Who was Elijah in the Bible?

A man from the edge

Elijah the Tishbite, who was one of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”

That is how Elijah enters the Bible: no father, no childhood, no call scene. Just a man from Gilead, the rough highland east of the Jordan, with one sentence for the king. Tishbe has never been firmly located; Christian tradition places it near Listib in northern Jordan, where the ruins of a Byzantine church bear his name, Mar Elias. Later the king’s men describe him in a line: “a hairy man, and wearing a leather belt around his waist” (2 Kings 1:8).

His years are the reign of Ahab, about 874 to 853 BC, a strong king whose 2,000 chariots appear in Assyrian records, and of his Phoenician queen, Jezebel, who brought the worship of Baal to the capital, Samaria.

What he did

1. The drought. He announces it, hides by the brook Cherith where ravens feed him, then lodges with a widow at Zarephath, near Sidon, whose flour and oil never run out and whose son he brings back to life (1 Kings 17).
2. Mount Carmel. In the third year he challenges 450 prophets of Baal to a contest by fire. Their god never answers; fire falls on his soaked altar, then the rain (1 Kings 18).
3. The flight. Jezebel vows to kill him, and he runs south, all the way to Horeb (why he ran).
4. Elisha. He throws his mantle over his successor, a farmer plowing with twelve yoke of oxen (19:19–21).
5. Naboth’s vineyard. When Jezebel has Naboth killed for his land, Elijah meets Ahab in the vineyard: “Have you found me, my enemy?” “I have found you” (21:20).
6. Fire on the captains. When Ahab’s son Ahaziah sends to consult Baal Zebub, the god of Ekron, Elijah sends back a death sentence, and fire falls on two companies of fifty sent to fetch him (2 Kings 1).
7. The whirlwind. He parts the Jordan with his mantle, a chariot of fire separates him from Elisha, and a whirlwind takes him up (did he die?).

A new Moses, with fire

Elijah wrote no book. Unlike Isaiah or Jeremiah, he lives only in stories, and the stories keep echoing Moses: forty days to the mountain of God, a cave on Horeb, water parted for a crossing. His signature is fire, on Carmel, on the soldiers, in the chariot. Not every reader is at ease with it. When James and John offer to call down fire on a Samaritan village “just as Elijah did,” Jesus rebukes them (Luke 9:54–55). The letter of James draws a humbler portrait.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months.

Still expected

Because he never died, Elijah was expected back. The Gospels dress John the Baptist like him, in camel’s hair with a leather belt (Mark 1:6), and say John would go “in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17). Some people thought Jesus was Elijah (Matthew 16:14). Jewish families pour him a cup at Passover and sing to him as the Sabbath ends. The Quran counts Ilyas among the righteous prophets (6:85; 37:123), Eastern churches keep his feast on July 20, and the Carmelite order takes its name from his mountain.