Every assault upon truth must bring mockery and death upon the assailants. Elijah mocked the prophets on Carmel and slew them at Kishon.
Elijah was a prophet of truth, but of sternness and terror. He lived in a tempestuous atmosphere. Lightning seemed to play around his temples, and his voice was as thunder.
Van de Velde gives a vivid delineation of the precise locality of the Carmel contest. He was, it is believed, the first traveler who identified the site of the “Burning.” The rock shoots up in an almost perpendicular wall, more than two hundred feet in height on the side of the vale of Esdrelon. This wall made the burning visible over the whole plain and from all the surrounding heights, so that even those left behind and who had not ascended Carmel would still have been able to witness, at no great distance, the fire from Heaven that descended on the altar. Here the place must have been, for it is the only point of all Carmel where Elijah could have been so close to the brook Kishon as to take thither the priests of Baal and slay them, return again to the mountain and pray for rain, all in the short space of the same afternoon. Down 250 feet beneath the altar plateau is a vaulted and very abundant fountain. While all other fountains were dried up, one can well understand that there might have been found here that superabundance of water which Elijah poured so profusely over the altar.
ELISHA.
When Elijah supposed that his work was done he was ordered by Jehovah to go up and return on his way to the wilderness of Damascus; and he who supposed that his ministry was concluded had yet to anoint Hazael to be king over Syria and Jehu, the son of Nimshi, to be king over Israel.
But the anointing of these kings was a comparatively insignificant circumstance. The great point of the commission is contained in this sentence:
“And Elisha, the son of Shaphat of Abel-mehola, shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.”
Probably it had not occurred to Elijah that he could have a successor. A very subtle indication is thus given of his approaching end. The Lord, instead of telling Elijah that he had many a year left to spend in holy service, gave him to understand that even he, mighty prophet though he was, could be dispensed with, and a man of almost unknown name would be qualified by divine inspiration to take his room. We can not imagine Elijah’s feelings under these circumstances. If a great demonstration of regard had been made, on the part of the Lord God of Israel, because Elijah was weary, the prophet might have supposed himself to be of vital consequence to the divine economy; but to be told that Elisha, a man who was plowing the twelfth plow in the field while his eleven servants were plowing beside him, would succeed to the high dignity was really to inflict in the most gracious way a very solemn humiliation upon a man who had become so self-conscious as practically to ignore the resources of the living God.
Elisha was a man in what we should now term comfortable circumstances. As he was plowing in his field of Abel-mehola (“the meadow dance”) Elijah drew near and threw over the plowman his prophetic sheep-skin mantle, and passed on in silence, leaving Elisha himself to interpret the graphic symbol. Elisha instantly comprehended the purpose, and, running after Elijah, he begged to be allowed to kiss his father and mother, after which he promised to follow the senior prophet.