Elijah

by William H. Stephens

  With the excuse that they would be safer from Jezebel’s search, Elisha convinced the prophet that they should stay to the back road. The road was longer, winding among the higher hills, but it met the main road again at Gibeah, across the border in Judah. They could be in Jerusalem by late afternoon.

  Elijah’s spirits revived when he crossed the border into Judah. He stopped and breathed deeply. The Great Sea glistened in full view to the west, down the steep slopes of the mountain range and across the gentler Plain of Sharon. He turned to Elisha. “Would to God that I were a prophet to Judah, with a king that loves Yahweh.”

  “Yes,” Elisha agreed, “that would be easier. But then you would need another name.”

  Elijah looked quizzically at his companion.

  “What good is a name that means ‘Yahweh is God’ in a land where the people already know he is?”

  The prophet smiled. “Yes. But I would gladly change my name.”

  “Elijah,” the servant spoke in a tone of serious piety. “Is it not a matter of great comfort that Judah is faithful?”

  Elijah looked back across the border. “But to a prophet of Israel, the comfort is hollow.” His voice lowered, speaking more now to himself than to Elisha. “Does it mean that Israel has given up her destiny? That Yahweh’s efforts will be directed only to Judah now?”

  “I share your love for Israel,” Elisha replied, unaware that Elijah had conversed only with himself,” but still it makes me glad to know that King Jehoshaphat can be faithful to Yahweh and still build a great country. Ahab builds Israel by appealing to greed and power. Jehoshaphat builds Judah by setting up a system of justice for the people and commitment to Yahweh by the people. And Judah is doing well by such a policy.”

  “Judah is doing well,” Elijah acknowledged. He turned full circle and took another deep breath. “And the air breathes better,” he said.

  Jerusalem was set on the crest of the mountain range, as impregnable a fortress as any large city could be. They entered Jerusalem through the Gate of Ephraim, one of three main gates on the north that led into the walled city. The Temple was not far inside. Quickly, they made their way to the great wonder.

  Elijah and Elisha stood side by side to gaze in reverent awe at the Temple’s entrance. Two huge, free-standing pillars rose thirty feet into the air, two-thirds as high as the front of the Temple itself. Jezebel’s temple had similar pillars, but those represented the phalli of fertility worship. These two had names: Jachin meant “Yahweh establishes” and Boaz meant “In Yahweh is strength.” Fire fluttered in gentle waves from huge bowls at the top of each pillar. Their significance was both historic and mystic, to recall the pillar of fire by night and cloud by day that led the Israelites through the wilderness, and to merge earth with heaven as the smoke rose to mingle with the sky.

  To their right stood the massive altar of burnt offerings, measuring thirty feet square and fifteen feet high. It was placed over, and completely hid, the natural rock altar. A ledge ran below the top of the altar, on which priests stood while preparing and offering the sacrifices. A drainage system ran beneath the altar to carry the blood of the sacrifices underground to drain into the Kidron Brook.

  To their left was the equally massive arrangement of the basin and lavers. A bronze basin, so large that it was called the Molten Sea, was lined on each side by five lavers. The Molten Sea itself was fifteen feet broad and seven and a half feet high. It was supported on the backs of twelve bronze oxen, seated on their haunches, in groups of three each facing each of the four directions. The priests washed their hands and feet in the water of the basin before they approached the altar or entered the sanctuary. Each of the ten round bronze lavers measured ten feet in diameter and were supported by large, nine-foot-high bases, around and on which were placed and carved various forms of animals and plants. The basins were used by the priests to wash the entrails from the animals in preparation for sacrifice.

  Without speaking, the two men walked between the altar and the Molten Sea to ascend the ten steps between the two pillars. They walked into the ulam, the vestibule of the Temple, and stared through other high doors into the hekhal, the holy place. Its dimensions were exact. The length of the room was twice its width, sixty feet by thirty feet, and the height was half again the width, forty-five feet.

  Near the top of the side walls were windows that slanted upward through the thick masonry to catch the sun, which glistened with striking brilliance on the gold-overlaid walls. Intricate patterns of palm trees, flowers, and cherubim were carved into the cedar that lined the walls. The entire structure inside was overlaid with gold, every bit of all and ceiling space, every implement and furnishing.

