Elijah challenges Baal's prophets

 

All those records of the kings! Then we come to Ahab, king of Israel, when Asa was king of Judah. He, we are told, “...did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him” I Kings 16:30; and: “... Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him” I Kings 16:33.

I ask myself, “Why so many prophets?” In Chapter 18 we hear of Obadiah hiding 100 “prophets of the Lord” and Jezebel “cutting them off.” Elijah has entered the story now with his confrontation with the 450 prophets of Baal, and 400 “prophets of the groves...which eat at Jezebel’s table.”

My Bible dictionary says: “...the prophets have been considered moral and ethical innovators, who brought Israelite religion to a higher level of development than it had previously achieved. In the twentieth century, many of the traditional understandings of the prophets have been questioned, and they have been variously portrayed as great preachers, as moral philosophers, as raving ecstatics, as isolated mystics, as cultic officials, as political analysts, and as keepers of old Israelite traditions.” A prophet was considered to have a special relationship to God, to serve as a channel of communication between the human and divine worlds.

And so we have prophets of God and prophets of Baal. I am surprised at the Bible dictionary’s short definition of Baal: “… the identity of Baal is clear. Baal is a weather god associated with thunderstorms.” And “The phenomena associated with thunderstorms were closely linked to Baal. Baal was said to appoint the seasons of rains. Clouds were thought to be part of his entourage. Lightning was his weapon, and it may have been his invention. The windows of Baal’s palace were thought to correspond to openings in the clouds through which rain flowed. Rain was important to Canaanite agriculture, and Baal was consequently a god of fertility – a prodigious lover as well as a giver of abundance.”

So Elijah challenged Baal’s prophets. It seems Baal’s prophets believed their god would send lightning to create the fire Elijah demanded. He said: “...call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God” (I Kings 18:24). The 450 prophets put in a great effort, but no fire came to burn up the wood and the bullock that had been provided. (Was the bullock an offering to the gods?)

Elijah made the conditions for his “turn” much more difficult by having lots of water poured over the wood and bullock. (It hadn’t rained for 3½ years so that was significant too perhaps – part of Elijah’s trust in his God.) He made an altar of stones (in the name of the Lord), dug a trench about it, put wood in order and laid the bullock on it, and had four barrels of water poured on the sacrifice and the wood. Oh dear! He had that done three times!

Elijah waited for the time of the evening sacrifice and prayed: “...Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am they servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word” (I Kings 18:36).

I gather that all this was to impress “the people.” We read in I Kings 18:21: “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. ... The people answered him not a word.” He thinks he is the only prophet of the Lord left.

And so these people witnessed Baal's powerlessness as opposed to the proof of God’s power when “… the fire fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench” (I Kings 18:38).

To finish off the tale of prophets, we might turn to the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy for a scientific definition: “Prophet. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth” (p. 593).

A Bible scholar once asked the question: “When did the last prophet live?” One in the group answered that all who practise Christian Science are prophets according to that definition.

Joyce Voysey