ELIJAH FED BY THE RAVENS.
"So he went and did according unto the word of the Lord: for he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.
"And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank of the brook."
In this passage we have a history of a purely miraculous character. It is not one that can be explained away. Some have tried to do so by saying that the banished prophet found the nests of the Ravens, and took from them daily a supply of food for his sustenance. The repetition of the words "bread and flesh" shows that the sacred writer had no intention of signifying a mere casual finding of food which the Ravens brought for their young, but that the prophet was furnished with a constant and regular supply of bread and meat twice in the day. It is a statement which, if it be not accepted as the account of a miracle, must be rejected altogether.
The desert-loving habit of the Raven is noticed in Isa. xxxiv. 11: "The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness."
We will now pass to the notices of the Raven as given by the writers and commentators of the Talmud.
Being an unclean bird, and one of ill omen, it was not permitted to perch on the roof of the Temple. According to some writers, it was kept off by means of scarecrows, and according to others, by long and sharp iron spikes set so closely together that there was no room for the bird to pass between them. The latter is by far the more probable account, as the Raven is much too cunning a bird to be deceived by a scarecrow for any length of time. It might be alarmed at the first sight of a strange object, but in a very short time it would hold all scarecrows in supreme contempt.
Its carrion-eating propensities were well known to the ancient writers, who must have had many opportunities of seeing the Raven unite with the vultures in consuming the bodies, not only of dead animals, but of warriors killed in battle. So fond was the Raven of this food that, according to those writers, the very smell of human blood attracted the bird; and, if a man accidentally cut himself, or if he were bled for some illness, the odour of the blood would bring round the spot all the Ravens of the place.