Elijah

The text presents him as a man inside a datable reign. Ahab son of Omri ruled in Samaria, and he appears by name outside the Bible in Shalmaneser III's account of the battle of Qarqar in 853 BC. The inscription credits him with two thousand chariots and ten thousand soldiers, a figure many who study it read as inflated, since it would rival Assyria's own contribution and sits oddly with a hill country ill-suited to chariots. Jehu, the man Elijah was told to anoint, pays tribute to the same Assyrian king in 841 BC and is named on his monuments, and the Moabite Stone names Omri, Ahab's father.

No inscription mentions Elijah, and this page says so rather than reaching. What the record supplies is the world he stands in, not a witness to the man himself. The reign dates usually given, around 874 to 853 BC for Ahab, follow the chronology of Edwin R. Thiele in The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, anchored to the Assyrian eponym canon, and they are stated here as that framework rather than as a bare fact.

The raven is on the unclean list in Leviticus 11:15 and Deuteronomy 14:14. The text does not explain the choice. It says only, "I have commanded the ravens to feed you there."

Ravens are scavengers, so the birds least likely to give food away are the ones that bring it twice a day. Then the brook dries up in the drought Elijah himself announced, and God sends him to be fed by a starving foreign widow. The pattern the chapter builds is that the provision keeps arriving from the last place a man would look.

Both numbers are in Scripture. 1 Kings 18:1 says the word came to Elijah in the third year of the drought. Luke 4:25 and James 5:17 both say three years and six months.

The reading the commentators give is the same in John Wesley and in Matthew Henry. The third year of 1 Kings 18:1 counts from the time Elijah went to live with the widow at Zarephath, not from the first day without rain. Add the months at the Brook of Cherith before that and the total reaches three and a half years.

Three and a half years is also a length Scripture uses elsewhere for a bounded season of testing, including the 1,260 days of Revelation 11:3. That connection is worth naming and it is not worth pressing.

This is the hardest thing on the page and it deserves an answer rather than a deflection. The facts first. Two companies of fifty are consumed (2 Kings 1:10, 1:12). A third captain kneels, asks for his life and the lives of his men, and lives. An angel then tells Elijah to go down with him and not be afraid, and Elijah goes.

Four readings, with the men who hold them. Adam Clarke argues the agency was God's and not Elijah's, since Elijah could no more bring fire from heaven than his critics could, and God "would not have destroyed these men had there not been a sufficient cause to justify the act." John Wesley reads it as a proof of commission and not revenge, done "not to secure himself... nor to revenge himself, for it was not his own cause that he acted in: but to prove his mission." Albert Barnes works the question at length and lands on both halves, that Elijah "is, consequently, no pattern for Christian men" and yet that "what he did, when he did it, was not sinful." And Caesarius of Arles was answering this same question from a pulpit in the sixth century, so it is not a modern squeamishness.

What Scripture itself does with the episode is the fact this page leads with. James and John propose exactly this precedent against a Samaritan village, and Jesus turns and rebukes them (Luke 9:54-55). Titus of Bostra saw the reasoning they were using, that they thought it more just for the Samaritans to perish than the soldiers who came for Elijah. Ambrose of Milan gives the sharpest answer in the fourth century: "But let him be avenged who fears. He who fears not, seeks not vengeance." The page gives the text, the readings and their holders, and Jesus's own refusal of the precedent, and stops there.

2 Kings 2:11 says he went up into heaven in a whirlwind. Fifty men searched for three days and found nothing, and no burial is recorded anywhere in Scripture. Albert Barnes puts it as flatly as it can be put: "No honest exegesis can explain this passage in any other sense than as teaching the translation of Elijah, who was taken from the earth, like Enoch Gen 5:24, without dying."

The memory was fixed before Christ. 1 Maccabees, written in the second century before Christ and read here as a labelled study resource rather than as Scripture, has a dying father list Elijah among the faithful with the line, "Elias for being zealous and fervent for the law was taken up into heaven."

Two things follow. This is why Malachi can promise that Elijah will be sent again, and why the scribes expected him before the Messiah. And it is the ground of the oldest reading of the two witnesses of Revelation, that they are the two men Scripture never records dying. Tertullian gave the reasoning around the year 200, that their death was postponed rather than cancelled.

