The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  But just as her caravan reached the porch of the palace, where Ahab himself stood smiling his welcome, Jezebel noticed one man in the multitude who did not bow before her antimony glance. He looked like a desert creature, desiccated. He wore a mantle of camel’s hair. He was unshorn, head and face. His body was hardened as for war. He stood straight up, looking back at her. His eye was altogether too bold, direct; it seemed contemptuous! Immediately, the queen was disgusted by this man.

  AFTER THE MARRIAGE of Ahab and Jezebel, Samaria experienced a period of renewed construction. The wide avenues were narrowed to make room for the houses of the priests of Ba’al Melqart, whom Jezebel worshiped. Not forty houses for forty priests, but four hundred, and then again another fifty. Jezebel’s father was not only the king of Tyre but also a priest of Ba’al Melqart. So Ahab commanded a temple to be built to the god of his wife and her father. In an elevated space within the city walls the land was excavated, pillars were raised, a house of lovely proportion was hewn of stone and cypress and cedar. Now thousands of people could worship the god whom the Tyrians believed to control the skies and bless the earth with rain and rich fertility: Sky-strider! Cloud-rider, Ba’al Melqart.

  But fertility needs a female. The gods must be male and female together in order to produce fruit. Therefore, Asherah, the goddess consort of Ba’al, also entered Israel and Samaria. And she required priests, and they required houses. So the streets grew narrower: four hundred more houses for four hundred more priests. And all these servants of Ba’al, together with their families and their servants—a very great company—ate at the queen’s table. Eight hundred and fifty Tyrian priests were supported by the state.

  For Jezebel intended to do more than worship the gods of her homeland. She wanted as well to enlighten the rude people of this backward nation, that they would worship her gods too. Thus the great number of priests: she had come with a zeal. The Lord of Israel was law-hard and austere. He was the God of a stony code, a mountain deity of wind and earthquake and frightening fires. Such holiness lacked all sweetness. Let Israel compare green fields with the forbidding mountain and make a choice.

  The temple which Ahab built for Ba’al Melqart and Asherah was as luxurious as their religion. Within its pillars there was neither darkness nor dread nor severity—but lightness, luminance, soft fountains of a gentle water, and kindness to every sense of the body. But on the day that this pleasant edifice was dedicated to her gods, a man stood up in the streets of the city and cried, “Ahab! Ahab!”

  He had an irritating, nasal voice: “King Ahab, hear what the Lord God says to you!”

  Ahab had already entered the temple. Jezebel, ten steps behind him, made the mistake of turning. She turned and recognized a face she had seen before.

  The hair of this man, as thin as tow, was uncut and wild. His shoulders were draped with a mantle of camel’s hair. His arms had the stringy strength of a nomad.

  He kept yelling, “Ahab! Ahab!” until the king himself appeared in the doorway of the temple—and then he said, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years—”

  Queen Jezebel experienced an intense hatred for this ranter who spoke of the things her Ba’al controlled.

  He cried: “There shall be neither dew nor rain these years—except by my word!” And then he vanished.

  Jezebel hissed, “I despise that fellow.”

  Ahab said, “So do I. But even the opinions of kings have never mattered to him.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Elijah. He is from Tishbe in Gilead. Elijah the Tishbite.”

  “He doesn’t wash.”

  Ahab shrugged. “There are laws for those who make special vows to the Lord: they don’t drink strong drink or cut their hair till the vow is done. But they wash. He washes.”

  “Except by his word!” Jezebel trembled at the blasphemy and the arrogance of this desert thing. “Ba’al is god of the rains, but he said it wouldn’t rain except by his word. I hate Elijah the Tishbite.”

  But the word of the blasphemer came true.

  II

  IN THE MONTHS that followed the dedication of the temple of Ba’al Melqart and his consort Asherah, no rain fell in Israel—neither the early rains nor the late rains a whole year through. There were no harvests. Seedlings perished in dry ground. The crops looked like hair on leprous flesh, a standing deadness.

  King Ahab said, “Where is Elijah?” He said it privately, then he demanded it publicly: “Has anyone seen Elijah the Tishbite?”

  The people couldn’t answer him. They said, “He travels on the winds of the Lord. He is here, and then he is not here. How can anyone know where Elijah is?”

  A second year passed without a rainfall. So widespread did the drought become that it included Tyre and Sidon in the north. The king repeated his question as a royal command. It carried with it anger and the burden of punishment: “Tell me where Elijah the Tishbite is!”

  A boy said, “I saw him.”

  That boy was brought into the king’s presence.

  “Where?” said the king. “Where did you see Elijah?”

  The boy said, “The prophet is living in a cave by the brook Cherith, east of the Jordan.” He lowered his voice and opened his eyes very wide: “Ravens,” he whispered: “Every evening ravens bring the prophet bread and meat. That’s how he lives.”

  Ahab sent soldiers to the Cherith. They searched up and down the dry streambed. They found the signs of dead fires, but Elijah they did not find.

  “Where is he?” Ahab cried. A third year began without rain. The bins and the storehouses in Israel were empty. Even the rich were going hungry.

