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| The Lord's defeat of the prophets of Baal From riverflowsdown.wordpress.com |
Readers of I Kings 18 may easily overlook a fascinating detail, that the Baal worshipers had destroyed the altar dedicated to Jahweh (vs 30): "Then Eli'jah said to all the people, "Come near to me"; and all the people came near to him. And he repaired the altar of the LORD that had been thrown down ...." I Ki. 18:30 (RSV). They had destroyed the Lord's altar because it was put up on a spot on a mountain dedicated to the cult of Baal. Von Rad says:
Carmel must must have been an advance post in Canaanite territory, for from time immemorial the mountain had been the domain of the cult of Baal of Carmel. How and when the advance [of Jahwism] was made is not known. Jahwism may at first simply have ousted the worship of Baal, but later the old indigenous cult revived; and of course Israel was often to experience what now resulted - once the two altars were established side by side, Jahweh's was inevitably deserted in favour of Baal's. This was the situation with which Elijah found himself faced on Carmel. As has just been said ... the coalescence, of the two forms of worship, in which the rest of the people were perfectly at home, was intolerable.
Von Rad at 17.
God himself answered the question of who was to be the God of Israel. Von Rad says that "the narrator of the story wanted to make clear ... that this was the only possible way by which Israel could have been saved, and that she could never of herself have been delivered from her neglect of her faith and worship, unless Jahweh himself had once again borne great and glorious witness to himself." Von Rad at page 17-18
In the next post I will discuss the action taken by God to defeat and destroy the prophets of Baal.
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