2 Chronicles 21:12 has a letter reaching Jehoram of Judah from Elijah, and 2 Kings 2 appears to place Elijah's departure earlier. Adam Clarke states the difficulty in two sentences: "From 2Ki 2:11, it is evident that Elijah had been translated in the reign of Jehoshaphat, the father of Jehoram. How then could he send a letter to the son?"

Three readings, with their holders, and no verdict. Albert Barnes argues that the Chronicles notice "proves that he was alive after the death of Jehoshaphat," which bears on where 2 Kings 2 sits in the book, since the events of Kings are not always arranged in the order they happened. John Wesley notes that Jehoram's accession is recorded at 1 Kings 22:50, before Elijah's departure is narrated, and that Elijah wrote rather than went because his own departure was near. A third reading is that the letter was written earlier and delivered later, which the text neither states nor excludes.

What all three share is that the difficulty is one of arrangement rather than of fact, and the page says that much and stops.

No, and Scripture says so twice in two different ways. Jesus says of John, "he is the Elijah who was to come" (Matthew 11:14) and "Elijah has already come" (Matthew 17:12), and Matthew adds that the disciples understood He meant John. But John himself, asked point blank whether he was Elijah, answered "I am not" (John 1:21).

The resolution the church has given from its earliest centuries is that the identification is of office and spirit and not of person, and Gabriel had already said as much before John was born, that he would go before the Lord "in the spirit and power of Elijah" (Luke 1:17). Origen made the distinction exactly: "He says not, in the mind of Elijah, but in the spirit and power." John Chrysostom said it in one sentence: "Christ called John Elijah, not because he was Elijah, but because he was fulfilling the ministry of that prophet."

The idea that a soul had come back was raised and rejected early. Tertullian worked through every verse a reader would use and showed that Elijah's case cannot be transmigration at all, because he never died. Origen wrote against the same reading at length, and Jerome named it as the error of foolish philosophers. This is not a modern question.

The two witnesses of Revelation 11 are given two powers: to shut the sky so that no rain falls, and to turn water to blood. The first is Elijah's in 1 Kings 17:1 and the second is Moses's in Exodus 7, and Adam Clarke reads the verse that way line by line. Fire from their mouths against their enemies reads against 2 Kings 1, and their title, the two olive trees and the two lampstands, comes from Zechariah 4.

The positions, with their holders. Elijah and Enoch, the two men Scripture never records dying, held by Hippolytus of Rome in the third century and by Tertullian, who gives the reasoning that their death was postponed and they are reserved for it. Elijah and Moses, on the two powers and on the pair at the transfiguration. Elijah and Jeremiah, which Alcuin of York reports around 804 as the reading of Victorinus, on the ground that Jeremiah's death is nowhere recorded. And a corporate or symbolic reading, which the site's own page also carries.

The expectation of a returning Elijah is older than the New Testament. Sirach, written about 180 years before Christ and labelled here as a study resource rather than as Scripture, already expands Malachi's promise: Elijah was "ordained for reproofs in their times, to pacify the wrath of the Lord’s judgment, before it brake forth into fury, and to turn the heart of the father unto the son, and to restore the tribes of Jacob." That is the background to the disciples' question about why the scribes say Elijah must come first.

This site reads Revelation as describing a future period rather than as a figure for the church age, so a literal return of Elijah before the Day of the LORD is a live expectation here, and Jesus's own future-tense "Elijah does indeed come, and he will restore all things" is read as leaving Malachi 4:5 not yet exhausted. Which two men the witnesses are is not settled on this page.

James answers this directly, and it is the reason he brings Elijah up at all. "Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain." The Greek behind "just like us" is homoiopathes, which means similarly affected.

The argument runs from his ordinariness to the reader's own prayer, and the instruction it is attached to is in the present tense: confess to each other, pray for each other, and the prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail. John Wesley's note is eleven words. Bede drew the conclusion in the eighth century, that if one Elijah praying obtained such things, the frequent prayer of many righteous people is worth more.

What that prayer actually looked like is in 1 Kings 18:42-44, and it is not impressive to watch. A man bent double with his face between his knees, sending a servant to look at the sea, told six times that there was nothing there, and sending him a seventh. Matthew Henry's line is the one to end on: "It is not enough to say a prayer, but we must pray in prayer."