  Moreover, the mules of Ahab’s armies and all his chariot horses were starving for lack of grass. He commanded soldiers to look everywhere in Israel for green grass and grazing.

  At the same time Jezebel sent her own troops as far abroad as Tyre and Sidon, looking for Elijah. She told the soldiers to threaten the people and to swear a solemn oath if they said they had not seen him.

  In the tiny town of Zarapheth north of Tyre, the soldiers discovered a widow who said that she had seen Elijah the Tishbite. In fact, she had fed him and let him live in her house.

  But when they asked where Elijah had gone, she said that even if they killed her she wouldn’t speak a word to harm Elijah.

  The widow told Jezebel’s soldiers that she and her son had been preparing to eat their final meal and to die, when this man Elijah came and asked for food. She had only a handful of meal left and a little oil in a cruse. But Elijah said, “Fear not, for the Lord the God of Israel says, The jar of meal shall not be spent, and the cruse of oil shall not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’’’’

  “He must be a prophet,” the woman said, “because his word came true. We always had enough food for one more meal.”

  But then the widow’s son became sick and stopped breathing. Elijah stretched his body over the boy’s body three times, asking the Lord to give him breath again and he did. “The boy lives,” the soldiers reported to Jezebel in Samaria. “We saw him. And the widow will only say that Elijah is a man of God in whose mouth the word of the Lord is truth.”

  In the day that Jezebel heard this story, she ordered her troops to cease looking for Elijah. Rather, they were to ride through the whole land of Israel and cut off all the prophets of the Lord wherever they were to be found. Kill them. The prophets of God went into hiding. They inhabited caves. Certain Israelites protected them, feeding them scraps of bread; but the queen’s armies were beginning to learn the territory, and soon no cave would be safe.

  Then suddenly Elijah appeared outside Samaria. King Ahab was walking in a dry field by himself; he looked up and saw the wild aspect of the prophet, as rough as mountain rock.

  “Is that you?” he said. “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?”

  Elijah said, “I have not troubled Israel. You have. You and your father have
split this nation into two by forsaking the commandments of the Lord and following Ba’al.”

  Ahab said, “How can you say I have forsaken the Lord? I name my children with his name. I fear his glory in the firmament. I know his strength to shut up the rain.”

  “So the king who fears the Lord has married a woman who hates the Lord and murders his prophets! Not both, King Ahab! No one can worship both the Lord and another. Yet you force Israel to hop from leg to leg between two cliffs! If the Lord is God, follow him! But if Ba’al, then follow him!”

  King Ahab turned his back on the prophet.

  “I,” cried Elijah, “even I only am left a prophet of the Lord!” Now he sang out in his nasal voice so that the people of Samaria heard him. People on the road outside the city stopped to watch, and the king was caught in discourse with the prophet of God. “I am one alone,” yelled Elijah, “but Ba’al’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men. Now listen to me, O King, and hear the end of famine and the return of the rains. I am going to Mount Carmel above the sea. Bring two bulls to that place and all the priests of Jezebel’s god, and we shall each pray to our own god, and everyone shall see which is God indeed. The God that can send both fire and rain, is he not God?”

  III

  MOUNT CARMEL JUTS NORTHWEST from Israel into the sea. On its southern side there was a strip of land more fertile than any other in the kingdom; therefore it was called the carmel, the Garden Land. Just below the summit of the mountain—also on the southern edge, but sixteen hundred feet above the seashore—was a natural platform, a flat stretch of thin soil and limestone.

  It was there that the prophet Elijah was found again.

  To that place came all the priests of Ba’al Melqart and of his consort, Ashe rah.

  Moreover, since most of Israel had heard of the challenge of Elijah, they climbed the mountain, too, covering it with a vast congregation, curious and hungry and hopeful.

  The queen had not deigned to leave her palace at the behest of a Tish-bite. King Ahab, likewise, was absent.

  But bulls were there for sacrifice. And here in the middle of the mountain platform were scattered the old stones of an altar that Jezebel had torn down.

  Among these stones stood Elijah, wrapped against the mountain winds in his mantle of camel’s hair. “Choose for yourselves one bull,” he cried to the priests of Ba’al Melqart. His wild hair whirled in the wind. “Cut the bull in pieces,” he cried. “Lay it on wood, but put no fire to it. Then call on the name of your god, your sky-strider, lord of the clouds, to see whether he will send the fire to burn his own sacrifice.”

  They did. They slaughtered the bull and butchered it. They arranged the bloody meat on dry wood, and then they began to pray. “Ba’al! Ba’al Melqart, answer us!”

  All morning long, Elijah rolled the stones of the Lord’s old altar together again, and the pagan priests called upon their god. Nothing happened. Nearly a thousand priests, they shouted louder and louder. By noon they began to limp around the sacrifice, begging the deity to manifest himself—but there was no voice. No one answered.

  Elijah, lifting now one stone upon the other, paused and yelled, “Louder! Louder! Maybe Ba’al is sleeping. Maybe he’s gone on a trip.”

  The priests drew swords and cut themselves till the blood streamed down their faces and their limbs. As midday passed they spun in circles, raving and shrieking. But there was no voice. No one answered.

