Elijah on Mount Carmel
about 860 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
During a long drought the prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal, whom King Ahab and Queen Jezebel support, to a contest on Mount Carmel. Kings tells of fire from heaven, the people’s return to the Lord, and Elijah’s flight to Horeb.
Ahab, son of Omri, ruled Israel from Samaria. He married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and built a temple and altar for Baal in his capital (1 Kings 16:29–33). Jezebel had prophets of the Lord put to death, and an official of the court hid a hundred of them in caves (1 Kings 18:3–4).
Elijah the Tishbite, from Gilead, told Ahab that there would be neither dew nor rain except at his word. He hid by the brook Cherith and then lodged with a widow at Zarephath, in Sidonian territory, where Kings says that her jar of meal and jug of oil did not run out and that he restored her dead son to life (1 Kings 17).
In the third year he showed himself to Ahab and asked him to summon Israel and the 450 prophets of Baal to Mount Carmel. There he put the choice to the people: “If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” Each side was to lay a bull on the wood without lighting it, and the god who answered by fire would be God. The prophets of Baal called from morning until evening and nothing happened. Elijah rebuilt the Lord’s altar with twelve stones, had the offering drenched with water three times, and prayed. Kings says that fire fell and consumed the offering, the wood, the stones and the water, and that the people fell on their faces and cried, “Yahweh, he is God!” Elijah had the prophets of Baal killed at the brook Kishon, and the rain came (1 Kings 18:1–2, 17–45).
Jezebel swore to kill him. He fled south to Beersheba and on to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, the account says, the Lord passed by. He was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire; after the fire came “a still small voice”, and Elijah was sent back to anoint Hazael as king of Aram, Jehu as king of Israel and Elisha as prophet in his place. Seven thousand in Israel, he was told, had not bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:1–18).
Later Scripture returns to Elijah often. The book of Malachi ends with the promise that he will return before the day of the Lord (Malachi 4:5–6). The Gospels apply that promise to John the Baptist (Matthew 11:13–14; Luke 1:17) and place Elijah beside Moses at the transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1–3). Paul cites the seven thousand as a sign that God had not rejected his people (Romans 11:2–4).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
Kings sets the contest in the reign of Ahab, at the end of a drought that broke “in the third year” (1 Kings 18:1), and gives no regnal year. The New Testament speaks of three years and six months (Luke 4:25; James 5:17). Ahab reigned twenty-two years (1 Kings 16:29) and was still king in 853 BC, when Shalmaneser III names him at Qarqar (Kurkh Monolith ii 91–92); Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3rd ed., 1983), dates his reign 874–853 BC. About 860 BC is a placement within that reign, not a year that any source gives.
Josephus, writing some nine centuries later, quotes an earlier historian, Menander, for a drought of one year under Ethbaal, king of Tyre, and identifies it with the drought under Ahab (Josephus, Antiquities 8.324). For the events themselves Kings is the only source.
Primary sources
Scripture
The Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III
- Kurkh Monolith ii 91–92oracc.museum.upenn.edu
Jewish Antiquities
- Josephus, Antiquities 8.324lexundria.com
In context
Grows out of
- about 930 BC, estimated date
Leads to
- 853 BC, firm date
- about 850 BC, traditional date