Canter Bridge

Prophets have no peripheral vision.

Their penetrating insight into a people’s core blinds them almost as a matter of course to the less urgent but no less tangible realities that surround them. Allies, for example. Blood brethren, kindred spirits, that sort of thing.

Elijah’s conquest of Baal’s prophets on Mount Carmel and subsequent flight from Jezebel represent one of the Hebrew Bible’s greatest melodramas. The juxtaposition of unparalleled access to divine power and the despondency of a man in the wake of his superlative moment makes Elijah an easy parable for those seeking insight into the emotional dynamics faced by any public leader in his or her moment of crisis.

Yet Elijah’s story is also more than that. In spite of its unconventional features—angel table-setters and the like—it is a narrative about the limits of prophetic zeal.

Alone and exhausted in a desert fully capable of delivering him over to an anonymous death, the spent prophet wishes for death. Typical of fatigued warriors, he combines this desire for extinction with the self-preserving choice to sit under a tree rather than bake quickly under the Judean desert’s sun.

That is not the only juxtaposition of deep feelings that marks Elijah’s conviction. Morally, he both elevates and subjugates his own fragile life. ‘I am no better than my fathers’, says the man who has single-handedly routed the prophets of a competing god. And then this:

I alone am left among the prophets …

YHWH dares to penetrate the vertiginous delirium of the prophet’s respite by appearing to him, not in a great wind, not in an earthquake, but in what one English translation aptly calls ‘the sheer silence’. Already, the fiery voice of prophetism begins to seem a partial view of reality as YHWH envisages it, a reality in which Israel has been summoned to walk.

In the face of YHWH’s probing, Elijah once again appeals to his own zeal. He is, it seems, a man trained to equate zeal with righteousness, fire with God, and death with infidelity. He has reason to do so. Yet Israel cannot live on this bread alone.

YHWH responds with a further prophetic commissioning, yet not before instructing his prophet—whose plea for death he diplomatically ignores—that …

I have seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal.

Prophets alone would not win the battle for Israel’s soul, though this conflict could not be waged without them.

YHWH must have some who would listen to him in silence, some whose knees remain unbent though they do not war on Mount Carmel, a few whose fidelity to Israel’s one God would work itself out under the shadow of a totalitarian, royal idolatry that had no official space for them in its project.

A prophet’s tunnel vision knows nothing of such little ones.

Meanwhile, YHWH asks his prophet to return to work.