1 Kings 18.16-20:
| 18.16 וילך עבדיהו לקראת אחאב | Ovadyahuα walks to meet Achavβ |
|---|---|
| ויגד לו | and explains to him. |
| וילך אחאב לקראת אליהו׃ | Achav walks to meet Eliyahu.γ |
| 18.17 ויהי כראות אחאב את אליהו | It is as soon as Achav sees Eliyahu |
| ויאמר אחאב אליו | Achav says to him, |
| האתה זה עכר ישראל׃ | “Is that you? You stir Israel up.” |
| 18.18 ויאמר לא עכרתי את ישראל | He said, “I don’t stir Israel up; |
| כי אם אתה ובית אביך | that’sδ you and your father’s house. |
| בעזבכם את מצות יהוה | by loosening Yahweh’s covenant. |
| ותלך אחרי הבעלים׃ | You kiss Ba’al’s butt.ε |
| 18.19 ועתה שלח קבץ אלי | Now: Send messengers to gather to me, |
| את כל ישראל אל הר הכרמל | from all Israel, to Karmel hill— |
| ואת נביאי הבעל ארבע מאות וחמשים | and to 450 of Ba’al’s prophets, |
| ונביאי האשרה ארבע מאות | Four hundred of his asherah’s prophets |
| אכלי שלחן איזבל׃ | eat at ’Izavel’s table.” |
| 18.20 וישלח אחאב בכל בני ישראל | Achav sends to every son of Israel. |
| ויקבץ את הנביאים אל הר הכרמל׃ | He gathers the prophets to Karmel hill. |
Look at this from Ahab’s perspective. Some renegade prophet shows up, announces a drought, then vanishes for three years while the Jordan and its outlets run dry. You’re sending messengers to every country around trying to find the guy; you’re letting your wife kill every other prophet of his God in order to get his—or his God’s—attention, and generally to show the public that his God, drought or not, isn’t as strong as yours. You’ve managed to terrorize your butler into thinking that he’s dead meat if he knows something but won’t tell. And then he shows up, just as you’re desperately trying to find grass before you’re forced to kill the rest of your dehydrating pack animals.
What do you do in this circumstance? You cut his freaking head off, take it back to Samaria, and publicly display it on a pole. What else?
Yet somehow Elijah manages to shut Ahab up and get him to bring 850 prophets to Karmel. Although it could just be 450 prophets, ’cause the 400 prophets of Ba’al’s asherah, or wife, that Elijah refers to might be considered Ba’al’s prophets as well, and he might have mentioned their location in order to point out to Ahab that it wouldn’t be as hard to drum up 450 prophets as he might think. Elijah wants them all at Karmel, a hill smack dab in the middle of northern Israel—conveniently centrally located for the Israelis to get to, but not so convenient for the Ba’alite prophets who were nice and comfortable in Samaria, who might not care to make a day trip to hear a solitary prophet of Yahweh call them names.
Ahab even has a snide remark about how Elijah is disrupting Israel, yet Elijah shuts him up and even calls him a brown-nose. And Ahab lets him do it. What?
Well, to understand some of this, you have to remember that Elijah turned the rain off. Not God. (Jm 5.17) God went along with it, and it absolutely couldn’t have happened without His involvement, but this is all Elijah’s doing. And Ba’al is supposed to be the fertility god. He’s supposed to be the god what decides when it rain and when it doesn’t. Yet he hadn’t, and wouldn’t. Elijah has, effectively, just demonstrated that he alone—and, for that matter, the God he worked for—is more powerful than Ba’al.
That’s pretty awe-inspiring on its own, but that kind of power doesn’t necessarily stop you from getting your head struck off by an enraged king. So obviously Elijah had to have a degree of personal charisma that got people to believe him and follow his orders. He was able to convince the starvation-fearing Sidonian widow to feed him, and the Ahab-fearing Obadiah to announce him, and now the Ba’al-fearing Ahab to gather prophets at Karmel. Maybe it’s Spirit-empowered charisma, although I sometimes wonder how much of a person’s natural charisma isn’t Spirit-empowered already. In any event, it works on Ahab.
I seriously doubt, as some have preached, that Ahab felt so secure in his position and his god that he anticipated what Elijah was up to and felt up to the challenge. Ahab didn’t know what Elijah was up to. We know the end of the story—that there’s a contest, Ba’al loses, and its prophets get killed. All Ahab knows right now is the guy who stopped the rain wants to meet with Ba’al’s prophets on a hill in the middle of Israel.
So... what to get from this story. Well, obviously Elijah comes across as pretty fearless when it comes to standing up to Ahab. When we have to speak the truth to people in positions of authority, we need to likewise concentrate on telling the truth rather than fearing for our jobs, lives, status, and so forth. Our possessions must come a distant second to the truth. Otherwise it’s as if we’ve stolen them. (’Cause if our ownership depends on fudging the truth or lying, what real difference does that make?)
In Elijah’s case, he doesn’t seem to really have any possessions, so he’s not risking much. Maybe the rest of us would do well to give up, or at least give up any attachment to, whatever things we own that might likewise get in the way.
Some people, of course, can’t handle the truth. Sometimes they react with violent denial, as Ahab does in another story. Sometimes the truth overwhelms them and gets them to respond, as Ahab does in this story. People aren’t always predictable when it comes to truth. Best to just side with the truth.
α. Obadiah.
β. Ahab.
γ. Elijah.
δ. Lit. “but.”
ε. Lit. “You walk with the backsides of the Ba’als.”
