Elijah

by William H. Stephens

  He sat for a long time that way, moving only a hand occasionally to relieve an aching wrist or stretching his legs to fight off the ache that dominated his calves and thighs. He looked carefully at his bruised knee, but decided to ignore the dull pain since he could do nothing about it.

  He wanted to cry, but he could not remember how. Instead, the despondency tightened in his throat. He sat in a stupor, unable to formulate words with which to pray away the despair. For more than an hour he stared at the bluffs that rose on either side and down the valley that stretched beyond his feet. The land and rocks were brown, austere in the desert sun, their rock-hard slopes and ridges speaking both of timeless peace and of timeless anguish. They reflected his soul, his deep certainty that Yahweh was God and that he was his prophet against the despair that his life had accomplished nothing.

  He had laid his faith, never mind his life, on the line on Mount Carmel. Never had Yahweh granted a greater, more viable, more convincing sign that he was God. Not even the parting of the sea when Israel was led by Moses from Egypt, not even the manna in the desert, was a greater sign than the fire from heaven. Yet Jezebel was not convinced. And if she were not convinced, Israel would not be.

  A sense of antagonism toward God filled his breast. Not doubt. He did not doubt God. He was angry with God—angry that Yahweh would lead him to perform such a magnificent miracle, then withhold from him his legitimate expectations of the results. The Israelites crossed the Red Sea on dry ground and they believed in Yahweh, at least for a while. They ate of the manna in the wilderness and they believed in Yahweh, at least for a while. But they saw fire descend from heaven to devour the offering, and the altar, and the water itself, and they did not believe, even for a while.

  Elijah’s daydreams of years past gathered in the crevices of the mountains and permeated the air around the tree. They were the haze that hung in the desert sky and that rose in shimmers from the hot stones of the valley. For all those years of preaching in marketplaces, of meditating in the trackless regions of Gilead, of talking passionately under flickering lamps, he had dreamed of standing one day beside Ahab and from the palace balcony to announce to the assembled crowd below that from now to forevermore Yahweh was God, the only God, in Israel.

  If ever that moment should have come, the miracle on Mount Carmel should have brought it.

  Elijah lay back, the weariness of his body spreading into his soul until, like his leaden arms, his spent spirit lay prone on the earth. He had failed, and in his failure culminated the failures of all who came before him. Moses failed in him, and Samuel, and David, and Nathan, and all those myriad nameless thousands of faithful spokesmen for Yahweh whose names were known only to God. He was the end of the line of witnesses. Their success was worthless without his success. All of that effort had come to this end. Yahweh was rejected, with finality and in the face of a great display of his power.

  Thought clings tenaciously to the exhausted mind, and the stories of Israel’s history poured in quick succession into his consciousness, filtering through the hazy disillusionment that hung in the sky.

  Moses’ face, as he often had pictured it, large and square with long beard and bushy eyebrows, loomed in his vision. But now that face did not hold a fierce, prophetic determination. Now the skin hung more loosely and the eyes were hollow.

  Samuel’s eyes stared at a throne, and his downcast head was shaking slowly back and forth, for what he had warned about a king, should Israel continue to demand one, had come to pass.

  David, large-boned and muscular, tall and fair—his poet-warrior, warrior-poet’s face was the most agonized of all. That face reflected hurt more than disappointment, for the kingdom he had pulled together through a lifetime of brilliant leadership and commitment to Yahweh had broken in two, and the larger and richer of the pieces was drifting from the rock-hard mountains into the cavernous sea.

  David’s face disappeared, and in its place paraded a sea of faces. Most of them were blank and featureless, but he recognized Caleb and Joshua, and Abijah and Nathan, all with features he had assigned to them as a boy listening to his father tell him the stories of Israel. All of them, to the last man, had lived for nothing. Their leadership, their suffering, their prayers, their commitment to Yahweh was wasted. And why should he, Elijah, a lone prophet among an apostate people, suppose himself able to turn a tide that had engulfed so many valiant and determined lives?

