hiding in caves by the hundred, kept alive by a court official named Obadiah who fears the God of his fathers more than he fears the queen.

The rain has not come in three years. Elijah announced the drought at the beginning — walked into Ahab’s presence and said: by the life of YHWH, the God of Israel, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word. Then he disappeared. Three years of Ahab searching for him, because someone has to be blamed for a drought in a land whose theology is built around a storm-god, and Elijah is the most convenient candidate.

The historical situation is exact. Two versions of storm-god theology, one Canaanite and one Israelite, competing for the allegiance of a population that lives or dies by whether the rain comes. Baal makes the rain come in the Ugaritic tradition — that is what Baal does, it is what his palace on Zaphon is built for, it is why the Phoenicians brought him when they came. YHWH makes the rain come in the Israelite tradition, or withholds it, which is what Elijah has just demonstrated. Mount Carmel, the long ridge above the Jezreel Valley that falls away toward the sea on one side, is where this question is going to be answered.

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Elijah comes out of hiding.

He walks into Ahab’s sight on the road — no warning, no message sent ahead, the prophet who has been blamed for three years of drought simply appearing in front of the king who has been looking for him. Ahab sees him first and calls him what three years of search and drought have made him: a troubler of Israel.

Elijah does not apologize. He does not negotiate. He says: You are the troubler of Israel — you and your father’s house, because you have forsaken the commandments of YHWH and followed the Baals.

Then he makes the offer that Ahab cannot refuse and cannot accept and accepts anyway: bring every prophet of Baal to Mount Carmel. Bring all of Israel. Two altars, two bulls, no fire. Each side calls on its god. The god who answers by fire — he is God.

Ahab does it. He is a king who knows how to read a situation, and the situation is that the drought has made Baal’s prophets politically untenable if they cannot produce rain. A contest is not the worst outcome. Maybe Baal answers. Maybe the crisis resolves. He gathers Israel and four hundred and fifty prophets and brings them to the ridge above the sea.

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The prophets of Baal go first.

They build the altar. They lay the bull on the wood. They begin to call on the name of Baal from morning until noon: O Baal, answer us. They dance in the ritual limping circle around the altar — the halting step that the tablets describe as the ecstatic movement of divine possession, the body made available to the god. They cry. They dance. They call.

Nothing happens. No voice. No fire. No one answers.

At noon Elijah begins to mock.

This is the detail the text preserves with what can only be called pleasure: Call louder. Perhaps he is musing, or he has gone aside, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened. The Hebrew word translated as ‘gone aside’ — the commentators have debated for centuries whether it means what it appears to mean, and the majority have concluded that it does. Elijah is telling four hundred and fifty prophets, in front of all Israel, that their god is relieving himself.

The prophets cry louder. They cut themselves with swords and spears, as their custom is, until blood runs down. The afternoon wears on. They rave. They prophesy. They do everything the ancient Near Eastern religious tradition could require of a priest seeking divine attention: noise, blood, hours of sustained appeal, the full register of devotion.

There is no voice. No one answers. No one is listening.

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At the hour of the evening offering, Elijah says: Come near to me.

He repairs the broken altar of YHWH — twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of the sons of Jacob. He digs a trench around it large enough to hold two seahs of seed. He lays the wood. He cuts the bull and puts it on the wood. Then: Fill four water jars and pour them on the offering and on the wood.

They pour. Do it a second time. They pour. Do it a third time. They pour. The water runs down over everything. It fills the trench. The wood is soaked, the offering is soaked, the stones under the altar are soaked. If fire comes now, no one will have a theory about how it came that does not include God.

Elijah steps up to the altar and prays. He uses forty words. He does not dance or cut himself or cry. He asks for a single thing: Let it be known today that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, YHWH, answer me, that this people may know that you, YHWH, are God, and that you have turned their heart back.

Fire falls from heaven.

It consumes the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust. It licks up the water in the trench. The people see it and fall on their faces: YHWH, he is God. YHWH, he is God.

Elijah says: Seize the prophets of Baal. Let none of them escape. They are seized. They are taken to the Kishon valley and killed — all four hundred and fifty.

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Then Elijah tells Ahab to eat and drink, because there is the sound of a heavy rain.

He climbs to the top of Carmel and puts his face between his knees. He sends his servant to look toward the sea seven times. Six times: nothing. The seventh time: a cloud, small as a man’s hand, rising from the sea. The cloud becomes clouds. The sky goes black. The wind rises. The rain falls.

The three-year drought ends in an afternoon.

The hand of YHWH is on Elijah, and he girds his loins and runs before Ahab’s chariot the full distance to Jezreel — seventeen miles — a man on foot outrunning horses in a rainstorm, because the god who just answered by fire has put something into this man’s legs that is not his own strength.

Then Jezebel hears what happened to her prophets, and she sends a messenger: May the gods do so to me and more also if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.

And Elijah, who just called fire from heaven and closed a drought with forty words, runs.

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He walks south through Judah. He leaves his servant in Beersheba and goes a day’s journey further into the wilderness alone. He sits under a broom tree and asks to die. It is enough. Now, O YHWH, take my life. I am no better than my fathers.

He lies down and sleeps. An angel touches him: Arise and eat. He finds a cake on hot coals and a jar of water. He eats, drinks, lies down again. The angel touches him a second time. Arise and eat. The journey is too great for you.

He eats. He rises. He walks forty days and forty nights to Horeb — the mountain of God, the mountain where Moses received the law, the mountain where everything was first established between YHWH and Israel. He finds a cave and spends the night there.

A word comes to him in the cave: What are you doing here, Elijah?

He says the thing that is true: I alone am left, and they seek my life.

The word says: Go out and stand on the mountain before YHWH.

YHWH passes by. A great wind tears the mountains and breaks the rocks — YHWH is not in the wind. An earthquake — YHWH is not in the earthquake. Fire — YHWH is not in the fire. After the fire: a still small voice, or as the Hebrew has it, a sound of fine silence, qol demamah daqah, a sound that is almost the opposite of sound.

Elijah wraps his face in his mantle and stands at the mouth of the cave. The voice asks again: What are you doing here, Elijah? He gives the same answer. The voice gives him three assignments and tells him: there are seven thousand in Israel whose knees have not bowed to Baal. He is not alone. He never was.

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The fire on the altar proves what power can prove: that YHWH acts in the physical world, that the drought can end when the drought’s lord commands, that the contest between two storm-god theologies has a winner. The still small voice at Horeb proves what power cannot prove: that the God who answers by fire is present in the silence after fire, and that the prophet who outran a chariot is the same man who lay under a broom tree and asked to die.

The Baal Cycle tablets found at Ras Shamra in 1929 put the Carmel confrontation in its full context. Baal is the god of the storm and the rain. The three-year drought Elijah announces is a precise parody of Baal’s absence in the underworld — YHWH is not just defeating Baal’s prophets, he is claiming dominion over Baal’s own domain, the weather of Canaan, the rain that the Canaanite tradition said could only come from the god on Mount Zaphon. The contest is between two accounts of the same meteorological reality, and Elijah’s mockery is a theologian’s argument dressed as a taunt.

The still small voice is the answer to the Baal Cycle that no Ugaritic tablet anticipated. Baal, when his power is demonstrated, opens windows in his palace and sends lightning and thunder across the valleys. YHWH, having demonstrated his power on Carmel in the most spectacular possible terms, shows up in a cave as almost-silence. The god who makes the rain come does not live in the storm. He speaks from the other side of it.

The angel said: the journey is too great for you. This is not a consolation. It is a theology. The journey is too great for everyone. That is the condition of the road, and the road still has to be walked.