1 Kings 18.30-37:
| 18.30 ויאמר אליהו לכל העם | Eliyahuα says to all the people, |
|---|---|
| גשו אלי | “Come near me.” |
| ויגשו כל העם אליו | The people come near him. |
| וירפא את מזבח יהוה ההרוס׃ | He restores Yahweh’s broken-down altar. |
| 18.31 ויקח אליהו שתים עשרה אבנים | Eliyahu takes twelveβ rocks, |
| כמספר שבטי בני יעקב | like the number of tribes of Ya’aqov’sγ sons |
| אשר היה דבר יהוה אליו | —Ya’aqov, to whom Yahweh’s word comes, |
| לאמר ישראל יהיה שמך׃ | saying, “Isra’elδ is your name.” |
| 18.32 ויבנה את האבנים | He built, with the rocks, |
| מזבח בשם יהוה | an altar to Yahweh’s name. |
| ויעש תעלה | He makes a trench big enough |
| כבית סאתים זרע | to house se‘asε of seed, |
| סביב למזבח׃ | a circle around the altar. |
| 18.33 ויערך את העצים | He arranges the sticks. |
| וינתח את הפר | He dismembers the calf. |
| וישם על העצים׃ | He puts it on the sticks. |
| 18.34 ויאמר מלאו | He says to them, |
| מלאו ארבעה כדים מים | “Fill four pails with water. |
| ויצקו על העלה | Pour them out on the sacrifice |
| ועל העצים | and on the sticks.”ζ |
| ויאמר שנו | He says, “Do it again.” |
| וישנו | They do it again. |
| ויאמר שלשו | He says, “Third time.” |
| וישלשו׃ | They do it a third time. |
| 18.35 וילכו המים סביב למזבח | The water walks around the altar |
| וגם את התעלה מלא מים׃ | and the trench is also water-filled. |
| 18.36 ויהי בעלות המנחה | It becomes time for the offering sacrifice. |
| ויגש אליהו הנביא | Eliyahu the prophet comes near. |
| ויאמר יהוה אלהי אברהם | He says, “Yahweh, God of Avraham,η |
| יצחק וישראל | and Yitskhaqθ, and Isra’el,δ |
| היום יודע | make Yourself known today, |
| כי אתה אלהים בישראל | for You are God in Isra’el. |
| ואני עבדך | I am Your slave. |
| ובדבריך [ובדברך] עשיתי את כל הדברים האלה׃ | By Your word, I do all these words. |
| 18.37 ענני יהוה ענני | See me, Yahweh, see me. |
| וידעו העם הזה כי אתה יהוה האלהים | These people know that You are Yahweh the God, |
| ואתה הסבת את לבם אחרנית׃ | and You turn the hearts around backwards.” |
You already know how it ends, so I’m not building up any suspense by stopping the story here to comment.
While Ba’al’s prophets are cutting themselves until they get blood all over them, from about midday to the evening sacrifice, Elijah leaves off making fun of them and gets to work. Serious work. Presumably he has some assistants helping him—he told someone to get the water, and someone did—but he had to reconstruct an altar, butcher an animal, and dig a trench around the altar. In the afternoon. During a drought.
Karmel must’ve already had an altar ready—for Ba’al, since Ba’al’s prophets really didn’t have to put in any prep time like Elijah does—but there used to be an altar for Yahweh there, and Elijah had to rebuild it. The only requirement for altar construction is that it consist of a mound of dirt, or that it be made of unworked rocks, because chipped or carved rocks desecrated it. (Ex 20.24-25) In the process of wrecking Yahweh’s altar, the Ba’alists likely knew this and chipped away at it. So that meant getting twelve fresh rocks. And they had to be big, ’cause little rocks doesn’t make a very sizable altar. So that meant hauling them up Karmel. I call Karmel a hill rather than a mountain ’cause it’s only a thousand feet high, but taking twelve rocks up a thousand feet is still a heck of a job. Hopefully Elijah did that the night before.
On top of that, Elijah needed water—twelve pails full of water, which would be enough to soak the meat, the sticks, and fill the several-gallon trench around the altar. Since there’s a drought, the ground would suck up all the moisture, so they had to put a lot of water in the trenches. I don’t know how big the pails were, but it seems they were big enough. As for carting the water up Karmel, that might have also been done the night before.
