Elijah, Ahab and Naboth

Ahab, king of Israel, lived in Samaria and held the government for twenty-two years. He made no change from the conduct of the kings who were before him, except in what he invented for the worse and in his grossest wickedness. He imitated them in their wicked ways and in their offenses against God, and above all he imitated the lawbreaking of Jeroboam: he worshiped the heifers Jeroboam had made, and he contrived other absurd objects of worship besides those heifers. He also married Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians and Sidonians, and from her he learned to worship her own gods. This woman was energetic and bold, and she fell into such impurity and madness that she built a temple to the god of the Tyrians, whom they call Baal, and planted a grove of all sorts of trees; she also appointed priests and false prophets for this god. The king himself had many such men around him, and so he outdid all who had gone before him in madness and wickedness. [a]

Now a prophet of the great God, from the city of Tishbe in the land of Gilead, came to Ahab and told him that God foretold he would send neither rain nor dew on the country in those years except when the prophet himself should appear. When he had confirmed this with an oath, he went away into the southern parts and lived by a brook, from which he had water to drink; as for food, ravens brought it to him every day. But when that stream dried up for lack of rain, he came to Zarephath, a city not far from Sidon and Tyre, for it lay between them. He did this at God’s command, for he would find a widow there who would provide him with food. When he was not far from the gate, he saw a woman working with her own hands, gathering sticks, and God told him that this was the woman who was to feed him. So he came and greeted her and asked her to bring him some water to drink. As she was going to do so, he called to her and asked her to bring him a loaf of bread as well. At this she swore that she had nothing at home but one handful of flour and a little oil, and that she was going to gather some sticks so that she could knead it and make bread for herself and her son; after that, she said, they must die and waste away in the famine, for they had nothing left for themselves. Then he said, “Go on with good courage and hope for better things. First of all make me a little cake and bring it to me, for I tell you beforehand that this jar of flour and this jug of oil will not fail until God sends rain.” When the prophet had said this, she went home and did as he had told her. She had part of it herself and gave the rest to her son and to the prophet as well; and none of it ran short until the drought ended. [b]

Menander mentions this drought in his account of the acts of Ethbaal, king of the Tyrians, where he says: “Under him there was a lack of rain from the month of Hyperberetaeus until the month of Hyperberetaeus of the following year; but when he made supplication, there came great thunder. This Ethbaal built the city of Botrys in Phoenicia and the city of Auza in Libya.” By these words he meant the lack of rain in the days of Ahab, for it was at that time that Ethbaal reigned over the Tyrians, as Menander tells us.

The woman we spoke of, who fed the prophet, had a son who fell ill until he breathed his last and seemed to be dead. She came to the prophet weeping and beating her breast with her hands, crying out whatever her grief prompted, and complained to him that he had come to her to reproach her for her sins, and that this was why her son was dead. But he told her to take heart and to hand her son over to him, for he would give him back to her alive. When she had handed her son over, he carried him into an upper room where he himself lodged, laid him down on the bed, and cried out to God. He said that God had not done well in repaying the woman who had taken him in and fed him by taking away her son, and he prayed that God would send the child’s soul back into him and bring him to life again. God took pity on the mother and was willing to grant the prophet’s wish, so that he would not seem to have come to her to do her harm; and the child, beyond all expectation, came back to life. Then the mother thanked the prophet and said that she was now fully convinced that God spoke with him.

