Elijah (28 page)

Elisha’s stomach protested through the night for lack of food. He had not eaten since the late breakfast in Bethlehem, and Elijah had eaten little eve then. Yet the prophet showed no sign of hunger and little sign of discomfort from the cold.
He is a single-minded man,
Elisha thought,
and now he thinks only of the wilderness.

Halfway to Beersheba the road and wadi left the infertile chalk and entered a stretch of softer alluvium. The hills were low, rolling gently toward the desert. An occasional small, unwalled town nestled silent and dark on the side of a low hill, always next to a smaller wadi that fed into the Khalil.

The road turned to sand as the travelers approached Beersheba, placing tension on their calf muscles as their toes pressed ineffectively into the loose soil. Their steps were shorter, and the cold night air parched their throats as they breathed more deeply with their effort. Still, they reached Beersheba by midnight.

The city had light fortifications, but no encircling walls except around a small portion. Settlements were spread out instead all along wide wadis.

In the marketplace, travelers huddled in doorways or sat back to back in the open night each to protect the other, their mantles pulled over their heads and double wrapped around their bodies, sleeping lightly in mild fear of being molested or robbed. They waited to join caravans that might take them across the treacherous desert to their destinations. Some of them would wait for days.

Elijah and Elisha passed through the scattered sleepers as silently as they could. Some of them, no doubt, awoke to watch them carefully, but not one of them moved perceptibly. Beyond the marketplace they came to the trickling Wadi es Seba. Elijah stopped and spoke softly to his servant. The prophet’s voice was firm. “Elisha, I want to go into the wilderness, alone.”

Elisha had expected his master to say that, though he had hoped all during the journey that he would be able to stay with him, to help him through the period of discouragement. But Elijah had worked alone as a prophet all of his life, friendly toward the coenobias but independent of them. Even more than most prophets he drew strength from the solitude of the wilderness. But the servant could not hide his concern, for the southern desert was unfamiliar to Elijah.

“
You should eat first,” he cautioned.

“
No. I shall go now.”

“
You don’t know the wilderness, Elijah. At least wait until morning to ask directions.”

“
No.”

“
Then where shall you go?”

“
Where the Spirit of Yahweh leads me.”

“
You are being foolhardy to leave now, in the night, and without food. You must be hungry even now.”

Elijah did not respond to his servant’s challenge. “Stay here, Elisha,” he ordered. “If I am not back in a few days, return to your home.”

Elisha nodded, having learned more during their journey of the unswerving single-mindedness of the prophet. “I’ll wait a few days. Shalom. Yahweh be with you.”

Elijah looked toward the sky to get his bearings from the stars. Then he knelt and filled his waterskin from the narrow, shallow stream. Rising, he crossed the water in two steps and began his walk due south. Elisha watched him for several minutes, as his master made his way among the low-built houses that littered the wide valley. Soon Elijah disappeared in the darkness. The servant stared after him, into the void that he could feel in the air. Worried, he forced his mind to recall the prophet’s last gestures and his scanning of the sky.
He went due south
, Elisha concluded.
Because he does not know the way, he went due south. He does not swerve.

Chapter Fourteen

Within an hour after leaving Beersheba, Elijah left behind him the fertile soil of the broad valley. The low hills became harder and more barren, with rocks strewn promiscuously over the surface. They were anathema to him in the dark, as he kicked them or stepped on them with the sides of his feet.

By sunrise Elijah approached Mount Haleiqim. The journey would not have been particularly hard during daytime, but in spite of the bright moon he fell several times. His forearm was scraped painfully from one of the falls, and he walked with a limp, the result of striking his knee against a small, sharp stone. Though he did not feel hungry, the loss of strength had slowed him considerably. As he dragged his feet, the toe of each sandal pulled a tiny trough of dirt upward with each step.