But everything else—butchering the calf, setting up the altar, digging the trench—that was done that day, in the afternoon, in the hot sun, plus Elijah was known for wearing leather. Not easy work.
Then the prayer.
The way the prayer is usually depicted has a lot to do with how this contest is usually depicted. It’s assumed that because tend to be monotheists today, they would have the same tendency 2,800 years ago. Not so. The natural tendency of everyone is to be polytheistic—to worship lots of gods. The reason people tend to be monotheistic nowadays is because most of the religions they encounter are monotheistic, and most of them teach that there can’t be another god. Even Hinduism is, in a sense, monotheistic—since everything is part of God, there’s technically only one God. Outside the Wiccans and the neopagans, our culture really isn’t presented with the option of polytheism. So we never consider it.
That’s a big cultural shift from Elijah’s day, where monotheistic religions were rare. Most of them had one chief god (like Amun-Ra, Ba’al, Marduk, or Zeus), and rival gods or god-relatives. Most of these religions were perfectly fine with you worshipping more than one god. So the Israelis hadn’t abandoned God. They were still worshipping Him. But they were also worshipping Ba’al.
In a sense, they had abandoned God, since He had told them they weren’t to worship any god but Him. (Ex 20.3, Dt 5.7) But the Israelis didn’t see it that way. They saw themselves as being very tolerant, modern, and advanced—certainly more advanced than the Jewsκ in Jerusalem.
But you can see that there’s a big difference in tone when you realize it’s not a God is real/Ba’al isn’t story, as I pointed out before. It’s a God is powerful/Ba’al isn’t story. It’s a God alone/not God plus Ba‘al story. It’s a monotheism/not polytheism story.
Usually Elijah’s prayer is translated, “Let it be known this day that You are God in Israel,” as if the people are in some kind of doubt that Yahweh is still God. Elijah isn’t asking God to prove He still exists to a skeptical people. They always knew He existed; they were just busy whoring after Ba’al.
God likes to use adultery metaphors to describe idolatry. This is, in part, because pagan religions are so fond of ritual sex. It’s also because of the comparison between a legitimate relationship with God, based on love and voluntary submission; and an illegitimate relationship with an idol, based on lust and greed. It’s because, in adultery, both relationships exist simultaneously, and everything good in the legitimate relationship is being undermined and devalued by the warped nature of the illegitimate one. While the people always knew God was there, they were more enticed by this new, freaky religion of Ba’alism. They knew God was still there, and they’d turn back to Him once they got all the Ba’al out of their system. But that “get it out of your system” concept is crap. It’s just an excuse we use so we can indulge our vices. We pretend that vices don’t escalate—and they all do; some of them until they kill us.
What Elijah was doing was performing a big, dramatic, heavenly intervention. The drought reminded folks that God exists—and not just that, but that He, not Ba’al, controlled the weather. Since the drought immediately followed the proclamation of one of God’s prophets that the water was turning off, it was pretty clear that this was God’s doing. This contest was now trying to hammer the point home: Not only was God still mighty, but Ba’al wasn’t capable of doing anything. It was the complete and utter undermining of Ba‘al’s power, in front of the people, the king, despite the fervent rituals of 450 Ba’alite prophets, and despite an altar that was too soaking wet for anyone to light.
We nowadays get distracted all the time by idols, but none of them—not our community goodwill, our money, our connections, our credit ratings, our military, our health insurance, or anything is capable of doing what God can do. Pray that we never get to the point of an intervention.
α. Elijah.
β. Lit. “two [and] ten.”
γ. Jacob’s.
δ. Israel.
ε. A se‘a is about seven and a third liters, or almost two gallons. The word se‘a is also translated “measure” or “meter.” (Mk 4.24) Some bibles have this “two se‘as,” but it’s just plural.
ζ. In English translations, verse 33 includes this part of verse 34.
η. Abraham.
θ. Isaac.
ι. Lit. “Eye me, Yahweh, eye me.” Or “mark me.”
κ. By “Jews,” I mean either the ancient citizens of Judah, or the modern-day descendants of Jacob. Most translations use “Israelites” and “Judahites” for the people of northern and southern ancient Israel. I use the modern-day terms “Israelis” and “Jews.” These aren’t different people, you know. They just lived longer ago.
