1 Kings 17.17-18:
| 17.17 ויהי אחר הדברים האלה | These things take place later:α |
|---|---|
| חלה בן האשה | the woman’s son is ill— |
| בעלת הבית | the woman who is master of the house. |
| ויהי חליו חזק מאד | The illness becomes very severe, |
| עד אשר לא נותרה בו נשמה׃ | until no lifeβ remains in him. |
| 17.18 ותאמר אל אליהו | She says to Eliyahu, |
| מה לי ולך איש האלהים | “What are you to me,γ God-follower?δ |
| באת אלי להזכיר את עוני | You come to me to remind me of my sin. |
| ולהמית את בני׃ | You kill my son!” |
Elijah is living in Tsarfatha, Sidon with the widow with the miraculous pail of flour and dish of oil. Lest that creep you out because single people shouldn’t live together, he’s doing the gentlemanly thing and living upstairs while she lives downstairs. “Upstairs” doesn’t mean an upstairs room; it means Elijah is living on the roof. In the summer, before air conditioning was invented, Middle Easterners frequently slept on the roof. Of course, since the drought lasted quite a few years, we don’t know what time of year it was when this story took place. Could be summer. Could be winter. It’s okay; Elijah’s a tough guy.
Living on a diet of bread and water isn’t the most nutritious way to live, and being cooped up in the much closer environment of the dark interior of a Phoenician home isn’t healthy either. The widow’s son—we don’t know how old he is, but he’s obviously younger than 13, and he’s light enough for Elijah to carry upstairs—isn’t strong enough to overcome a sickness, and he dies. “No נשמה remains in him,” the historian writes—no puff of wind, no small flicker of life. The ancient Hebrews equated breathing with life; when you stopped breathing, you were dead. The boy couldn’t breathe, so he was dead.
If you think baking bread when you’re out of ingredients is a big test of faith, try living with a Yahwist prophet—whom you know hears from God—and despite this, your kid dies. You’d think feeding His prophet would get you some kind of special favor. But here, it doesn’t. “What good are you?” she essentially tells Elijah, but she thinks she already has the answer to that: “You come to remind me of my sin.”
Like other Phoenicians, she had probably spent her life worshipping Ba’al, which of course hasn’t done her any good—she’s a poor deprived widow, a single parent with no means of support, and was on the verge of death by starvation until Elijah showed up. Now that she knew that Yahweh was real—heck, she had it demonstrated for her daily, whenever she scooped flour from the pail—she may have figured He was going to extract some vengeance for worshipping the wrong god.
But that’s not how God works. That’s how other gods work. God doesn’t take the repentant and exact a little revenge from them. God forgives. She likely didn’t know this; the only gods she knew were petty and cruel and selfish. She overlaid some of this idea on God and expected Him to behave the same way.
We do this too, in lesser ways—we assume that God is gonna behave like a human being. Our parents, perhaps. When we sin, we think He’s gonna be mad at us and give us a whipping. But that’s not who God is. Learn who God is. Don’t assume anything about Him; read your bible and learn what He’s really like.
Happy ending next time.
α. Lit. “It became, after, these words.”
β. Or “soul,” or “breath of life.”
γ. Lit. “Why to me and to you?” I translate it this way ’cause it’s similar to how it’s put in the New Testament. (Mk 1.24)
δ. Lit. “man of God.” I translate it “God-follower” because she’s referring to his religion. Technically, Elijah is a Yahwist, but that’s not a familiar term—and she calls him a man of God, not a man of Yahweh—and “Jew” is anachronistic. So “God-follower” is the best I can come up with.