  Suddenly Elijah cried out to the people of Israel, “Come near to me!” They drew near and saw that the twelve stones had been built again into an altar of the Lord. All around the altar Elijah had dug a trench. The wood was on the stones, and the sacrifice had been laid on the wood.

  Elijah said, “Fill four jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood.”

  They did.

  He said, “Do it a second time,” and they did.

  “Again,” he said. So then the water soaked the whole altar and filled the trench. Elijah the Tishbite lifted his hands and said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant. Answer me, O Lord. Answer my water with your greater rains. Answer me, that this people may know that you are God.”

  Then in the middle of a cloudless afternoon, the fire of the Lord forked out of heaven. It struck the earth, consumed the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and swallowed the water in the trench.

  The people of Israel dropped to the ground, roaring, “The Lord, he is God! The Lord, he is God!”

  But Elijah, full of a holy fury, wanted action. “Seize the priests of Ba’al!” he commanded. “Grab them where they stand! Let none escape!”

  At the sound of his voice, Israel became a host of warriors. “Bind the pagans in strips of their clothing,” he cried, “and follow me!”

  Already wounded and amazed, the priests of Ba’al Melqart and Asherah were overcome by the congregation of Israel and driven down the mountain into the valley of Kishon below. “Kill them,” said Elijah, and Israel slaughtered the personal priests of Jezebel. In a universal delirium, they killed every one of them.

  Almost immediately, when the voice of Ba’al had been drowned in blood and a hollow silence stunned the evening air, the people were horrified by what they had done. They stared at the carnage around them, trembling.

  “What will the queen do to us now?” they wailed. Then they saw Elijah on a low crag, and they cried out: “What will Ahab require of us now?”

  Elijah swept the people with eyes drained of passion. He shrugged and whispered, “Go home.”

  As if a great sickle had cut among them, the congregation of Israel vanished. They scattered, and in a short time no one living soul was left near Carmel except the prophet and a lad whose arm he had caught and held.

  “Come with me, boy,” Elijah said, and they climbed the mountain again.

  On the high plateau, the prophet wrapped his mantle around his upper body and walked west along the ridge that reached out over the sea. He sat down and drew his legs up and lowered his face between his knees.

  “Boy,” he said, “go up and look over the sea to the horizon. What do you see?”

  The boy went up and looked and came back again. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  Elijah said, “Go again. Go seven times again.”

  Seven times the lad walked to the edge of the mountain and peered westward. After the seventh time he came and said, “I see a little cloud like a man’s hand rising out of the sea.”

  “Then run to King Ahab,” the prophet said, “and tell him that the word which is soon to break from heaven is of the Lord and of no other god. Run.”

  In a little while the heavens were rolling with black clouds. The wind woke up and blew from the west. The prophet kept his head bowed down. He drew his mantle over his shoulders—and then there fell a great rain. The mountain was beaten with a blowing water all down its slopes; sheets of rain swept over the valleys and the borders of Israel, out into the desert. The prophet sat on Carmel, and the roofs of Samaria dripped.

  IV

  THREE DAYS LATER an Israelite crept to Elijah where he was hiding in a ravine near Tishbe and told him that Queen Jezebel was seeking to kill him.

  The messenger said, “She sent me herself, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make Elijah’s life as the life of my priests by this time tomorrow.’”

  Then Elijah was afraid. He left Tishbe, traveling south as fast as he could past Jericho and Jerusalem and Hebron. He ran through the night, by dawn coming through southern Judah near Beer-sheba. Still, the prophet did not stop. He traveled in sunlight through the wilderness all day long.

  At dusk he collapsed beneath a broom tree and cried out, “It is enough! O Lord, take my life away. I am no better than my fathers.”

  When the night descended, the air grew cold. Elijah covered himself in his mantle and fell asleep under the broom tree.

  Suddenly there appeared bes
ide him a column of white light, and an angel touched him and said, “Arise and eat.”

  Elijah saw at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and then lay down again.

  But the angel came a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, or else the journey will be too great for you.”

  So Elijah arose and ate and drank—then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights, all the way to Sinai, the mountain of God.

  He found a cave in the base of the mountain and entered into the darkness there. But the word of the Lord came to him and said, Elijah, what are you doing here?

  Elijah wound his fingers into the wild hair on his head. “I have been zealous for the Lord,” he said. “The people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, O God of hosts! They have thrown down your altars and killed your prophets. I, even I only, am left; and now they seek my life, too, to kill me.”

  The Lord said, Go forth, Elijah, and stand on my mountain.

  So the man crawled out of the cave and climbed Sinai, the mighty crag in an endless wilderness. He labored upward as Moses had five hundred years before, then he stepped out on a rocky promontory.

  At once a screaming wind swept over the summit and ripped down the mountainside, spraying pebbles, dislodging boulders, and driving the prophet back beneath the brow of a rust-red rock. But the Lord was not in the wind.

  After the wind died, the entire mountain began to tremble, riding an earthquake. Rifts opened in its ruined face, pinnacles toppled, and enormous stones careened down in dust to the dead plains below. But the Lord was not in the earthquake.