  He spoke then, aloud but low, to the God he could not feel but who he knew was there. “It is enough,” he said slowly. “Now, Yahweh, take away my life. I am not better than my fathers.” Then his eyes closed in sleep, and his last thought was that he would not awake.

  The sun crept higher to cast its full fury into the valley, to filter through the leafless branches of the broom tree to shine on the prone body of the prophet. He lay flat on his back, his arms wide above his head, his face turned to one side, the tangled shadows of thin branches criss-crossing his body. He did not move as the sun passed from view behind the western bluff, nor as the shadow deepened in the valley. Night fell, and with it the winter’s desert chill, and still he did not move.

  At dawn, while the early light of the pre-morning reflected in bright pastels of orange and pink and red and purple and blue on the ridges that enclosed the valley, Elijah felt a tug at his shoulder. A voice broke through his deep slumber, as though from far away, the voice of a messenger of God, the touch of an angel, speaking and touching with the gentleness of love.

  He woke slowly, climbing from a deep pit of slumber, making his way toward the sunlight at its top. The voice spoke, “Arise and eat.” And then the voice was gone, and the tug ceased.

  He raised himself on one elbow and opened his eyes toward the soft smell of hot breadcake. A small fire smoldered only a few feet away, smelling of thornbranches. Baking on a flat stone place in the midst of it was a large breadcake. Nearby was a cruse of water.

  Elijah pushed himself to his hands and knees and crawled to the fire. He cautiously pulled the breadcake from the hot stone and shifted it back and forth quickly from hand to hand until it cooled enough to be held. He ate slowly, washing down each bite with the clear, cool water from the cruse, wondering at the providence of God, yet wishing that God had taken his life instead.

  After he ate, he lay down again in his place under the broom tree and quickly fell again into his deep slumber.

  The sun moved as hot as before into the valley and beyond it to the west. The night fell as chilled as before on the desert floor. Elijah slept through it all, still, his body and soul quiet, without visions or dreams of Israel’s yesterday or his today. At the moment of the predawn’s most vivid painting, again he felt the tug at his shoulder, and in his cavern of sleep he heard the distant and gentle voice calling again to him, “Arise and eat.” This time he thought he heard another phrase, “because the journey ahead is too great for you.”

  Waking was not as hard as the morning before, but even so the climb from the deep was as though he had been in the belly of the earth.

  Three breadcakes this time baked on the flat stones in the midst of the fire. He retrieved them and ate them slowly, drinking in small swallows the water from the cruse.

  The voice had said, “because the journey is too great for you.” Elijah pondered the words. Yahweh did not want me to die yet, but what is the journey? Surely it is not to return to Israel, after Jezebel’s threat? What then?

  By the time he took the last bite of breadcake and drank the last bit of water from the cruse he had decided. He would go to Mount Horeb, the Mountain of Yahweh in Sinai where Yahweh gave the Law to his people. There either he would hear God as vividly as Moses did or he would die.

  Elijah laid the empty cruse aside, rose, and started down the valley. He struck a course due west when he emerged from the valley, walking at a fast pace, his route being for the most part downhill. Somewhere to the west, he knew, a road ran from Beersheba to Kadesh-barnea.

  He left the barren chalk hills s
oon and entered a stretch of desert that supported rare clumps of scrub and even, in the wadis, more aggressive growth. But though the small trees and winter-dead grass of the dry wadis appeared as oases in comparison to the desert’s bleakness, the region was forbidding. The bare stretches of rock-littered gray and tan wilderness shouted its awesome warning to travelers to seek directions before journeying into the great and terrible Sinai Desert.

  Those who survived the wilderness sought those directions carefully at one of the towns or cities that lay on its perimeter, like Beersheba or Kadesh-barnea. The traveler would question until he knew every landmark, every trail, every watering place, every controlling Bedouin tribe and its leaders. The prophet, then, had double reason for going through Kadesh, to seek directions and to start his pilgrimage at the site where Israel itself languished for much of her forty years of cursed wandering.