Determined to go farther, and now with the daylight to aid him, he followed the foot of Mount Haleiqim toward the southeast. The land was treeless, but looking west to the lower region he could detect an occasional ribbon of winter-dulled growth, and sometimes a clump of tall cypress trees.

By the time he found a pass through the forbidding ridge he could see no sign of life anymore, though the pass itself gave evidence of rare travel. Once again he was almost due south of Beersheba. He turned east into the pass and then, shortly, north up into a deep valley between two high ridges. After an hour of climbing he came to a small level flat. In its center, fed by the bit of water that the level could hold for awhile, grew a single broom tree. It was leafless, but its myriad of thin branches broke the sun to offer a gray shade. Elijah lowered himself slowly to a sitting position, careful of his aching muscles and sore knee as he shifted his weight, and stretched out his legs in front of him.

He sat for a long time that way, moving only a hand occasionally to relieve an aching wrist or stretching his legs to fight off the ache that dominated his calves and thighs. He looked carefully at his bruised knee, but decided to ignore the dull pain since he could do nothing about it.

He wanted to cry, but he could not remember how. Instead, the despondency tightened in his throat. He sat in a stupor, unable to formulate words with which to pray away the despair. For more than an hour he stared at the bluffs that rose on either side and down the valley that stretched beyond his feet. The land and rocks were brown, austere in the desert sun, their rock-hard slopes and ridges speaking both of timeless peace and of timeless anguish. They reflected his soul, his deep certainty that Yahweh was God and that he was his prophet against the despair that his life had accomplished nothing.

He had laid his faith, never mind his life, on the line on Mount Carmel. Never had Yahweh granted a greater, more viable, more convincing sign that he was God. Not even the parting of the sea when Israel was led by Moses from Egypt, not even the manna in the desert, was a greater sign than the fire from heaven. Yet Jezebel was not convinced. And if she were not convinced, Israel would not be.

A sense of antagonism toward God filled his breast. Not doubt. He did not doubt God. He was angry with God—angry that Yahweh would lead him to perform such a magnificent miracle, then withhold from him his legitimate expectations of the results. The Israelites crossed the Red Sea on dry ground and they believed in Yahweh, at least for a while. They ate of the manna in the wilderness and they believed in Yahweh, at least for a while. But they saw fire descend from heaven to devour the offering, and the altar, and the water itself, and they did not believe, even for a while.

Elijah’s daydreams of years past gathered in the crevices of the mountains and permeated the air around the tree. They were the haze that hung in the desert sky and that rose in shimmers from the hot stones of the valley. For all those years of preaching in marketplaces, of meditating in the trackless regions of Gilead, of talking passionately under flickering lamps, he had dreamed of standing one day beside Ahab and from the palace balcony to announce to the assembled crowd below that from now to forevermore Yahweh was God, the only God, in Israel.

If ever that moment should have come, the miracle on Mount Carmel should have brought it.

Elijah lay back, the weariness of his body spreading into his soul until, like his leaden arms, his spent spirit lay prone on the earth. He had failed, and in his failure culminated the failures of all who came before him. Moses failed in him, and Samuel, and David, and Nathan, and all those myriad nameless thousands of faithful spokesmen for Yahweh whose names were known only to God. He was the end of the line of witnesses. Their success was worthless without his success. All of that effort had come to this end. Yahweh was rejected, with finality and in the face of a great display of his power.

Thought clings tenaciously to the exhausted mind, and the stories of Israel’s history poured in quick succession into his consciousness, filtering through the hazy disillusionment that hung in the sky.

Moses’ face, as he often had pictured it, large and square with long beard and bushy eyebrows, loomed in his vision. But now that face did not hold a fierce, prophetic determination. Now the skin hung more loosely and the eyes were hollow.

Samuel’s eyes stared at a throne, and his downcast head was shaking slowly back and forth, for what he had warned about a king, should Israel continue to demand one, had come to pass.

