ELIJAH PART 1

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PROPHET

Elijah and his student Elisha are different kind of prophets than the rest of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible.  If we think of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel etc what we know them for are their visions, their pronouncements and their calls for repentance and promise of comfort.  These prophets have some kind of connection with the divine who comes to them, and they share what they have heard.  Here’s the introduction to Jeremiah, as one example.  “The words of Jeremiah…the word of YHVH came to him in the days of King Josiah…The word of the Lord came to me:” and then follows what is conveyed to him.  Here’s Ezekiel: “In the thirtieth year on the fifth day of the fourth month, when I was in the community of exiles by the Chebar Canal, the heavens opened and I saw visions of God.” Then his vision is described. The divine is the agent, the prophet a vessel.

But Elijah is different.  No elaborate visions, no poetry, little talk, no discernable doctrine other than belief that YHVH is the true God and all others are false.  Elijah is a prophet whose stories are about what he did and they involved no preaching and calling upon masses of people to repent.

Elijah is pertinent to us as folks interested in revitalizing earth based Judaism because he represents a kind of religious practitioner who is common to indigenous cultures. Rather than being a learned legal scholar or an expounder of a complicated doctrine, he is instead a healer and a wonder maker with a hard won pipeline to the divine that comes from spending much time in the wilderness. We have too few models of Jews connected to the divine through the earth.  But Elijah is one and I will share about others in this blog over time.  

There are five stories about Elijah from the book of Kings that I will start sharing in the next blog post.