The heart and kidneys were placed on the altar, along with all of the choice cuts of meat. Then the spokesman began to pray. With no memorized prayer available for such an occasion as calling down fire from heaven, he called for Baal to have mercy on the people who served him, to show to all Israel that Baal was God. Other prophets joined him, and soon all four hundred fifty prophets crowded in a cacophony of sound into the clearing and around the altar.
The people watched with easy acceptance, for all of them had seen sacrifices before, when voices rise as long fingers from the earth to point to the sky, when blood runs full over an altar to entice the life force of water from the skies to join the life force of living things to wet the earth, when the prophets or priests cry to the gods to accept the dead sacrifice as though it were the people themselves who laid on the altar to die for the gods.
But the heavens did not answer. The prayers droned on, now loud and demanding, now pitiful and begging. The prophets’ eyes soon were rimmed with the dark earth, which they threw in handfuls onto their hair, and the ground grew powdery under their constant pacing. The sun hung at midday. It glared down through white circles in the blue sky to draw upward the stench from spoiling meat. The prophets called to the silence through hoarse throats. When the silence did not answer, some leaped onto the altar itself. They lay across the meat and heart and kidneys and wood until one man was pushed off by another, while those who fell rolled with their blood-stained cloaks in the choking dust.
And still the sky was silent.
Elijah watched. Occasionally he laughed quietly but audibly to the people around him, who moved still farther away from this wild-haired man who dared defy the Baal, this unruly prophet under some exotic protection of Yahweh.
Finally, the prophet rose to his feet. Bare-armed in his tunic and standing on his mantle, he shouted at the men of Baal, “Cry louder, you prophets of Baal, for Baal is a god, is he not! Cry louder, for surely a god can hear!” He laughed derisively, a wild laugh that knifed its edges in horror through the crowd. “Perhaps he is thinking through some new invention for the people of Tyre, or talking over some new idea with Asherah. Perhaps you need to cry louder to draw him away from his work.”
Elijah walked along the edge of the clearing. As he passed the people who had managed to gain the favored vantage points, they moved back instinctively from him, catching their breath at the brazen blasphemy of his words.
“Cry louder,” he yelled toward the already screaming prophets. “Cry louder. Perhaps Baal is excreting and he cannot hear you for the strain.” He laughed as the prophets turned toward him in righteous, frustrated anger. “Cry louder,” he shouted, leaning toward their contorted faces. “Perhaps he has gone on a journey to Spain with Tyre’s new colony. You will have to cry louder for him to hear you from across the waters.” Elijah’s own laughter now was as loud as the wails of the men of Melkart. “Cry louder. Perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened.”
Elijah’s taunts, coupled with frustration of three hours of frenzied prayer, goaded the prophets to greater displays. Their voices rose, until not even Elijah’s loud laugh could be heard. As they screamed out their prayers, they began the whirling dervish dance of Baal. Knees bent, with thighs outstretched, crouching, they leaped high, whirling into the air. Disorganized, yet moving in a circle around the altar as though some force stirred them like heavy brew in a caldron, they danced. Some rocked in slow rhythm from one bent knee to the other, crouching on one leg at a time, while at the same time they flailed their arms fiercely and shrieked out their prayers. Some in the audience pressed fingers into ears to gain relief from the awesome cries that rose in a deafening mass above the four hundred fifty prophets. Others in the audience joined in the cries and prayers, raising their arms upward, shaking them in rhythm to the ecstatic chants until they were hypnotized.
Then one prophet leaped onto the altar and drew his knife, sharpened on two sides. He screamed, then drew the knife diagonally across his chest. A ribbon of blood instantly appeared and he shrieked in homage to Baal. Again he drew the knife against his flesh to mark an x, which quickly was obliterated in the red flow. Again he raised his arms and screamed allegiance to Baal. Then his knife arm moved more quickly. He drew it across his abdomen, and across his arms, and across his legs, shrieking rather in ecstasy than in pain as his blood flowed from the shallow cuts to redden the dark, dried blood of the sacrifice.
