The Life
Elijah is the most fiery figure in the entire Old Testament. He came out of the hill country of Gilead, east of the Jordan, around 870 B.C. We know almost nothing about his early life. The Bible introduces him in 1 Kings 17 with a single startling sentence in which he tells King Ahab that no rain will fall in Israel until he says so. Then he disappears for three and a half years. The drought he announced lasted exactly that long. When he reappears, he challenges 450 prophets of Baal to a contest on Mount Carmel; he calls down fire from heaven that consumes a water-soaked sacrifice; he slaughters the false prophets at the brook Kishon; he runs forty days into the wilderness to escape Jezebel; he hears the still small voice of God on Mount Horeb; he anoints kings and prophets at the divine command; and at the end of his life, walking with his disciple Elisha by the Jordan, a chariot of fire and horses of fire come down out of heaven and he is carried up alive in a whirlwind. He is one of only two figures in the entire Bible (along with Enoch) who never tasted death. The Orthodox Church teaches that he is still alive and that he will return at the end of the age, alongside Enoch, to confront the Antichrist and call the world to repentance before the Second Coming of Christ.
The first time Elijah appears in the Bible, he walks into the throne room of Ahab, king of Israel, and says: “As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word” (1 Kings 17:1). Then he turns around and walks out. Ahab was the most powerful king in the region. His wife Jezebel had imported hundreds of priests of Baal to staff the temples she had built across Israel; Baal was specifically the storm god, the deity supposedly responsible for rain. Elijah’s declaration was therefore not merely a meteorological prediction; it was a frontal challenge to the entire religious infrastructure of the kingdom. The skies closed. No rain fell. The land dried up. The crops failed. The cattle died. For three and a half years the drought spread destruction across Israel, and the prophets of Baal prayed and cut themselves and danced and could do nothing about it. The Lord, meanwhile, sent Elijah to a hidden brook called Cherith, where ravens brought him bread and meat morning and evening, and the brook gave him water until the brook itself dried up. Then the Lord sent him to Zarephath in Phoenicia (Jezebel’s home country), where a poor widow fed him with the last of her flour and oil. The flour and oil never ran out for the entire drought, and when the widow’s son later died, Elijah raised him from the dead by stretching himself upon the boy three times and praying.
After three and a half years of drought, the Lord told Elijah to go to Ahab and announce that the rain would soon return. Elijah went, and on the way he met Obadiah, the chief steward of the palace, who was a secret servant of the Lord; he had hidden a hundred prophets of the Lord in caves to protect them from Jezebel’s purge. Elijah told Ahab to gather all the people of Israel to Mount Carmel, along with the 450 prophets of Baal who ate at Jezebel’s table. They gathered. Elijah stood before the assembled multitude and said: “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him” (1 Kings 18:21). The people answered nothing. Elijah proposed a contest. Two bullocks would be prepared, one for the prophets of Baal, one for him. They would be laid on altars without fire underneath. Each side would call on its god. The God who answered by fire would be God. The prophets of Baal agreed. They went first. They called on Baal from morning until noon, then until afternoon, leaping on the altar, cutting themselves with knives until the blood gushed out, prophesying frantically. There was no voice, no answer, nothing. Elijah mocked them: “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked” (18:27). At the time of the evening sacrifice, Elijah called the people near. He repaired the broken altar of the LORD with twelve stones for the twelve tribes. He laid the wood, cut the bullock in pieces, and laid it on. Then he had four barrels of water poured over the sacrifice three times, until the water filled the trench around the altar. Then he prayed a brief, simple prayer: “LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the LORD God” (18:36-37). Fire fell from heaven and consumed the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. The whole people fell on their faces and confessed: “The LORD, He is the God; the LORD, He is the God” (18:39). Elijah brought the prophets of Baal down to the brook Kishon and there slew them. Then he climbed back up Carmel, bowed down to the ground with his face between his knees, and prayed for rain. After he sent his servant seven times to look toward the sea, the seventh time the servant reported a small cloud the size of a man’s hand rising out of the sea. Soon the heavens were black with clouds and a great rain came down. The drought had ended.
