1 Kings17chapter 17

1 Kings 17:1-2

Elijah enters Scripture with no genealogy beyond a place name, the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead, unlike the fuller introductions Kings gives its other prophets. His oath, before whom I stand, is the standing formula he repeats to Obadiah at 18:15, and it grounds his authority to shut heaven in a single sentence rather than in any king's sending. Kings measures the drought as these years and the third year at 18:1; Luke 4:25 and James 5:17 give the New Testament's own count, three years and six months.

1 Kings 17:3-4

The command sends Elijah east across Jordan to Cherith, away from Ahab's reach, where ravens rather than any human hand supply his bread and flesh morning and evening. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown defend the plain reading of raven against conjectures that would emend the word to Arabians or merchants, since a miraculous feeding needs no natural explanation for where the birds found food. The prophet who shut heaven by his own word now depends on a daily supply he did not arrange, the same lesson Zarephath will teach a widow's jar.

1 Kings 17:5-7

Elijah obeys at once and settles by the brook until it fails after a while, at the end of days, Wesley notes, meaning a year, the season a severe drought would need to dry a perennial stream. Clarke ties the drought itself to the curse Deuteronomy attached to a land that turns after other gods, that the Lord's wrath be kindled and he shut up the heaven. The drying brook lays a second trial on the first, teaching the prophet who called the drought to depend on the God who sent it rather than on the brook itself.

1 Kings 17:8-10

When Cherith fails, the word comes a second time and sends Elijah further still, to Zarephath in Sidon itself, inside the territory of Jezebel's own father. Barnes notes Zarephath's dependence on Sidon from the Assyrian inscriptions and suggests the prophet is sent to the one place least likely for Ahab to search. Wesley reads the sequence as provision from an unclean bird and then from a Gentile in turn, and Jesus draws the same widow into his own preaching at Nazareth, naming her against the many widows in Israel in the days of Elias.

1 Kings 17:11-12

Elijah's request for bread tests the widow before she can test him, though she has told him only that she gathers sticks for a last meal. Her answer names her stock exactly, an handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse, enough by her own reckoning for one meal before she and her son die of the famine. Wesley notes the famine's effects reached beyond Israel into Tyre and Sidon, since both regions depended on Israel's grain, so her poverty is the drought's own doing before Elijah asks anything further of her.

1 Kings 17:13-14

Elijah asks the widow to feed him before she feeds her own son, a request Clarke calls an extraordinary trial of faith, since her last handful of meal is at stake for a stranger she has met only at the city gate. The promise attached is exact rather than vague, that the barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day the Lord sends rain, tying the miracle's own end to the very drought Elijah pronounced at verse 1. Wesley reads the command as a trial God intended to reward, given as much to encourage others toward the same obedience as to test her own.

1 Kings 17:15-16

The widow obeys, and she, he, and her house eat many days on a supply that never runs out. Henry calls the widow's own faith as great a miracle in the kingdom of grace as the oil's increase was in the kingdom of providence, since believing the promise came before seeing it kept. Gill compares the standing increase to the loaves and fishes multiplied in the disciples' own hands while they were still distributing them, a later miracle worked on the same pattern.

1 Kings 17:17-18

The widow's son dies outright, no breath left in him, and her grief turns at once into an accusation, art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son. Wesley reads her question as fear that Elijah's presence, and his prayers, have brought her own guilt under the same judgment his word brought on the whole land. Clarke notes that adversity commonly surfaces a conscience adversity itself had let sleep, so the death forces an examination the drought alone had not.

1 Kings 17:19-21

Elijah takes the child from her arms, carries him to his own upper room, and lays him on his own bed before he prays. Barnes notes the stretching of himself upon the child three times differs from the method Elisha later uses over the Shunammite's son, and compares it instead to the touch by which Jesus later raises the dead. The prayer names the God he serves twice, O Lord my God, and asks plainly that this child's soul come into him again, a request Wesley calls bold, made by a man whose own experience of answered prayer had already earned him standing to make it.

1 Kings 17:22-24

The Lord hears, and the child's soul returns to him. Gill calls this the first instance in Scripture of anyone being raised from the dead, and notes that pagan literature's own tales of revived men are its later, lesser copy. Elijah carries the boy down and hands him to his mother with the plainest possible proof, see, thy son liveth, and her confession closes the chapter where it opened: now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth, the same word that shut heaven at verse 1 now proven true over a single household.