Prophetic Top Trumps

Top five Old Testament prophets? Anyone?

Well, obviously Jonah rates highly on intelligence alone, but it is impossible to imagine him in the flesh without associating him with the strong smell of fish guts. On balance then, I'd have to give pride of place (as, incidentally, did the Israelites) to Elijah.

One of the most interesting stories about Elijah is his confrontation with the Priests of Baal: a gameshow of sorts in which, instead of getting over three oversized red balls, the contestants were required to prove whose god was the more powerful. Given that religious power within the Kingdom of Israel was at this point balanced on a knife-edge between Yahweh, the tribal god of the Israelites, and Baal, the tribal god of Queen Jezebel, the stakes were high.

The nature of the contest was to see which of the two gods (Yahweh or Baal) would accept the sacrifice of a bullock. The Priests of Baal (450 in number) might have done better to choose a task where they could bring their numerical supremacy to bear. A tug of war perhaps. Instead, they fell into Elijah's trap and spent the day doing the best that they could to entreat Baal to signal his acceptance of their sacrificial bullock, which he was required to do by setting it spontaneously alight.

During their vain attempts, Elijah mocked them for the benefit of the audience, saying "Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." (Irreverence is not a modern invention.)

At the end of this, the Priests gave up, Elijah prepared his own altar (complete, one suspects, with mirrors and a large painted sign saying The Great Elijah) and arranged for his bullock to be inundated with twelve barrels of water (or, as even a mild cynic must suspect, lamp oil).

At this point Elijah called upon Yahweh, at which we are told that the following happened. "Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that [was] in the trench."

Whether Elijah kept his eyebrows is unrecorded in Biblical history.

Now this story may seem at first to be of little consequence, but it seems to me that it is one of the most important episodes in the history of religion.

Yahweh is a water god: He moves on the face of the waters; He drowns the world; He parts the Red Sea; He brings water out of a stone; He turns water into wine; He walks on water. As befits the god of a desert tribe, He is most strongly associated with the medium that brings life, and when He deals with fire it is often (not exclusively, but often) in opposition to it, as when the three men emerge unharmed from the burning fiery furnace.

Elijah does not only defeat the Priests of Baal, but - by setting a task to be answered by fire - he also dramatises the crucial step for a monotheistic religion from an elemental deity to an all-encompassing God, which is the basis of monotheism. And monotheism is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the religions that adopt it.

While I will admit, therefore, that a cackling voiceover from Richard Hammond would probably have improved things ... that's what I call entertainment.