  On each side of the wall stood five gold candlesticks, each one with seven branches, each one shaped out of pure gold. Three of the candlesticks burned even now, during the day, to symbolize the unbroken worship and unceasing light of God and his people. The flickering light from the candlesticks cast gentle and ever-changing light on the gold of the room.

  On the right was a table made of acacia wood, also overlaid with gold. On it was placed in two neat rows twelve loaves of unleavened bread, each loaf to represent one of the twelve tribes, a double reminder of the wilderness provisions and of the constant provisions of the earth, all given by Yahweh. The altar of incense lay directly ahead of them, in front of the door to the debit, the holy of holies. Every morning and every evening a priest burned incense on the altar, prepared by formula from four perfumes and a temper of salt, to signify the adoration of Yahweh’s people for their God. A trace of the odor, sweet to the nostrils, remained from the morning ritual when the smoke of the incense rose to the ceiling to escape through the slanted windows and to dissipate toward heaven.

  Beyond the incense altar was the cedar wall of the holy of holies. Its two olivewood doors were, as all else, overlaid with gold. Few men in Israel’s history ever had entered the perfectly square cubicle, thirty feet by thirty feet, for only the high priest could go into the dark chamber, and he only once each year on the Day of Atonement. Yahweh’s presence dwelt intensely in the holy of holies. His shekinah glory was there—that awesome, almost visible presence of God that was in the pillar of fire and the cloud, that presence that descended on Mount Sinai when Yahweh’s voice thundered from the cloud-bound heights of the mountain, that presence that threatened by its very holiness to overcome even the high priest who entered into the holy room.

  Elijah spoke very softly, not particularly to his companion. “I would that every Israelite heart were a holy of holies.”

  The ark of the covenant was in the room, the acacia wood chest that housed the stone tablets hewn by Moses’ own hands and on which Yahweh himself had inscribed his Law. Every devout Israelite knew the placement and design of the holy of holies. The ark was the central object, but it was not the largest. Its lid, the mercy seat of Yahweh himself, was of solid gold. Joined to the lid in one unbroken piece were two large cherubim, facing each other and looking down to the mercy seat, each with wings that touched the wall on one side and the wing tip of its companion in the center. In the space between the two cherubim and just above the mercy seat was the holiest spot in the holy of holies. The mercy seat was the seat of God, his special abode which, for all its sanctity, was unlike the shrine of other gods. It was much too small to hold Yahweh, whose presence permeated the universe.

  Feeling small, yet honored the two men turned back from the outer door and walked slowly out of the Temple area.

  Two hours yet remained before dusk, and Bethlehem lay but five miles farther.

  The road to Bethlehem ran along the crest of the range. To the left the barren hills descended in a bizarre array of yellow-brown nakedness to the Dead Sea, broken by a faint haze of green that lined the banks of the Kidron Brook, now flowing with the winter rains. To the right the hills were greener, though the fields that supported barley and what now were bare. Men still toiled feverishly in the downward-terraced, stony plots to break up the r
ain-softened earth. They would work until nightfall, so late were the rains in coming.

  Do they know, Elijah thought, of the contest on Mount Carmel—that Yahweh broke the drought and that his prophet walks even now so close by?

  The hard land in the region was rich but troublesome, not so easily tamed as Ephraim’s valleys. Stones dominated the fields, littered across the landscape as though a giant trickster cast new ones from his hand each time the farmers cleared the old ones. The toil was ceaseless. Low walls built form the troublesome rocks so laboriously gathered marked the boundaries of individual fields. The walls criss-crossed each arable valley and terraced hill, yet other stones remained, to the farmers’ unending consternation. The limestone hills broke through the earth in places, like the bald heads of old men, and at other places ran just under the soil, unseen but treacherous to the farmer.

  Elisha, more the farmer than his master, explained to Elijah how the plants sprout early and promising from the shallow earth that covers the underlying stone. The sun heats the earth quickly in such places, causing the seed to germinate and the shoot to grow rapidly. But the plant is unable to break through the stone to send its roots deeper. Soon, it shrivels and dies.

