1 Kings 19.4-5α:
| 19.4והוא הלך במדבר | Eliyahuα himself walks into the desert |
|---|---|
| דרך יום | a day’s journey. |
| [ויבא וישב תחת רתם אחת [אחד | He goes and sits beneath a lone juniper.β |
| וישאל את נפשו למות | He asks his lifeγ to die. |
| ויאמר רב עתה יהוה | He says, “I’ve lived a long time, Yahweh; |
| קח נפשי | take my life,γ |
| כי לא טוב אנכי | because I’m no good, |
| מאבתי׃ | just like my ancestors.” |
| 19.5αוישכב ויישן | He lies down and sleeps |
| תחת רתם אחד | beneath the lone juniper. |
Having left his servant boy in Beersheba, Elijah now wandered east, likely into the desert around the Dead Sea, to die. Some commentators figure he’s headed west towards the Sinai Peninsula—because they figure he’s headed in the general direction of Mt. Horeb, which is also known as Mt. Sinai. Except that Horeb isn’t in the Sinai Peninsula. Horeb is on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Remember, the Hebrews had to cross the Red Sea (Hebrew ים סוף, Sea of Reeds, which is what Middle Easterners call the Red Sea because of the reeds growing on its north coast) in order to get there.
The reason people think Horeb is in the Sinai is because the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery misidentified their mountain as Mt. Sinai in the third century, and geographers—including the folks who make the maps for most bibles—went along with it ever since. This inaccuracy is the reason why your bible’s maps are all confused as to the Hebrews’ route through the desert, and the reasons why scores of Israeli archaeologists haven’t find jack squat in that peninsula whenever they’ve looked for signs of Moses’s encampment. If people would just read their bibles instead of falling for what’s essentially a 1600-year-old tourism scam, maybe they’d realize they’re looking on the wrong bloody continent. That’s not Sinai; that’s Goshen.
Geography lesson—and rant—aside, I’m gonna go along with the commentators and assume that Elijah was in the general direction of Horeb—which is east, not west—when he sat down under a juniper tree and told God, “I’ve lived long enough; you can kill me now.”
Regardless of how much he said he wanted to die, he still sat under a tree. He wasn’t willing for the heat or the sun to kill him. It makes me wonder just how much he really wanted to die. He was probably just venting or grumbling at God. People do that, especially people in the bible.
The reason Elijah wanted to die was that he was going from one extreme to the opposite extreme. After the Karmel contest, the Israelis had likely been treating him as if he was a big deal—the badass prophet who dared to stand up to Ahab and Ba’al, and stop the rain, and call down God’s fire, and slaughter 450 prophets, and now ran in front of Ahab’s chariot. He was hot stuff. He was on fire. Problem is, he likely began to believe it. When you start to think too much of yourself, getting humbled doesn’t always bring you back to reality. Frequently it makes you think too little of yourself. We humans are creatures of extremes; either we’re the greatest prophets ever, or we’re the worst sinners ever. We can’t just be average. (After all, who wants to be average?)
Both these extremes indicate that we’ve gone astray. Elijah in particular. A prophet who was still in touch with God wouldn’t have fled in the face of Jezebel’s threat; he’d have stuck around and dealt with her. Instead, Elijah went to the far side of Judah. Then, once he realized that wasn’t the right response to the circumstances, he decided he wasn’t fit to live, and punished himself by going into the desert.
In neither situation do we actually see Elijah repent, turn to God, accept His grace and forgiveness, and go back to being His prophet. We instead see him trying to do things his own way. We see him being lost—as lost as we become when we don’t surrender to God either.
α. Elijah. Lit. “he.”
β. Or “Spanish broom tree.”
γ. Or “soul.”
