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CHAPTER 1: AHAB, KING OF ISRAEL - Three years' Famine in
Israel - Elijah meets Obadiah and Ahab - The Gathering on
Mount Carmel - The Priests of BaaI - Description of their Rites -
The time of the Evening Sacrifice - Elijah prepares the
Sacrifice - Elijah's Prayer - The Answer by Fire - Israel's
Decision - Slaughter of the Priests of Baal- The Cloud not
bigger than a Man's Hand - Elijah runs before Ahab to Jezreel.
(1 Kings 18)
THREE and a half years had passed since the ban of Elijah had driven clouds and
rain from the sky of Israel, and the dry air distilled no dew on the parched and barren
ground (comp. Luke 4:25; James 5:17^1 ). Probably one of these years had been spent
by the prophet in the retirement of Wadi Cherith; another may have passed before the
widow's son was restored from death to life; while other eighteen months of quiet
may have followed that event.
Surely, if ever, the terrible desolation which the prophet's word had brought upon the
land must by this time have had its effect upon Israel. Yet we meet no trace of
repentance in king or people: only the sullen silence of hopeless misery. What man
could do, had been attempted, but had signally failed. As the want and misery among
the people became more pressing, King Ahab had searched both the land and all
neighboring countries for Elijah, but in vain (1 Kings 18:10), while Jezebel had
wreaked her impotent vengeance on all the prophets of Jehovah on whom she could
lay hands, as if they had been Elijah's accomplices, to be punished for what she
regarded as his crime. If all the representatives of Jehovah were exterminated, His
power could no longer be exercised in the land, and she would at the same time crush
resistance to her imperious will, and finally uproot that hated religion which was
alike the charter of Israel's spiritual allegiance and of civil liberty. Yet neither Ahab
nor Jezebel succeeded. Though Elijah was near at hand, either in Ahab's dominions
or in those of Jezebel's father, neither messenger nor king could discover his place of
retreat. Nor could Jezebel carry out her bloody design. It affords most significant
illustration of God's purpose in raising up "prophets," and also of the more wide
sense in which we are here to understand that term, that such was their number, that,
however many the queen may have succeeded in slaying, at least a hundred of them
could still be hid, by fifties, in the limestone caverns with which the land is
burrowed. And this, we infer, must have been in the immediate neighborhood of the
capital, as otherwise Obadiah (the "servant of Jehovah"), the pious governor of
Ahab's palace (comp. 1 Kings 4:6; 2 Kings 18:18; Isaiah 22:15), could scarcely have
supplied their wants without being detected (1 Kings 18:4). Nor was Obadiah the
only one in Israel who "feared Jehovah," though his position may have been more
(^)