Elijah Called Fire From Heaven and Then Disappeared

The king of Israel had fallen through a lattice in his upper room in Samaria and was lying injured and afraid. His name was Ahaziah, son of Ahab, and he had grown up watching his parents fill the northern kingdom with idols and he had continued their work faithfully. Now he lay on the floor wondering whether he would recover, and instead of asking the God of Israel, he sent messengers to consult the Fly, the deity of Ekron, which was the god Baal-Zebub and was called this because flies were his symbol and flies were what gathered around offerings left to him in the temples of the Philistine plain.

God sent Elijah to intercept the messengers before they reached Ekron. Elijah stood in the road and asked them the question that defined his entire ministry: does Israel have no God of its own, that the king must send to a foreign deity to learn whether he will recover? Go back, he told them. Tell the king he will not get up from that bed. He will die.

The messengers turned around. The king, Josephus tells us in his Antiquities of the Jews, written toward the end of the first century CE, asked them why they had come back so soon. They described the man who had met them in the road: hairy, girt about with a leather belt. The king said at once, that is Elijah the Tishbite.

He sent a captain with fifty soldiers to bring Elijah in. The captain found Elijah sitting on top of a hill, which was simply where Elijah tended to be, elevated above the world and watching it from a distance. The captain ordered him to come down and come to the king. Elijah told him plainly that he could have fire from heaven before he could have Elijah, and he prayed, and a whirlwind of fire came down and destroyed the captain and all fifty men.

The king sent another captain with fifty more men. This captain also threatened. The fire came again. Fifty-one more dead.

The third captain was wiser. He came up the hill slowly, and he did not threaten. He said, I know that you are here against your will, that those before me were here against their will. He asked Elijah to have pity on the men with him, who had done nothing wrong, who were only following orders. He asked Elijah to come down willingly.

Elijah came down. He went to the king and told him the same thing he had told the messengers to tell him: because you treated God as though he were no god at all, and consulted Baal-Zebub as though he could tell you what God alone knows, you will die in this bed. Ahaziah died, as Elijah had said. He had no sons, and his brother Jehoram took the kingdom.

What follows in Josephus is the strangest sentence in the entire narrative: Elijah disappeared from among men, and no one knows of his death to this very day. He left behind his disciple Elisha. And regarding Elijah, as regarding Enoch who was before the Flood, the sacred books record that they disappeared, but in such a way that nobody knew that they died.

The fire episode and the disappearance belong together because they bracket the same mystery. A man who could call down fire from the sky and destroy a hundred soldiers without moving from his hill was not a man who could be arrested, who could be forced, who could be made to come down unless he chose to. The third captain understood this instinctively and survived because of it. The first two captains treated Elijah as a subject of the king and died as a result.

And then this man who had stood against Ahab and Jezebel, who had called drought upon the land and then ended it, who had raised the dead son of the widow of Zarephath, who had stood on Sinai and heard the still small voice after the wind and the earthquake and the fire, this man simply ceased to be present on the earth. No burial. No grave. No death scene. The books say he disappeared.

Jewish tradition, drawing on the second chapter of the Second Book of Kings and the Talmudic literature that elaborated it, understands Elijah's departure as an ascent in a fiery chariot, taken up by the whirlwind while his disciple Elisha watched and wept. The tradition also understands him to be still present, still active, visiting every circumcision ceremony and every Passover seder, moving through the world in disguise, sometimes as a poor man, sometimes as a merchant, sometimes as a wandering scholar who appears at the precise moment someone needs help and disappears before thanks can be given.

The Mekhilta, a tannaitic midrash on Exodus composed by the school of Rabbi Ishmael in the second century CE, connects Elijah directly to the covenant, to the commandments, to the chain of obligation that runs from Sinai through every generation. Elijah is not outside history. He is inside it, invisibly, at every moment that matters.

Josephus, writing as a historian, can only record what the books say and what he does not know. He does not know how Elijah died. He does not know where Elijah went. He places Elijah alongside Enoch as the two figures for whom the normal narrative of a life, which is to say the narrative that ends in a grave, simply does not apply. Both of them exist in the sacred books as men who were present and then were not, without the intermediary of death.

The fire that came down on the first two captains and the disappearance of the man who called it down are not separate stories. They are the same story told twice from different angles. This is a man for whom the normal laws that govern the boundary between life and death, between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine, have a different texture. He summons heavenly fire. He departs by heavenly means. The Maggid says: some people are not entirely of this world, even while they walk through it. Elijah walked through it, and then he kept walking, past the edge that the rest of us cannot cross.