After a little while Elijah came to King Ahab, by God’s will, to tell him that rain was coming. The famine had seized the whole country, and there was a great lack of what was needed to live on. Not only did people go without, but the earth itself did not produce enough of what the horses and the other animals needed to feed on, because of the drought. So the king called for Obadiah, who was in charge of his estates, and told him that he wanted him to go to the springs and the brooks, so that if any grass could be found there for the animals, they might cut it and keep it for them. And since he had sent men over the whole inhabited world to find the prophet Elijah, and they could not find him, he told Obadiah to go with him. So it was decided that they would make a circuit and divide the roads between them: Obadiah took one road and the king another. Now at the time when Queen Jezebel was killing the prophets, this Obadiah had hidden a hundred prophets in the caves below Garis and fed them on nothing but bread and water. When Obadiah was alone and away from the king, the prophet Elijah met him. Obadiah asked him who he was, and when he learned it from him, he bowed down to the ground before him. Elijah then told him to go to the king and tell him that he was here, ready to meet him. But Obadiah replied, “What wrong have I done you, that you send me to a man who is seeking to kill you and has searched the whole earth for you?” Did Elijah not know, he asked, that the king had left no place where he had not sent men to bring him back, so that if they caught him they could have him put to death? For he told him he was afraid that God would appear to Elijah again and he would go away to some other place; and that when the king sent him for Elijah and he missed him and could not find him anywhere on earth, he would be put to death. So he begged him to have a care for his safety, and told him how diligently he had provided for those of Elijah’s own calling: he had saved a hundred prophets when Jezebel killed the rest, kept them hidden, and fed them himself. But Elijah told him to fear nothing and go to the king, and he assured him on oath that he would certainly show himself to Ahab that very day. [d]

When Obadiah had told the king that Elijah was there, Ahab met him and asked him angrily whether he was the man who was afflicting the Hebrew people and was the cause of the drought they were suffering. Elijah, without any flattery, said that it was Ahab himself, he and his house, who had brought such grievous troubles on them, by bringing foreign gods into their country and worshiping them, and by abandoning their own God, who was the only true God, and having no regard for him at all. However, he told him to go and gather all the people to him at Mount Carmel, with his own prophets and those of his wife—he told him how many of them there were—and also the prophets of the groves, about four hundred in number. When all the men Ahab sent for had hurried to that mountain, the prophet Elijah stood in the middle of them and said, “How long will you live like this, uncertain in mind and opinion?” He urged them, if they held their own country’s God to be the true and only God, to follow him and his commandments; but if they thought him nothing, and held the foreign gods in esteem and believed they ought to worship them, his advice was that they should follow those. When the people made no answer, Elijah proposed a test of the power of the foreign gods and of their own God. He, who was God’s only prophet, while they had four hundred, would take an ox, kill it as a sacrifice, lay it on wood, and kindle no fire; they should do the same and call on their own gods to set the wood alight; for if that were done, they would learn from it the nature of the true God. This proposal pleased the people. [f]

So Elijah told the prophets to choose an ox first, kill it, and call on their gods. But when no effect followed the prayer and invocation of the prophets over their sacrifice, Elijah mocked them and told them to call on their gods with a loud voice, for they might be away on a journey, or asleep. These prophets did so from morning till noon and cut themselves with swords and lances, according to the customs of their country. When Elijah was about to offer his sacrifice, he told the prophets to go away but told the people to come near and watch what he did, so that he could not secretly hide fire among the wood. When the people had come near, he took twelve stones, one for each tribe of the Hebrew people, built an altar with them, and dug a very deep trench. When he had laid the wood on the altar and the pieces of the sacrifice on the wood, he ordered them to fill four jars with water from the spring and pour it on the altar, until it ran over and the whole trench was filled with water from a spring that welled up. When he had done this, he began to pray to God and to call on him to show his power to a people who had already been in error a long time. At these words fire suddenly came down from heaven in the sight of the people, fell on the altar and consumed the sacrifice, until even the water was set on fire and the place became dry.

When the Israelites saw this, they fell on the ground and worshiped the one God, and called him the great and only true God; but the others they called mere names, invented by the evil and foolish opinions of men. So they seized their prophets and, at Elijah’s command, killed them. Elijah also told the king to go to his meal without further worry, for in a little while he would see God send them rain. So Ahab went away. But Elijah went up to the highest top of Mount Carmel, sat down on the ground, rested his head on his knees, and told his servant to go up to a certain lookout and watch toward the sea, and when he saw a cloud rising anywhere, to tell him; for until then the sky had been clear. The servant went up many times and said he saw nothing; but the seventh time he went up, he said he saw a small black thing in the sky no bigger than a man’s foot. When Elijah heard this, he sent to Ahab and asked him to go away to the city before the rain came down. So Ahab came to the city of Jezreel. In a little while the sky was all darkened and covered with clouds, a violent windstorm came on the land, and with it heavy rain. And the prophet, seized by a divine frenzy, ran alongside the king’s chariot all the way to the city of Jezreel. [h]

When Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, learned what signs Elijah had done and how he had killed her prophets, she was angry and sent messengers to him, and through them she threatened to kill him as he had destroyed her prophets. At this Elijah was frightened and fled to the city called Beersheba, which lies at the farthest edge of the country belonging to the tribe of Judah, toward the land of Edom. There he left his servant and went away into the desert. He prayed that he might die, for he was no better than his fathers, and he need not be very eager to live when they were dead. He lay down and slept under a tree, and when someone woke him and he got up, he found food and water set beside him. When he had eaten and recovered his strength with that food, he came to the mountain called Sinai, where Moses is said to have received his laws from God. Finding a hollow cave there, he went into it and stayed living in it. Then a voice came to him, he did not know from where, and asked him why he had come there and left the city. He said that because he had killed the prophets of the foreign gods and had persuaded the people that He Who Is, whom they had worshiped from the beginning, alone was God, the king’s wife was seeking him to punish him for it. Then he heard another voice telling him to come out the next day into the open air, and he would learn there what he was to do. So he came out of the cave the next day, and he both heard an earthquake and saw the bright blaze of a fire. After a silence, a divine voice urged him not to be troubled by his circumstances, for none of his enemies would have power over him. The voice also commanded him to return home and to appoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over their own people, Hazael of Damascus over the Syrians, and Elisha of the city of Abel to be prophet in his place; and of the impious people, some would be killed by Hazael and others by Jehu. So Elijah, on hearing this charge, returned to the land of the Hebrews. He found Elisha son of Shaphat plowing, with some others with him driving twelve yoke of oxen. He came to him and threw his own cloak over him, and at once Elisha began to prophesy; he left his oxen and followed Elijah. When he asked leave to say goodbye to his parents, Elijah let him do so, and when he had taken leave of them, he followed him and became Elijah’s disciple and servant all the days of his life. That completes my account of the affairs in which this prophet was concerned. [i]

There was a man named Naboth, of the city of Jezreel, who had a field next to the king’s. The king tried to persuade him to sell him that field, which lay so near his own lands, at whatever price he liked, so that he could join them together and make them one farm; and if he would not take money for it, he gave him leave to choose any of his other fields in its place. But Naboth said he would not do so, but would keep possession of that land of his own, which he had inherited from his father. At this the king was grieved, as if he had been wronged, because he could not get another man’s property, and he would neither bathe nor take any food. When Jezebel asked him what was troubling him, and why he would neither bathe nor eat dinner or supper, he told her of Naboth’s perversity: how, though he had used considerate words to him, words beneath his royal authority, he had been insulted and had not gotten what he wanted. But she persuaded him not to be downcast at this mishap, but to leave off his grief and go back to the usual care of his body, for she would see to it that Naboth was punished. She immediately sent letters in Ahab’s name to the rulers of the Israelites, ordering them to hold a fast and call an assembly, to set Naboth at its head, since he was of a distinguished family, and to have three bold men ready to testify that he had blasphemed God and the king, and then to stone him and kill him that way. So Naboth, testified against as the queen had written, as having blasphemed God and Ahab, was stoned by the people and died. When Jezebel heard this, she went in to the king and told him to take Naboth’s vineyard as his inheritance at no cost. Ahab was glad at what had been done and got up at once from the bed where he was lying to go and see Naboth’s vineyard. But God was greatly angered at it and sent the prophet Elijah to Naboth’s field to meet Ahab and question him about what had been done: he had killed the rightful owner of the field and unjustly taken it as his own inheritance. As soon as Elijah came to him, the king said that he might do with him whatever he pleased, for he thought it a disgrace to be caught like this in his sin. Elijah said that in the very place where Naboth’s dead body had been eaten by dogs, both his own blood and his wife’s would be shed, and that all his family would perish, because he had been so insolently wicked and had killed a citizen unjustly and against the laws of his country. At this Ahab began to be sorry for what he had done and to repent of it. He put on sackcloth, went barefoot, and would not touch any food; he also confessed his sins, and in this way tried to appease God. But God told the prophet that while Ahab lived he would postpone the punishment of his family, because he had repented of the insolent crimes he had committed, but that he would still carry out his threat under Ahab’s son. The prophet delivered this message to the king. [j]