Canter Bridge

Elijah’s post-heroic flight to the desert may be a quest for further revelation. His destination–Horeb, the mountain of God—is the detail that suggest this. Regardless, Yahweh’s attitude towards his prophet-in-flight is complex. On the one hand, YHWH’s angel feeds Elijah, and on the strength of this sustenance the prophet travels ‘forty days and forty nights’ to Horeb. On the other, YHWH’s word is twice interrogative: ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

It seems, on balance, as though Elijah should have been somewhere else, mostly likely tending to his prophetic task in the turbulent peril that was Israel under Jezebel’s scheming gaze and Ahab’s consummate wimpery.

As for Elijah himself, he wants only to die, He feels certain his heroic zeal has gone unrequited by the very deity in whose service it was offered. Twice Elijah responds to YHWH’s probing question that ‘I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.’ The Lord seems not ungrateful, but rather unimpressed by Elijah’s curriculum vitae. He simply sends him back into the fray—not up the mountain of God for fresh revelation—with a command that he annoint two kings and a prophetic successor.

Within this complex interaction of murderous queen, zealous prophet, and remote-but-nourishing deity, YHWH’s mode of appearance is the most striking feature. YHWH does not appear amid those phenomena that, in the Baal-crazed spirituality of Israel, might have been supposed to bridge his transcendent habitation with the here-and-now of Israel. YHWH is not in the earthquake. YHWH is absent from the tempest. YHWH is not to be glimpsed in the fire. Where then is YHWH?

The text does not say. It satisfies itself with affirming that a ‘thin silence’ was the precursor to Elijah’s detection of YHWH’s word.

It is barely short of astonishing that this text should not have been filled out with all manner of adornment and explication, beginning perhaps with the Deuteronomistic Historian who received this bit of tradition into his epic history with the stunning discipline it must have required not to explain the thing. It is not even asserted, though the suggestion may be there, that YHWH appeared in or through the thin silence that followed the impressive accoutrements of his non-appearance. The silence simply precedes the announcement that Elijah heard his word. The reader is left on his own to interpret the relationship—or it absence—between silence and speech.

Few Old Testament stories leave more questions unanswered. Yet YHWH has spoken. Elijah has heard. The latter heads north, perhaps not willingly, out of the desert, away from his wish to die a solitary and unappreciated death, into that place where kings kill each others and prophets lean into the wind to declare YHWH’s will when only seven thousand will take heed.