The size of a hand

Where we are

The fire has fallen, the crowd has shouted Yahweh is Theos, and — in a verse the lectionary passes over — Baal's prophets have been killed at the Kishon. What remains is the thing the drought was declared for. Three years ago Elijah said there would be no rain except at his word. Today he says it.

What happens

Elijah said to Ahab, "Go up, eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain." Ahab goes up to eat and drink. Elijah climbs to the top of Carmel, crouches down to the earth and puts his head between his knees. He tells his servant, "Go up and look out to sea." The servant goes up, looks, and says, "There is nothing." Seven times Elijah says, "Go back again." The seventh time the servant says, "There is a cloud as small as a man's hand rising from the sea." Elijah says, "Go up and say to Ahab, 'Harness up and leave the mountain before the rain stops you.'" In a trice the sky grows dark with clouds and wind, and heavy rain falls. Ahab drives to Jezreel. But the hand of Yahweh was on Elijah, and he girded up his loins and ran before Ahab as far as the approaches to Jezreel.

What to notice

He hears it first. Ki qol hamon ha-gashem — for there is the sound of the roar of the rain — said under a clear sky, to a king, before anything is visible. Hamon is a crowd-noise word: the rumble of a multitude, the din of an army. Elijah reports a sound nobody else can hear as though it were a weather observation, and Ahab, whose prophets were slaughtered this afternoon, goes off to have lunch.

The posture is unique in the Hebrew Bible. Va-yighar artsah va-yasem panav bein birkav — he crouched to the earth and put his face between his knees. No other figure in scripture prays like this. It is a folded, self-enclosing position — the shape of someone waiting out a storm, or of a body curled in on itself — and the fact that the narrator specifies it at all suggests it looked strange. What the prophet is doing on the summit is not described as prayer. It is described as a posture, and the text leaves it at that.

Seven times, and the servant sees nothing six of them. Shuv sheva pe'amim — go back seven times. Six negative reports are recorded in one clause; only the seventh gets its own sentence. The narrator is unhurried about the repetition and precise about the failure, and Elijah gives no sign of doubting between attempts. He has already told the king it is raining.

And then the cloud, measured in the smallest available unit. Ke-khaf ish — like the palm of a man's hand, held up at arm's length against the horizon. Kaph is the hollow of the hand, and it is the same word the widow of Zarephath used two days ago in these readings for what was left in her jar: kaph qemach, a palmful of flour. Twice now the Elijah cycle has put the decisive quantity in a cupped hand — the flour that did not run out, and the cloud that ends a three-year drought.

The order that follows is given on that evidence alone. Not wait and see: harness up and go down before the rain stops you. One hand-sized cloud, and a king is told to move his chariot. The interval between the smallest visible sign and full commitment is zero, and the next sentence says the sky went black.

The last line is the strangest. Yad YHWH hayetah el-Eliyahu — the hand of Yahweh came upon Elijah — and he tucked up his robe and ran ahead of the royal chariot the seventeen miles to Jezreel. Running before the king's chariot is the position of a courier, part of the honour guard. The prophet who has just humiliated the crown escorts it home on foot, at speed, in the rain. Note also the second hand in six verses: a cloud like a man's kaph, and then Yahweh's yad on the prophet. And note where he is running to. Jezreel is where Jezebel is, and the first thing that happens in the next chapter is that she sends him a death threat and he runs for his life in the opposite direction.