After Carmel and the slaughter of the prophets of Baal, Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying: by tomorrow your life will be like theirs. Elijah — the same prophet who had just called fire down from heaven — was suddenly afraid. He ran for his life. He went a day’s journey into the wilderness, sat down under a juniper tree, and asked to die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers” (1 Kings 19:4). He fell asleep. An angel touched him and gave him a cake baked on the coals and a jar of water. He ate, drank, and slept again. The angel touched him a second time and said: “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.” Strengthened by this food, he walked forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb — the same mountain where Moses had received the Law. He came to a cave there and lodged in it. The word of the Lord came to him: “What doest thou here, Elijah?” He answered: “I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” The Lord said: “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD.” Then a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke the rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire — a still small voice. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle, came out, and stood at the entrance of the cave. The Voice came again: “What doest thou here, Elijah?” The encounter on Horeb is the opposite of the encounter on Carmel. At Carmel the Lord came in fire that fell from the sky and consumed everything in its path; at Horeb the Lord came in a whisper. Both are real. Both are the same Lord. But the deeper presence is the gentle one.
Elijah’s last day on earth is recorded in 2 Kings 2 with extraordinary precision. He knew it was coming. So did Elisha, his disciple. So did the sons of the prophets at Bethel and Jericho. They tried to get Elisha to leave Elijah, knowing what was about to happen. Elisha refused. Master and disciple walked together from Gilgal to Bethel to Jericho and finally to the Jordan. At each town Elijah asked Elisha to stay behind. Elisha answered each time: “As the LORD liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.” At the Jordan, Elijah took his mantle, rolled it up, struck the waters, and the river divided. They crossed on dry ground (just as the Hebrews had crossed the Red Sea under Moses, and just as Joshua had crossed the Jordan a few centuries earlier). On the far side, Elijah said to Elisha: “Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee.” Elisha asked: “I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me.” Elijah answered: “If thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if not, it shall not be so.” As they walked on talking together, suddenly there appeared between them a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha cried out: “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!” He saw him no more. He took up the mantle that had fallen from Elijah, returned to the Jordan, struck the waters with it, and they parted again. The sons of the prophets watching from the far bank said: “The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha.” Elijah is one of only two figures in the entire Bible who never tasted death, the other being the patriarch Enoch (Genesis 5:24, Hebrews 11:5). The Orthodox Church teaches that he is still alive, that he was taken up bodily into the heavenly realm, and that he will return at the end of the age to confront the Antichrist before the Second Coming of Christ.
The very last verses of the Old Testament — the closing words of the prophet Malachi, the final words of the entire Hebrew prophetic tradition before the four hundred years of silence that preceded the coming of Christ — are about Elijah. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:5-6). The whole Old Testament ends pointing forward to Elijah’s return. When Saint John the Forerunner began his ministry by the Jordan four hundred years later, the Jewish authorities sent a delegation to ask: are you Elijah? John said no. But the Lord Jesus Christ, looking at the same John, said yes. “If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come” (Matthew 11:14). The angel Gabriel had announced to John’s father Zacharias before John’s conception that the child would go before the face of the Lord “in the spirit and power of Elias” (Luke 1:17). Saint John the Forerunner was the second Elijah, fulfilling the Malachi prophecy in his ministry of repentance preparation for the First Coming of Christ. But the Orthodox tradition teaches that the prophecy will also be fulfilled in a different way at the Second Coming. Elijah himself — the historical Elijah, taken up alive in the chariot of fire, still alive in the heavenly realm — will return at the end of the age, alongside Enoch, to confront the Antichrist and call the world to repentance before the Second Coming of Christ. He will be slain by the Antichrist, and his death (along with Enoch’s) will be one of the supreme signs of the imminent eschatological climax. This is why the Orthodox liturgical tradition addresses him as “the second Forerunner of the coming of Christ”: Saint John the Forerunner prepared for the First Coming, and Elijah will prepare for the Second.
