The Ravens and the Widow

The kings of the north went from bad to worse, and the worst of the lot was a king called Ahab. He married a princess from Sidon named Jezebel, and she brought her god Baal with her, and Ahab built Baal a temple in his capital city and bowed down to it himself. Jezebel set out to finish the job. She hunted down the prophets of the Lord and killed them, until people who wanted to serve God were hiding in caves — and there was one steward in Ahab’s own palace, a man named Obadiah, who quietly hid a hundred of them, fifty in one cave and fifty in another, and carried them bread and water himself. And into the middle of all that walked a man from a village nobody had heard of, out in the hill country east of the Jordan. His name was Elijah. He stood in front of Ahab in the throne room and said this, and then turned round and walked out: “As the Lord lives, the God of Israel, before whom I stand — there will be no dew and no rain in these years, except by my word.” Baal, you see, was supposed to be the god who brought the rain. So Elijah shut the sky, and the argument between the God of Israel and Baal was going to be settled out where everybody could watch it: in the fields.

And the word of the Lord came to Elijah: “Go away from here, eastward, and hide by the brook Cherith, near the Jordan. You will drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” So Elijah went and lived by a little stream in a gully in the wilderness. And every morning the ravens came with bread and meat in their beaks, and every evening they came again; and he drank out of the brook. Ravens — birds that steal food, not birds that bring it. And then, because the rain had stopped everywhere, the brook dried up too.

And God said to Elijah, “Get up and go to Zarephath, in the country of Sidon, and stay there. Look — I have commanded a widow woman there to feed you.” Sidon was Jezebel’s own country. That was where God sent him: out of Israel altogether, into Baal’s back yard, to be fed by a woman with nothing. He came to the town gate, and there was a widow out gathering sticks. And he called to her, “Bring me a little water in a cup, please.” And as she went to get it, he called after her, “And a piece of bread in your hand, please.” And she stopped and turned round and told him the truth: “As the Lord your God lives, I have not got any bread. I have a handful of flour in a jar and a drop of oil in a jug. And here I am, picking up two sticks, so that I can go in and cook it for my son and me — and then we shall eat it, and die.” That was the whole of it. One last little meal for a mother and her boy. And Elijah said, “Do not be afraid. Go and do just as you said — but make a little cake for me first, and bring it out to me, and then make some for yourself and your son. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: the jar of flour will not run out, and the jug of oil will not run dry, until the day the Lord sends rain on the ground.” It was an enormous thing to ask. And she did it. And she and her son and Elijah ate for a long time out of that jar. Every day there was flour in it. Every day there was oil in the jug. Never much — just enough — but it never once ran out, all through the famine, exactly as God had said.

And then the worst thing happened. The woman’s son fell ill, and got worse, and stopped breathing, and died. And she turned on Elijah, the way people do when they are broken: “What have you got against me, man of God? Did you come here to remind God of everything I have done wrong, and to kill my son?” And Elijah said, “Give me your son.” And he took the boy out of her arms and carried him up the stairs to the little room on the roof where he slept, and laid him on his own bed. And he cried out to God — and he did not say anything polite. He said, “Lord — this widow I am staying with — have you brought harm on her, too, by letting her son die?” And he stretched himself over the child three times and prayed, “Lord my God, let this boy’s life come back into him.” And the Lord heard Elijah. And the boy cried out — and he was alive. And Elijah carried him down the stairs and put him into his mother’s arms and said, “Look. Your son is alive.” And the woman said, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.”