When Elijah ran ahead of the king’s chariot, Yashar had seen the city of Jezreel in a kind of vision beforehand but he had no idea how to get there. It seemed that Elijah had insisted that they meet there as a test. Having no other plan but to trust in God, Yashar began away. After a tricky start down the backside of Mount Carmel during which he often slipped and fell, the terrain began to roll more gently toward the Kishon Stream. Yashar found the once struggling creek bed surging like a river from fresh rain. How wonderful then, after years of breathing dust and spitting sand, to splash in puddles and slip on wet rocks.
Eddies spun in the Kishon’s water, the sky grew darker and the rain fell heavier still.
At a bend in a shaded glade, Yashar found the bodies of Jezebel’s priests. He had never before seen a dead man, much less hundreds, and so he ran from the spot praying that the storm would wash away every trace of what had happened there. He crossed a rope bridge farther downstream and continued along the opposite bank where it seemed easier to walk. Once down upon the flats he guessed his bearings, crossed the stream once more and set off in the direction he supposed Elijah had run.
How hard could it be to find an entire town?
*
Earlier in the day at Carmel, Ahab had sent a runner to Samaria to summon his steward, Obadiah, to Jezreel. Obadiah had left at once and arrived in town not long after the king. Though he had heard of the slaughter of Jezebel’s priests, Obadiah had hoped to find the king upbeat and encouraged by the weather.
“What a wonderful evening, sir,” Obadiah said as he met Ahab at the Jezreel palace. “At Ibleam I passed your people lifting praises up to the Lord.”
“Elijah brought the drought,” Ahab muttered, “now we honor his god for its end.” He seemed about to cry. “I should have killed him on the mountain,” he said. “Obadiah, I had a thousand chances to do it but somehow the right moment never came. In truth I thought the rabble would finish him for me but once Elijah brought down fire…”
Obadiah watched the king’s eyes cloud with a hundred emotions, fear, awe, doubt…
“Even I,” Ahab sighed, “fell to my knees full of fear and yes, praise. If I had dared to speak against the prophet then, Israel would have done me in.”
“I heard what they did to your priests,” Obadiah said.
“Not my priests, Jezebel’s,” Ahab said. “She’s lost her doting clowns and has been embarrassed, again, by the one man she hates more than any other in Israel, and believe me she hates quite a few. I promise you, Obadiah, I will not have a moment’s peace.” He shook his head. “Rain or no rain, this will not sit well with the queen.”
“I fail to understand her thinking,” Obadiah said.
“It’s because you have no wife, sir,” Ahab said. “How I envy you. The best of them weigh matters with their hearts. Jezebel’s heart, if it exists at all, is black as night. She will be bent on nothing less than murdering poor Elijah.”
“God’s anointed, and you call him poor Elijah?”
“You wait,” Ahab said. “I can’t stand the man but I can pity him.”
“God’s justice, not Elijah’s power, began this drought, O king.”
“Tell that to the queen of Israel,” Ahab spat. “Elijah cast a spell and nothing more.”
“You cannot truly believe that, sir,” Obadiah said. “Can even the most accomplished sorcerer make the mountains themselves shake?”
“You felt the earth tremble on your way here from Samaria?”
“Everyone felt it,” Obadiah said. “The late afternoon heat lifted like a veil in a breeze. O such mercy! The people cried for joy then, knowing what was to come.”
“Whom did they praise?” Ahab asked.
Obadiah could not help but smile a little before he answered, “Not the Baalim.”
“I have yet another mystery to report,” Ahab said, “one that you could not have seen. It is easily sixteen miles from Carmel here to Jezreel, is that not so?” He waited for Obadiah to nod. “I tell you, sir, old Elijah, after standing all this long day in the sun, ran before my team to these gates the entire way.”
“No.”
“In this same storm, sir, glancing back and laughing like a mad man. I ran like the wind as a youth, Obadiah, but no natural man could do what the prophet did today.”
“Then why not accept, O king, the miracles you have witnessed as proof of the one, sovereign God of Israel?”
The king stepped to a window and looked out a long time before answering. The storm that had begun at Carmel had not yet abated in Jezreel. “I am in great need of mercy,” he said between claps of thunder. “The queen will be inconsolable when she learns of her dead priests. I can only hope that her hatred for Elijah will surpass her disgust for me.”
“That,” Obadiah said, “seems quite likely.”
*
On the day of the confrontation at Carmel, Jezebel had waited in her big house in Samaria, sitting beside her window looking west. She had known that her priests would go first. When rain failed to appear until late that afternoon, rather than celebrate the end of the years-long drought, Jezebel swore an oath against Elijah. Ahab confirmed her worst suspicions later that evening when he returned home, speaking at length of miracles and touching only lightly on the murders.
“You do not claim,” Jezebel said, “that Elijah, by his own hand, was able to slay nearly five hundred of my favorites with a single weapon?”
“Of course not,” Ahab said. “The prophet does not carry a weapon.”
“Is it also safe to assume,” Jezebel said, “that my men did not simply drop to their knees and wait to be slaughtered?”
“In truth, woman,” Ahab said, “they did nearly exactly that. They had cut themselves earlier, you see, when nothing happened in the sky. They bled for a very long time, terrifically. It seemed they had no will to save themselves as early as midday, fearing their return to Samaria, I suppose, and having to face you.”
“Don’t dare attempt to put their deaths on me,” Jezebel hissed. “Tell me now, Ahab, who was it that killed them?”
“You want to know who delivered the actual, physical blows?”
“I want to hear their names.”
Ahab laughed a little. “How would I know, lady? A riot happened. I did not line up the rabble and call roll. The thousands that had come up the mountain simply sided with Elijah, the man who carried the day. Is that my fault? They, like I, watched him summon fire from heaven. Think about it. You too would have been impressed. They willingly followed Elijah’s orders afterward, goading your men down the south slope of the mountain toward the Kishon Stream… Have you ever been to Carmel?”
“And there,” Jezebel said, “Israel murdered them all.”
“Yes, Israel, generally,” Ahab sighed. “There were no foreign, invited guests. The men of Israel butchered your priests; heads, arms, innards…no more than hacked up stuff for birds and foxes when they finished, much worse than anything I’ve ever seen at war. But there is only one name of interest in this incitement, lady, a single man to blame.”
“Elijah,” Jezebel said, shaking with emotion.
Ahab nodded solemnly, relieved.