They told him of the apparition by which they had been confronted. That it was a prophet who had spoken to them they knew; but the appearances of Elijah had been so few, and at such long intervals, that they knew not who he was.
"What sort of man was he that spoke to you?" asked the king.
"He was," they answered, "a lord of hair,[11] and girded about his loins with a girdle of skin."[12]
Too well did Ahaziah recognise from this description the enemy of his guilty race! If he had not been present on Carmel, or at Jezreel, on the occasions when that swart and shaggy figure of the awful Wanderer had confronted his father, he must have often heard descriptions of this strange Bedawy ascetic who "feared man so little because he feared God so much."
"It is Elijah the Tishbite!" he exclaimed, with a bitterness which was succeeded by fierce wrath; and with something of his mother's indomitable rage he sent a captain with fifty soldiers to arrest him.
The captain found Elijah sitting at the top of "the hill," perhaps of Carmel; and what followed is thus described:—
"Thou man of God," he cried, "the king hath said, Come down."
There was something strangely incongruous in this rude address. The title "man of God" seems first to have been currently given to Elijah, and it recognises his inspired mission as well as the supernatural power which he was believed to wield. How preposterous, then, was it to bid a man of God to obey a king's order and to give himself up to imprisonment or death!
"If I be a man of God," said Elijah, "then let fire come down from heaven, to consume thee and thy fifty."[13]