  The servant was sorry the moment the explanation passed his lips. Elijah stopped and looked over the fields. Then he turned and said, almost audibly, “Israel is like that.” He resumed his walk, head down, watching only the ground directly in front of him as despondent men do when they walk. “I cannot understand, my friend Elisha, how Israel can be so hard to reach. Our country is richer than Judah. The land gives of its bounty so much more easily than here. And we are richer in commerce. Yet here the people give Yahweh credit for the toil of their lives and the yield of the earth.”

  “It is partly leadership, is it not, prophet of Yahweh? Jehoshaphat is just, and he knows that only Yahweh truly teaches justice. Ahab knows only the power of arms and treaties. Religion is a mystery to him, so he allows Jezebel free rein to teach the people what appears to work, the worship of the Gods of Power and Growth.”

  Elijah did not respond. He felt strange to be taught by the younger man, impressed by his insight yet chagrined that he, the prophet, was not teaching the servant.

  The prophet slept fitfully that night, even amid the comfort purchased with Elisha’s money. His life did not make sense. The Mount Carmel scene reconstructed itself minutely and vividly, despite his efforts to push it out and go to sleep. He tried to relax his muscles, starting with his fingers and working to his shoulders and neck, but each time the scene forced its way into his consciousness.

  The Baal prophets played out their drama of ecstatic screams and gyrations again and again. The onlookers’ faces came into focus individually, and the prophet’s mind recalled expressions he had not consciously noticed two days ago on Carmel, expressions that changed through the long day from excitement to disbelief to stony rejection by minds seared with what they could not accept.

  He woke out of his semi-consciousness from time to time to ponder the events more controllably. The people did not really accept Yahweh. They were overwhelmed by him. They obeyed the command to slaughter the Baal prophets as they would obey a victorious general at the moment the tides of victory turn his way; and they would as quickly desert Yahweh as a mercenary soldier would a losing cause.

  The morning broke under partly cloudy skies, and at his servant’s prodding Elijah woke from the deep slumber that comes in the early morning after a sleepless night. Elisha tried to be cheerful. He had ordered breakfast already, and he joked about the downhill road from Bethlehem to Hebron.

  By the time they resumed their journey Elisha had given up his efforts to cheer his master. Though concerned about Elijah and mystified at his behavior, the servant knew that some problems can be worked out only by the man who is troubled. Outside help, though appreciated, rarely touches the nerve of the concern, a nerve the troubled man himself may not know.

  The men had started late in the morning, and it was early afternoon by the time they reached Beth-zur. They climbed the hill to refresh themselves and refill their waterpouches at the city’s copious springs. No cattle or sheep were present, since it was midday, but hollowed-out stone troughs encircled the fountain for watering the herds and flocks. After resting only a few minutes the prophet and companion clambered down the hill to the road.

  Hebron was but an hour ahead. From tales told over campfires and under flickering oil lamps over the years, Elijah knew that soon they would come upon a grove of oak trees, the Oaks of Mamre, where Abraham lived several times during his travels over the vast land. In spite of the beauty of the location, no tent was pitched among the thick trees. The spot was sacred.

  They did not stop at Machpelah, northwest of Hebron, though Elisha wished strongly to visit the cave tomb Abraham had purchased from Ephron the Hittite when Sarah died.

  Nor did the two travelers stop for the night at Hebron as planned. Elijah insisted they continue, in spite of the cold that would settle on the desert night. Elijah hastened his pace. He walked like a man obsessed, and soon talked so incessantly of the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites that the tired Elisha longed for the tranquility of the former silence.

  Elisha’s stomach protested through the night for lack of food. He had not eaten since the late breakfast in Bethlehem, and Elijah had eaten little eve then. Yet the prophet showed no sign of hunger and little sign of discomfort from the cold. He is a single-minded man, Elisha thought, and now he thinks only of the wilderness.

  Halfway to Beersheba the road and wadi left the infertile chalk and entered a stretch of softer alluvium. The hills were low, rolling gently toward the desert. An occasional small, unwalled town nestled silent and dark on the side of a low hill, always next to a smaller wadi that fed into the Khalil.