His devotion was infectious. Other prophets drew knives and leaped onto the altar to join their companion, until no room was left and the altar itself could not be seen for the press of bodies.
Many of the prophets were naked now, their mantles long since thrown aside and their tunics cut loose from their bodies by the frenzied handling of the knives. With sticks picked up from the altar, some of them beat themselves, swinging alternately across their shoulders to pound their slashed backs until the blood flowed even more freely, until the skin and rough clubs were red with the liquid of their lives.
Even more loudly they screamed, in volume that was beyond the power of normal men. For three more hours beyond noon, until the time of afternoon sacrifice, they screamed, until they fell to cover the sacred clearing in exhausted, bleeding, earth-caked heaps, until only five remained, who still opened their mouths that uttered only throaty hoarseness. The five moved around the altar still, their muscles refusing to obey the dancing command of their frozen minds, their throats cauterized by the screaming and chill air and dust, their legs shuffling where they should be leaping, their arms limp where they should be flailing.
Elijah left them and moved to the edge of the cliff. He gazed down on the latecomers and women and poorer classes who could not get to the slopes, who could only listen to the cries from high above and catch reports that were passed down from the more fortunate who could see the spectacle.
He turned to face the audience. All but a few sat in stony silence, their senses seared by the display, their minds unable to register the horrors any longer. They were mute. Heads lay bowed into knees. Backs were turned to the scene. Unseeing eyes stared at the altar. A few were drunk, blessedly drunk.
Elijah called to the stupored crowd. “Come,” he called. “Come closer to me.” Eyes looked his way, and heads shook loose from their hypnotic stares. “Come near. Come close to me,” the prophet repeated.
Ahab was the first to respond, followed by Obadiah. The king’s stoic look had melted into shocked disbelief, disbelief at the excesses of the Baal prophets. He was a military man, an administrator. He had seen less of the Baal religion than the common man, and what he had seen was tempered by the dignity of the court. He wondered about Jezebel.
The people followed their king and clustered close around Elijah. He looked at them for a moment. Then, without a word, he turned to Yahweh’s broken-down altar and selected a large undressed stone. Grunting under its weight, his muscles straining against the thin cloth of his tunic, he moved it to a level place near the cliff but still on the soft earth. He laid it flat and straight. Then he moved to another stone of equal size. Then to another. And another. Finally, he had arranged twelve stones side by side and end to end to make a low, flat altar. He looked at the crowd. Twelve tribes of Israel, divided now politically but never to be divided spiritually. They quickly caught the significance of the number.
The prophet called to Obadiah to fetch a digging tool. Elisha watched his mentor work hard at the menial task and wished he could help. But Elijah dug the trench himself, several inches deep into the soft earth, all the way around the improvised altar.
This task completed, as the people watched in rapt silence, Elijah gathered armloads of wood. This time he beckoned Elisha to help. Together, they arranged the wood on the altar. Then, on command from the prophet, Elisha brought forward the young bull he had tied to a tree. Elijah killed the bull, cut it into pieces in much the same way of the Baal prophets, and laid the proper pieces on the wood.
“Now,” he said to the audience, “fill four
large pots with water.” At his first spoken word in over an hour, several young men hastened to obey. They found the jars among the supplies of the Baal prophets and clambered down to a pool at the bottom of the cliff. In a matter of minutes they returned, sweating from the strain of carrying the jars up the steep ravine that led from the pool. Word had reached the throngs of people below, who now craned their necks toward the cliff even though they could see nothing of the activities on top.
The men looked at Elijah, waiting for his word. “Pour the water onto the sacrifice.”
They glanced at one another, not believing they had heard the command rightly. “Onto the sacrifice?” one asked.
“Onto the sacrifice,” Elijah answered quietly.