These verses are the heart of Elijah’s entire spiritual legacy. He had just witnessed the most dramatic miracle of the Old Testament — fire from heaven on Carmel — and immediately afterward fled into the wilderness in despair, asked to die, and was carried by miraculous food across forty days into the cave on Mount Horeb. There the Lord met him not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in a still small voice. The Hebrew is even more striking than the English: it literally means “the sound of thin silence.” That phrase has shaped the entire Orthodox tradition of contemplative prayer for two thousand years. The hesychast tradition (from the Greek hesychia, meaning silence or stillness) takes the Horeb encounter as its supreme Old Testament foundation. The deeper a soul progresses into authentic prayer, the less it expects God to come in dramatic external manifestations and the more it learns to listen for the gentle Voice in the silence of the heart. The wind, the earthquake, and the fire are not absent from authentic spiritual life; they are the moments of public witness, of dramatic vocation, of fiery zeal. But the deepest encounter with God is not in any of those. It is in the still small voice. Elijah — the most fiery prophet in the entire Old Testament — is also the supreme teacher of contemplative silence. The two are not opposites. They are the framework of authentic spiritual life.
When the Lord asked Elijah at the cave on Mount Horeb what he was doing there, Elijah answered with this single sentence: I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts. The Hebrew word for jealous (qana) is the same word the Lord uses to describe Himself: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5). It is not the petty human jealousy that resents another’s success. It is the holy jealousy that loves something so that it cannot bear to see it dishonored. Elijah loved the worship of the One God so that he could not bear to see Israel give itself over to Baal. He loved the covenant of the Lord with His people so that he risked his life to defend it. That holy jealousy is what made him a prophet. The Apostle Paul says the same thing about himself: “I am jealous over you with godly jealousy” (2 Corinthians 11:2). The Lord Jesus Christ shows the same thing when He cleanses the Temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and driving out the cattle: “The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up” (John 2:17, citing Psalm 69:9). Holy jealousy, godly zeal, sacred passion for the things of God — these are not character flaws to be apologized for. They are the foundation of authentic prophetic life. Without them, religion becomes lukewarm and eventually dies. With them, the soul becomes capable of standing alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal on a mountain and waiting for fire to fall.
In approximately 30 A.D., on a high mountain in Galilee identified by patristic tradition as Mount Tabor, the Lord Jesus Christ took with Him three disciples — Peter, James, and John — and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun. His clothing became as white as the light. Two figures appeared and stood with Him in the glory: Moses and Elijah. They spoke with the Lord about the exodus that He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem — His coming Passion and Resurrection. Peter, overwhelmed, said: Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tabernacles, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a Voice came out of the cloud: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him.” The disciples fell on their faces in fear. When they looked up, Moses and Elijah were gone, and Jesus was standing alone. Elijah had been taken up in the chariot of fire approximately 870 years before. He had been continuously alive in the heavenly realm for nine centuries. Now there he was, standing in the divine Light, speaking with the Lord about the Passion. He had been waiting for this. He had prophesied for years against Ahab and Jezebel and the prophets of Baal; he had heard the still small voice on Horeb; he had been taken up alive into the heavens; and now he was conversing with the Christ whose first coming his entire prophetic ministry had been preparing the people of God to receive. The Orthodox Church celebrates the Transfiguration on August 6 every year, and Elijah is one of the two figures who appears in every icon of that feast, standing to the right of Christ while Moses stands to the left.
Elijah matters to every Orthodox Christian for many reasons. He is the supreme example of fiery zeal for the Lord, the prophet who refused to compromise with the spirit of his age, the lone voice who stood against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and called fire down from heaven. He is also the supreme example of contemplative depth, the man who, after the most dramatic miracle of the Old Testament, fled into the wilderness in despair and discovered that the deepest encounter with God is not in the dramatic external manifestations but in the still small voice. He is the second Forerunner of the coming of Christ, alongside Saint John the Baptist who came in his spirit and power, and Elijah himself who will return at the end of the age before the Second Coming of the Lord. He is one of the two figures, alongside Moses, who appeared in the divine Light on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of the Lord. He is one of the two figures, alongside Enoch, who never tasted death and who lives still in the heavenly realm. He is the patron of those who pray for rain in time of drought, of those who stand alone for the faith against cultural pressure, of those who feel called to the wilderness, of those who have just experienced a great spiritual victory and immediately afterward fallen into depression. He is the friend of every soul that has ever heard the divine call to fiery zeal and the divine invitation to contemplative silence and recognized that they are not opposites but the framework of authentic prophetic life.