  By the time Elijah reached the sprawling town dusk was dissolving into darkness. He was disappointed at first at the smallness of the ancient settlement until, the next morning, he discovered that the city was spread in wide-ranging clusters up and down the wide Wadi el Qudeirat and its tributaries, each cluster concentrated near or around a rock-sided well. The town had no strong buildings to form a center, only a ramshackle marketplace that, later in the morning, was filled with desert Bedouins and the almost-alike Judeans of Kadesh. They were desert toughened, darker than their kinsmen to the north, due surely to the ferocity of the sun.

  Kadesh was on the very edge of the terrible wilderness, the last outpost between the vengeful desert and the dew-tempered hills and wadis that stretched north and west. His forefathers lived on the edge of existence for forty years. Now, he thought, they have chosen again to live on the edge of existence in their wanderings of the spirit.

  To the south the wilderness began in earnest. Elijah looked out toward the Tih, the Wilderness of the Wandering, shielding his eyes from the glare. That is the hardest way to Mount Horeb, though the shortest. Perhaps, he thought, the harder way is the better way for the wandering soul. Forty years Israel wandered, ten times four years.

  The holy significance of the number was apparent. Ten was the number of human completeness, four was the cosmic number to symbolize the world. The forty-year period then had its divine purpose—to bring God’s people to completeness.

  Elijah started down the north slope of the hill into the Wadi el Ain. His journey, the journey that would be too great for him without the sustaining food provided by God, would be in that great wilderness. He would stretch his journey to Horeb to last forty days, a day for a year. Perhaps Yahweh would do in his soul what he did with Israel.

  Once in the valley the prophet sought out an elderly Judean for directions. They sat for more than two hours under a terebinth tree. The old man was glad to share his knowledge with a traveler, especially with a prophet of Yahweh on a pilgrimage to Mount Horeb. He described the wilderness in great detail. When Elijah bade the man good-bye, he started his journey with confidence.

  Elijah spent the days exploring the region. He examined every slight valley and camped beside every waterhole, forcing his mind back into the minds of his forefathers, to think as they thought, to see life as they saw it. He struggled to grasp the secret of the disbelief and weakness that forced their wilderness wandering, then he struggled to grasp the secret of the faith and fierce commitment that made their children a conquering nation.

  He walked the trackless expanse of the Tih, the vast plain west of the Wilderness of Paran, and wondered at the black flint, worn glass smooth by the wind-driven sand, thickly strewn across the gravel plain, a mixture of black against harsh white. He felt the flint slip underfoot and cut into his sandals, and his legs ached from the short, ineffective steps he was forced to take.

  He scooped dirt from wadi junctures to uncover the hidden water of the temails, and filled his waterpouch time and again with the yellow, brackish fluid that appeared when sand was scooped from the right place. He wandered over the Tih for hours at a time without seeing a single shrub. He wondered at the tiny snails that sealed themselves airtight onto the rare plants that grew erratically along wadis. At the appearance of the equally rare rainy season the snails would come to life again.

  The prophet traveled east to explore the Wilderness of Paran, part of the terrible plateau that broke farther east into eerie, craggy mountains in their plunge to the Arabah. He tried to guess where his forefathers may have traveled, where they pastured their flocks, and where they pitched their tents. He felt the hardness of the arid region, and felt the sun burn into his already deeply tanned skin. When he ran out of water he felt the spittle dry salty on his lips, to leave them swollen and cracked. He felt the fiery burning of a parched throat and the heavy weight of disobeying limbs and the fear of hallucinations in a land that did not care.

  He watched the colors of gray and white desert turn to hues of reddish browns and more distinct grays, and saw the sandstone hills turn into rainbows brushed by the rising and setting sun. He felt the breathtaking heat of the still hamsin and shivered under the heavy and penetrating cold of the nights. He looked forward each day to the relief of the late afternoon breeze that rarely failed to come.

