Elijah must stop all this I-alone-am-left nonsense. He is instructed to go back down the mountain and make contact with some of the seven thousand of the Lord’s loyal servants. The prophet is warned about the dangers of isolation and self-pity. Elijah’s own revelation from the Lord, however, takes place in a still small voice. He climbs the mountain to the place where Moses met the Lord, amid earthquake, fire, and whirlwind. Strengthened by these modest meals, he travels another 40 days-reminiscent of Moses’ forty years in the wilderness-until he comes to Mount Horeb (Sinai), where the Lord entered into covenant with Israel. Twice an angel from the Lord feeds him with bread and water in the wilderness. Totally distressed, he falls asleep from the heat and great fatigue. In this respect Elijah resembles two earlier discouraged travelers in the desert, Moses and David.

He proceeds another day into the Judean desert and sits under a tree, feeling very discouraged. Here he leaves his servant, for Elijah has in mind to go much further south. Even for northerners this city is a popular site of pilgrimage (cf. As he flees southward, he comes to Beersheba, at the southern boundary of Judah. Elijah is also very tired from the exertions of the previous day, to say nothing of the ordeals associated with the long drought and famine. He flees the vengeance and wrath of Jezebel, whose prophets he slew after the episode on Mount Carmel. Then, when the time comes for Elijah to leave this life, he repeats Moses’ act of parting the waters and then disappears east of the Jordan, where Moses disappeared (2 Kings 2:8–18).Īs the present chapter begins, Elijah is afraid, this same Elijah who acted so fearlessly in the preceding story. Like Moses too, Elijah covers his face in response to his mountaintop experience (19:9–13). Elijah receives his prophecies on the very mountain where Moses received the Law.

For now, let us limit our consideration to Elijah, who resembles Moses in several particulars of his story: a miraculous provision of meat and bread in the wilderness (1 Kings 17:4–7), a fast of forty days while journeying through the desert on the strength of miraculously provided bread and water (19:4–8), and, in the present chapter, an encounter with the Lord on Mount Horeb, complete with all the sounds and sights associated with Moses’ own experience in that place. In due course we shall explore the ways in which Elisha (introduced in the present chapter) resembles Moses. In fact, the expression “the Law and the Prophets” is sometimes employed to mean simply the whole Hebrew Bible. This perspective is likewise part of the Bible’s more general care to regard the prophetic corpus as the proper sequence to the Law. Indeed, emphasizing that resemblance pertained very much to the author’s purpose, for he had in mind to portray them both as Moses’ latter-day successors, each providing some measure of fulfillment to Moses’ own prophecy that he would be succeeded by a prophet like himself (Deuteronomy 18:15–18). First Kings 19: In the Books of Kings it is not difficult to perceive the ways in which the prophets Elijah and Elisha resemble the great Moses.

Daily reflections