David, large-boned and muscular, tall and fair—his poet-warrior, warrior-poet’s face was the most agonized of all. That face reflected hurt more than disappointment, for the kingdom he had pulled together through a lifetime of brilliant leadership and commitment to Yahweh had broken in two, and the larger and richer of the pieces was drifting from the rock-hard mountains into the cavernous sea.

David’s face disappeared, and in its place paraded a sea of faces. Most of them were blank and featureless, but he recognized Caleb and Joshua, and Abijah and Nathan, all with features he had assigned to them as a boy listening to his father tell him the stories of Israel. All of them, to the last man, had lived for nothing. Their leadership, their suffering, their prayers, their commitment to Yahweh was wasted. And why should he, Elijah, a lone prophet among an apostate people, suppose himself able to turn a tide that had engulfed so many valiant and determined lives?

He spoke then, aloud but low, to the God he could not feel but who he knew was there. “It is enough,” he said slowly. “Now, Yahweh, take away my life. I am not better than my fathers.” Then his eyes closed in sleep, and his last thought was that he would not awake.

The sun crept higher to cast its full fury into the valley, to filter through the leafless branches of the broom tree to shine on the prone body of the prophet. He lay flat on his back, his arms wide above his head, his face turned to one side, the tangled shadows of thin branches criss-crossing his body. He did not move as the sun passed from view behind the western bluff, nor as the shadow deepened in the valley. Night fell, and with it the winter’s desert chill, and still he did not move.

At dawn, while the early light of the pre-morning reflected in bright pastels of orange and pink and red and purple and blue on the ridges that enclosed the valley, Elijah felt a tug at his shoulder. A voice broke through his deep slumber, as though from far away, the voice of a messenger of God, the touch of an angel, speaking and touching with the gentleness of love.

He woke slowly, climbing from a deep pit of slumber, making his way toward the sunlight at its top. The voice spoke, “Arise and eat.” And then the voice was gone, and the tug ceased.

He raised himself on one elbow and opened his eyes toward the soft smell of hot breadcake. A small fire smoldered only a few feet away, smelling of thornbranches. Baking on a flat stone place in the midst of it was a large breadcake. Nearby was a cruse of water.

Elijah pushed himself to his hands and knees and crawled to the fire. He cautiously pulled the breadcake from the hot stone and shifted it back and forth quickly from hand to hand until it cooled enough to be held. He ate slowly, washing down each bite with the clear, cool water from the cruse, wondering at the providence of God, yet wishing that God had taken his life instead.

After he ate, he lay down again in his place under the broom tree and quickly fell again into his deep slumber.

The sun moved as hot as before into the valley and beyond it to the west. The night fell as chilled as before on the desert floor. Elijah slept through it all, still, his body and soul quiet, without visions or dreams of Israel’s yesterday or his today. At the moment of the predawn’s most vivid painting, again he felt the tug at his shoulder, and in his cavern of sleep he heard the distant and gentle voice calling again to him, “Arise and eat.” This time he thought he heard another phrase, “because the journey ahead is too great for you.”

Waking was not as hard as the morning before, but even so the climb from the deep was as though he had been in the belly of the earth.

Three breadcakes this time baked on the flat stones in the midst of the fire. He retrieved them and ate them slowly, drinking in small swallows the water from the cruse.

The voice had said, “because the journey is too great for you.” Elijah pondered the words.
Yahweh did not want me to die yet, but what is the journey? Surely it is not to return to Israel, after Jezebel’s threat? What then?

By the time he took the last bite of breadcake and drank the last bit of water from the cruse he had decided. He would go to Mount Horeb, the Mountain of Yahweh in Sinai where Yahweh gave the Law to his people. There either he would hear God as vividly as Moses did or he would die.

Elijah laid the empty cruse aside, rose, and started down the valley. He struck a course due west when he emerged from the valley, walking at a fast pace, his route being for the most part downhill. Somewhere to the west, he knew, a road ran from Beersheba to Kadesh-barnea.