The men obeyed. In teams of two, the men lifted the large jars. The water splashed on the sacrificial meat and wood and ran down into the cracks between the altar stones. The next team followed, and the water ran onto the ground. Then the next team followed, and the next. The sodden meat lay red on the wood; and the wood, pink-tinged from the watered blood, lay dark on the wet altar. The soft dry ground below quickly soaked up the excess water. Elijah’s act was so extraordinary that no one thought to question the impropriety of pouring out precious water during the drought.
The eight young men stood by their four large jars. “Do it again,” Elijah ordered. Incredulous but obeying, the men hoisted their jars and worked their way to the pool. When they poured the water the second time onto the altar, the earth no longer could hold the wetness, and the water trickled on all sides into the ditches.
To the astonishment of the young men, Elijah ordered them a third time to fill the jars. Low, subdued conversation moved throughout the audience.
The men returned, sweating profusely now, their legs aching from the threefold climb, their shoulders and biceps burning from the weight of the threefold burden. They did not question Elijah this time, not even by so much as a glance, when he simply pointed to the altar. Each team in turn, they poured the water onto the meat and wood. It ran in quick streams down the altar and across the soaked ground into the surrounding ditches. The fourth jar filled the ditch to its brim.
It was done. Four jars, the number symbol for the world with its four winds and four corners. Three times emptied, the number symbol for the divine Yahweh. The message was clear to the people. Yahweh controls the earth.
Elijah motioned the men away and cautioned the crowd to move back, then he stood near the altar, his face upturned. His voice was loud but even, and the people below could hear the words from the prophet they could not see. “Yahweh Elohim,” he called, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Israel. Let it be revealed today, and known to all, that you are God, the only God, in Israel, and that I, Elijah, am your servant. Let all Israel know that the drought spoken by my mouth and all that happens here today is not my doing, but is done at your command and by your power.”
The people, the leaders of Israel, the great men of the nation, stood straight and silent as the prophet spoke.
“Hear me, O Yahweh,” he continued, his hairy arms outstretched, “hear me, that all these people, all the people of Israel, may know that you are the Lord God. Let them know that by this act you turn their hearts from Baal back to you.”
Elijah moved backward toward the cliff until he stood at its edge. He raised his arms upward. The people below could see him now, a lone figure small against the sky. The audience nearer him hardly breathed, so electric was the contrast between the lone, calm prophet and the frenzied Baal multitude.
The sun was over the Great Sea to the west. Without a trace of cloud, the clear sky was a blue expanse that stretched as far as the eye could see. The people followed Elijah’s gaze upward. All nature was silent, without a breeze to rustle a leaf. Then it happened. Lightning streaked from the cloudless blue to touch the altar. The thunderclap was instantaneous and awesome, the thundering voice of Yahweh in answer to the prophet’s prayer. The whole area exploded into flames. A blue fire rose in a roar from the wood and meat and altar, as if sucked upward into an invisible chimney. Electricity crackled like fire among the trenches, and on the wet ground the white-hot flame burned the water from the blackened ground in frightening, fast-moving streaks. The flame burned still on the wood and meat, and between the stones hot electricity sizzled with its white flame.
All was over in a minute, even before the people recovered from the horrendous shock of the thunderclap. The intense heat left the stones broken into small pieces, and the wood and meat were completely consumed.
The people fell to the ground and pressed their faces against the earth. The people below, too, saw the lightening and the leaping flames. The thunderclap jolted them as sternly as it did the people closer to the altar, for they saw the lone prophet standing with upraised arms against the backdrop of fire. They, too, fell to their faces, even before word passed down to them of the total destruction of the altar. The chant started almost immediately from the mountain, but it spread quickly to the people below. “Yahweh, the only God. Yahweh, the only God.” The people said it with their heads still bowed to the earth, then as they recovered from their shock they shouted it louder still, “Yahweh, the only God!”
Elijah had not moved, but he lowered his arms and pointed toward the Baal prophets who lay amid their mumblings, still dazed. He shouted above the din, “Take the prophets of Baal. Do not allow a single one to escape.” A few closer men heard the command and quickly obeyed. As others watched them move, Elijah screamed out the command again and a mass of men moved into action against the prophets.