  He ate sparingly, to allow the fast to do its work in his soul. When he did eat, it was the pleasantly acrid, fleshy-leafed gataf plant.

  The days were too agonizing to pass quickly. They lingered long, the nights longer, to melt one into the next with an ever-increasing sameness. Toward the end he knew he had discovered the source both of weakness and strength that drained one generation and shaped the next. The desert that proved too hard for a generation of slaves formed of their children a generation of warriors.

  He found that secret, but he did not find the answer to his own life. Mount Carmel still loomed as one of Israel’s great miracles, and the Israelites still followed other gods.

  During his wanderings he had worked his way farther south into the wilderness, so that on the morning when he determined to move on to Mount Horeb he stood on the southern rim of the Tih. The air was quite cold, and the prophet shivered even under the warmth of his mantle. The enormous plateau cut its triangular point through the heartland of Sinai. Then it stopped, with abruptness, to fall away all along its cliffs to a wide sandstone plain, the Debbet er Ramleh. Its mountains were low and rare, broad at their tops, with bizarre shapes, its valleys sheer-walled and narrow.

  Beyond the sandstone range rose the blue-hard granite mountains, the majesty of all Sinai. They were a chaotic mass, with sharp ridges and snowcapped peaks that clawed upward to tear at the sky. Mount Horeb was straight ahead, two days’ journey away, the highest point on the peninsula. The slightly lower but unbowing Mount Serbal rose to dominate the range to the west of God’s mountain.

  Elijah was thinner now, his skin looking older from his fast, with slight hollows under his cheekbones. His limb muscles were sinewy rather than rounded, his dark eyes and hair more prominent than ever before. He moved down the trail with resolute determination, his mind forcing his body, his body obeying with strength drawn from the mind, obeying because the mind would not let the body stop. The body was beyond fatigue, unfeeling, a vehicle only to carry the mind.

  But the endurance of the body passed into the mind. The mind would not be still. It darted catlike from thought to thought, finely tuned by the desert fast to recall details of the prophet’s life and of Israel’s history. Yet for all its discipline and recall it could not quiet the prophet’s foreboding spirit. The soul was as exhausted as the body, forced on to Horeb only by the dominating mind.

  He was in a different world now, the sickly-green herbage of the valley that would through a maze of barren ridges looking rich in comparison to the Tih. Large thorny trees grew spasmodically along the bottom and lower sides of the narrow valley. The walls rose sharply on both sides, perpendicular at places.

  By late afternoon he arrived at the large Wadi Feiran, the route the ancient Israelites followed inland from the Red S
ea during the Exodus. The floor was of white sand, smooth in places, stone-littered in others. The mountains rose in irregular patterns from each side, their height tempered by the wadi’s wideness.

  He turned east. His mind projected into the valley a scene, almost a mirage in its reality, of thousands of newly-freed slaves shuffling along the path of dust and stone, their fear dominating their hope, their bickering eclipsing their faith, led by a man determined to free them against their will. It was here, in Sinai, not many miles up the wadi, that Moses had faced some of his most trying hours. But in those hours, Elijah’s mind insisted to his sick soul and tired body, Moses heard God most decisively.

  By midafternoon of the next day the prophet could contain his excitement no longer. He broke into a run, his sandals kicking up spurs of dust where his toes propelled him forward. He ran hard for a few minutes, then settled into an easier stride. The valley was splotched with vegetation, thin-trunked acacia trees with their flat tops of tangled branches, palms ringed along their bottoms with wild new growth from fallen seeds, and gnarl-trunked terebinths. He passed all of it without notice, nor did he notice the peaks, rising ever higher and more imposing as he moved south. He ran erect, his legs pumping in their short-stepped way, his arms moving in rhythm to his stride, his eyes fixed only on the wadi as an obstacle to surmount.