Who fed Elijah in the wilderness?

Ravens at the brook

Elijah’s first words to King Ahab announce a drought: no dew and no rain except at his word (1 Kings 17:1). Then God sends him into hiding by a stream called Cherith, toward the Jordan, with a strange promise: “I have commanded the ravens to feed you there” (17:4).

The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the brook.

It is Israel’s menu from the exodus: “At evening you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread” (Exodus 16:12). Now one hunted man gets it, twice a day.

Why ravens?

The law of Moses lists “any kind of raven” among the unclean birds Israel may not eat (Leviticus 11:15). They are scavengers, and elsewhere in the Bible they are the birds that depend on God for their own meals: he provides “for the young ravens when they call” (Psalm 147:9), and Jesus tells his listeners, “Consider the ravens” (Luke 12:24). Here the birds God feeds become the ones who feed his prophet.

The Hebrew word for ravens has the same consonants as the word for Arabs, so a few interpreters have pictured desert neighbors bringing the food; nearly every translation keeps the birds. Either way, it does not last: “the brook dried up, because there was no rain in the land” (17:7).

A widow in Jezebel’s country

Next God sends Elijah north, to “Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon” (17:9), today’s Sarafand on the coast of southern Lebanon. This is Phoenician country, Queen Jezebel’s homeland, where Baal is worshiped. God says he has commanded a widow to feed him, but the woman gathering sticks at the town gate seems to know nothing about it.

As Yahweh your God lives, I don’t have anything baked, but only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jar. Behold, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and bake it for me and my son, that we may eat it, and die.

Elijah asks her to bake him a small cake first, with a promise: the jar of meal will not run out and the jar of oil will not fail until the rain comes. She does it, and “she, he, and her household ate many days” (17:15). When her son later stops breathing, Elijah carries him upstairs, stretches himself over the boy three times and gives him back alive (17:17–24). Jesus later reminds his hometown that Elijah was sent to this foreign widow, and Nazareth turns on him (Luke 4:25–29), the scene behind “no prophet is acceptable in his hometown”.

An angel under the broom bush

The third meal comes after Mount Carmel, when Jezebel swears to kill him and he runs south past Beersheba (why Elijah ran). A day into the desert he lies down under a broom bush, a “juniper tree” in older translations, and asks to die. An angel touches him: “Arise and eat!” By his head is a cake baked on the coals and a jar of water.

Yahweh’s angel came again the second time, and touched him, and said, “Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you.”

On the strength of that food he walks “forty days and forty nights to Horeb, God’s Mountain” (19:8), as long as Moses once stayed on that mountain without bread or water (Exodus 34:28).

Not to be confused

One more feeding in the same story often gets mixed up with these. While Jezebel was killing the prophets of Yahweh, Ahab’s steward Obadiah hid a hundred of them, fifty to a cave, and “fed them with bread and water” (1 Kings 18:4). Elijah was not among them. The man who shut the sky lived on what others brought him: birds, a starving foreigner and an angel.