Exhausted and still hypnotized by their ecstatic dancing and screaming, the prophets offered little resistance as the horde of men caught them up bodily. The servant Elisha led the way, mercilessly shoving a naked, bleeding prophet down the ravine past the pool and on down the steep slope to the Kishon River. Sliding down the rocky path, rolling and tumbling, the prophet of Baal was a mass of lifeless bruises and torn flesh by the time Elisha plunged a borrowed knife into his heart and threw the body into the narrow, muddy river.
The men followed Elisha in the orgy of slaughter. Mangled bodies, with arms and legs at grotesque angles, their throats slashed or stabbed through the heart, were piled into the Kishon until the muddy water turned brown-red. The path was clear from the sacred ground of Carmel down to the river, the slope marked with blood left on the trees and rocks. And the reddened Kishon slowed sluggishly toward the Sea to regurgitate the contagion of the land into the home of the Tyrian god.
Ahab, with Obadiah at his side, had not moved throughout the massacre. Stunned by the enormity of God’s display of fire, he was mute to the slaughter. He thought instead of Jezebel.
Elijah had not moved, either, but his face held a glow of victory. Through he had expected God to answer, even in his certainty the loud and thorough response was a shock. He felt as though his soul was outside his body, observing with joy the purge of the land, watching with anticipation the proclaiming of Yahweh. But there was more to be done.
He called to some older men who still remained, “Go and slay and prepare a young bull for a feast. Your king must eat.” Then he shouted across the demolished altar to Ahab, “Follow the men higher up the mountain. They will prepare a feast. Eat your fill and drink deeply of the good water. Celebrate the end of the drought, for my ears ring with the sound of a great, abundant rain.”
Ahab turned without a response and moved lethargically in the direction Elijah pointed. Obadiah walked silently at his side, the royal train following close behind. Thoughts whirled in the king’s mind, thoughts of Yahweh as the God of Israel, thoughts of the drought’s end, thoughts of Jezebel. Of all, Jezebel loomed most important. What would she do? Would the slaughter of the Baal prophets cause Tyre to break their alliance? How could he promote Yahweh worship in Israel without breaching the terms of his marriage to Jezebel? The development was not a religious problem to Ahab so much as an administrative one. How would he administer the zeal now toward
Yahweh and hold together the pieces of the mutually profitable alliance with Tyre?
Elisha returned as Ahab’s company disappeared among the trees.
“Come with me,” Elijah ordered.
The two men walked up to the crest of Carmel. The sea still was not visible when they stopped, hidden by another peak a few minutes to the west. Elijah sat on the ground. He buried his face in his drawn up knees and clasped his hands around his legs. “I will pray,” he murmured to Elisha. “Go up higher and look out to the sea.”
With quick obedience, Elisha broke into a run. The climb was not overly steep, but the winter air held enough chill to bring pain to his throat from the exertion. Even so he ran with excitement, his own head dizzy with the sudden and decisive victory. On the peak, he looked beyond the yellow-sanded gulf shore below him and out to the western horizon. He cupped his hands over his eyes to break the late afternoon sun, and for several minutes he looked, with increasing disappointment. As far as he could see, the sky was clear.
He descended the peak at a disappointed walk and reported to his master. “There is nothing. I don’t see a thing.”
Without looking up, Elijah waved his hand toward the sea. “Go, look again.”
The servant nodded, unseen by Elijah, and returned to the peak. Again he searched the sky. He squinted against the bright sun and looked carefully. Still, the sky glared clear. Despondently, he returned to Elijah with his discouraging report. Again, Elijah motioned him back to the peak. Again, the sun-dominated sky glared with its dry stare.
Elisha made several trips. Each time, Elijah repeated his unspoken gesture for his servant to look again, with hardly an interruption of his prayers.
Below, by the Kishon, the wild excitement of the slaughter was over for the people. They talked of the spectacle of the Baal prophets, and spoke in tones of awe of the act of Yahweh, and laughed about the prophets’ naked bodies that forced the river to work its way around them.
Elijah Page 17