Did Elijah die?

The last walk

Elijah knows the day has come, and so does everyone around him. From Gilgal to Bethel to Jericho, the sons of the prophets keep asking Elisha the same thing: “Do you know that Yahweh will take away your master from over you today?” (2 Kings 2:3). At the Jordan, Elijah strikes the water with his rolled-up mantle, the river parts, and the two cross on dry ground. Elisha asks for a double portion of his spirit. Then:

As they continued on and talked, behold, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated them; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.

Read it slowly. The chariot does not carry Elijah; it comes between the two men. The whirlwind takes him up. Painters put him at the reins, but the text never does. Elisha cries out, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” and “He saw him no more” (2 Kings 2:12). The mantle falls, and Elisha picks it up.

Fifty men, three days

The prophets of Jericho refuse to accept it. Perhaps, they say, Yahweh’s Spirit has picked him up and dropped him “on some mountain or into some valley.” Elisha tells them not to bother. They insist until he gives in, and fifty strong men search for three days without finding him (2 Kings 2:16–18). The scene closes the door on a hidden death or a lost grave. Moses died in Moab, and “no man knows where his tomb is” (where is Moses buried?). Elijah has no grave at all.

There is an irony here. Years before, the same prophet sat under a broom bush in the desert and begged, “Now, O Yahweh, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). He is the one man in the story who never dies.

Only Enoch is like him

The Bible has one other case. Enoch, the seventh in the line from Adam, “walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). The same Hebrew verb, take, is used of Elijah’s going. The Letter to the Hebrews says Enoch was taken “so that he wouldn’t see death” (Hebrews 11:5).

Readers have raised puzzles. 2 Chronicles 21:12 has a letter arriving “from Elijah the prophet” for King Jehoram of Judah, whose reign seems to begin after Elijah is gone; explanations range from a letter written in advance to a slip in the record. Some Christians cite Jesus’s words, “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended” (John 3:13), or the line that it is “appointed for men to die once” (Hebrews 9:27). From these, writers such as Tertullian concluded that Enoch and Elijah were kept alive to return at the end and die then (On the Soul 50), and many identified them with the two witnesses of Revelation 11.

Expected back

Because Elijah never died, he could return. The last prophet of the Hebrew Bible promises exactly that.

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes.

The Gospels are full of the hope. People ask John the Baptist whether he is Elijah, and he says, “I am not” (John 1:21), yet Jesus says of him, “this is Elijah, who is to come” (Matthew 11:14). Elijah appears beside Moses at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:3), and at the cross bystanders think Jesus is calling him. In the Talmud, Elijah walks the roads and talks with rabbis (Bava Metzia 59b; Sanhedrin 98a). Jewish families still pour him a cup at Passover, and the Quran honors him as Ilyas (37:123).