Limping on two crutches

Where we are

Three years of drought have passed. The lectionary skips the first nineteen verses of chapter 18 — Obadiah hiding a hundred prophets in caves, Ahab and Elijah meeting on the road, the summons to Carmel — and gives us the contest entire, twenty verses, one of the longest weekday first readings in the cycle. Carmel is a ridge running to the Mediterranean, on the border between Israel and Phoenicia: neutral ground, and Baal's own coast.

What happens

Ahab assembles the people and the prophets on Mount Carmel. Elijah puts the question: "How long will you straddle the issue? If Yahweh is Theos, follow him; if Baal, follow him." The people say nothing. He proposes the test: two bulls, two altars, no fire. "You call on your gods, and I will call on Yahweh. The god who answers with fire is Theos." All the people agree that this is fair. Baal's prophets go first. They call from morning to noon — Answer us, Baal! — and there is no sound, no answer, and they hobble around the altar they have made. At noon Elijah taunts them: "Call louder, for he is a god; he may be busy, or may have wandered off, or may be on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." They cry louder and gash themselves with swords and spears until blood gushes over them; they rave on until the time of the evening offering, but there was no sound, no one answering, no one listening. Then Elijah calls the people to him. He repairs Yahweh's ruined altar with twelve stones, digs a trench around it, lays the wood and the bull, and has four jars of water poured over the offering three times, until the water runs down and fills the trench. At the time of the evening offering he prays — briefly. Yahweh, Theos of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known this day that you are Theos in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, Yahweh! Answer me, that this people may know that you, Yahweh, are Theos and that you have brought them back to their senses. Fire falls and consumes the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and licks up the water in the trench. The people fall on their faces: "Yahweh is Theos! Yahweh is Theos!"

What to notice

The opening question contains the chapter's best pun, and English cannot keep it. Ad matai attem poschim al shtei ha-se'ippim — how long will you go hopping on two forked branches? Pasach means to limp, and se'ippim are forked sticks or crutches. The picture is of someone trying to walk on two crutches that lean opposite ways, and getting nowhere with great effort. And pasach is the verb of Passover — Yahweh passed over, skipped past, the houses in Egypt. The word for the founding act of Israel's deliverance is being used for its indecision.

The joke then comes back. When Baal's prophets circle their altar, the narrator writes va-yefassechu al ha-mizbeach — they went limping around the altar. Same verb. The people are limping between two options and the professionals are limping around the furniture. The whole scene is choreographed as a hobble.

The people's silence is the loudest thing in the chapter. Ve-lo anu ha-am oto davar — the people did not answer him a word. Asked to choose between Yahweh and Baal, in public, they say nothing at all, and Elijah does not press it. He builds a demonstration instead. The narrative's judgment on hedging is not an argument; it is a day.

The mockery is coarser than translations allow. Ki siach ve-ki sig lo is usually rendered he is meditating, or he has wandered away. Siach can mean musing, but the pairing with sig, a turning-aside, has been read since antiquity as the polite way of saying he has stepped out to relieve himself. The list runs: he is occupied, he has stepped aside, he is travelling, he is asleep and needs waking. Every item is a limitation a god should not have, and the last one — yashen, asleep — is the one Psalm 121 denied of Yahweh two days ago in these readings.

The self-laceration is described neutrally. Ke-mishpatam, according to their custom — the narrator reports the gashing as ordinary professional practice, not as barbarism, which somehow makes it worse. And the verb for what they do all afternoon is va-yitnabbe'u, they prophesied: the same root used of Israel's own prophets. The text declines to call it something else.

The twelve stones are a political act. Elijah rebuilds the ruined altar with twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of Yahweh had come: "Israel shall be your name." He is standing in the northern kingdom, which has been a separate state for two generations. Building an altar of twelve stones there is a claim that the division is not real, and the narrator pauses the action to say so.

The water is not explained, and the trench is measured in seed. Twelve jars, poured three times, in the third year of a drought — Carmel runs down to the sea, which is the usual explanation, though the text never offers one. And the trench is sized ke-veit sa'atayim zera, as big as would hold two seahs of seed: the narrator measures a ditch in agricultural volume, in a famine.

And the timing ties Carmel to Jerusalem. Baal's prophets rave until the time of the evening offering; Elijah prays at that hour. It is the moment of the minchah in a temple two days' walk south, in another kingdom. The prophet who has been driven out of every institution keeps the institution's clock.

The prayers are the contrast the chapter is built on. One side gets a whole day, ecstatic dance, blood and volume. The other gets sixty-odd words, spoken once, containing no demand for spectacle: let it be known that you are Theos, that I am your servant, and that I have done this at your word. Elijah asks for one thing that the fire cannot supply — that this people may know that you have turned their hearts back, a change that has to happen in the crowd, not on the altar.