  The road turned to sand as the travelers approached Beersheba, placing tension on their calf muscles as their toes pressed ineffectively into the loose soil. Their steps were shorter, and the cold night air parched their throats as they breathed more deeply with their effort. Still, they reached Beersheba by midnight.

  The city had light fortifications, but no encircling walls except around a small portion. Settlements were spread out instead all along wide wadis.

  In the marketplace, travelers huddled in doorways or sat back to back in the open night each to protect the other, their mantles pulled over their heads and double wrapped around their bodies, sleeping lightly in mild fear of being molested or robbed. They waited to join caravans that might take them across the treacherous desert to their destinations. Some of them would wait for days.

  Elijah and Elisha passed through the scattered sleepers as silently as they could. Some of them, no doubt, awoke to watch them carefully, but not one of them moved perceptibly. Beyond the marketplace they came to the trickling Wadi es Seba. Elijah stopped and spoke softly to his servant. The prophet’s voice was firm. “Elisha, I want to go into the wilderness, alone.”

  Elisha had expected his master to say that, though he had hoped all during the journey that he would be able to stay with him, to help him through the period of discouragement. But Elijah had worked alone as a prophet all of his life, friendly toward the coenobias but independent of them. Even more than most prophets he drew strength from the solitude of the wilderness. But the servant could not hide his concern, for the southern desert was unfamiliar to Elijah.

  “You should eat first,” he cautioned.

  “No. I shall go now.”

  “You don’t know the wilderness, Elijah. At least wait until morning to ask directions.”

  “No.”

  “Then where shall you go?”

  “Where the Spirit of Yahweh leads me.”

  “You are being foolhardy to leave now, in the night, and without food. You must be hungry even now.”

  Elijah did not respond to his servant’s challenge. “Stay here, Elisha,” he ordered. “If I am not back in a few days, return to your home.”

 
; Elisha nodded, having learned more during their journey of the unswerving single-mindedness of the prophet. “I’ll wait a few days. Shalom. Yahweh be with you.”

  Elijah looked toward the sky to get his bearings from the stars. Then he knelt and filled his waterskin from the narrow, shallow stream. Rising, he crossed the water in two steps and began his walk due south. Elisha watched him for several minutes, as his master made his way among the low-built houses that littered the wide valley. Soon Elijah disappeared in the darkness. The servant stared after him, into the void that he could feel in the air. Worried, he forced his mind to recall the prophet’s last gestures and his scanning of the sky. He went due south, Elisha concluded. Because he does not know the way, he went due south. He does not swerve.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Within an hour after leaving Beersheba, Elijah left behind him the fertile soil of the broad valley. The low hills became harder and more barren, with rocks strewn promiscuously over the surface. They were anathema to him in the dark, as he kicked them or stepped on them with the sides of his feet.

  By sunrise Elijah approached Mount Haleiqim. The journey would not have been particularly hard during daytime, but in spite of the bright moon he fell several times. His forearm was scraped painfully from one of the falls, and he walked with a limp, the result of striking his knee against a small, sharp stone. Though he did not feel hungry, the loss of strength had slowed him considerably. As he dragged his feet, the toe of each sandal pulled a tiny trough of dirt upward with each step.

  Determined to go farther, and now with the daylight to aid him, he followed the foot of Mount Haleiqim toward the southeast. The land was treeless, but looking west to the lower region he could detect an occasional ribbon of winter-dulled growth, and sometimes a clump of tall cypress trees.

  By the time he found a pass through the forbidding ridge he could see no sign of life anymore, though the pass itself gave evidence of rare travel. Once again he was almost due south of Beersheba. He turned east into the pass and then, shortly, north up into a deep valley between two high ridges. After an hour of climbing he came to a small level flat. In its center, fed by the bit of water that the level could hold for awhile, grew a single broom tree. It was leafless, but its myriad of thin branches broke the sun to offer a gray shade. Elijah lowered himself slowly to a sitting position, careful of his aching muscles and sore knee as he shifted his weight, and stretched out his legs in front of him.