Three and a half years is the ancient symbol of tribulation. God’s choice for how long the drought lasted speaks volumes to anyone of Hebrew heritage. Elijah had survived the famine starting out near his hometown on the Wadi Cherith until the drought had taken away any residual flow. Then He spent the balance of the time in Zarephath in the home of a widow. This was a coastal town in Phoenicia between Tyre and Sidon. When the time comes to confront Ahab, Elijah comes to find him staying in his winter palace in Jezreel.
Keep in mind: Ahab is king, but his wife Jezebel is the driving force behind the throne. We get the impression he’s only as forceful as she wants him to be. He’s not a cartoon figure about it, but surprisingly lax on his own, or even wimpy at times.
Elijah first encounters the King’s Chamberlain, named Obadiah. This man happened to be faithful to Jehovah. He had privately and secretly funded the maintenance of a hundred surviving prophets of Jehovah in a couple of caves somewhere in the kingdom to spare them the murderous slaughter at the insistence of Jezebel. We have no idea how many did not escape her clutches, but it would have been quite a few. The population of the Northern Kingdom was roughly three million or more at this time, and there would have been plenty of active prophets from several generations supporting their mission. Keep in mind that Samuel had built several prophets’ academies a couple centuries prior to this, dividing them between Israel and Judah.
So Ahab took a bunch of servants, and Obadiah another bunch, and they spread out in opposite directions from the Jezreel palace, looking for any sign of greenery to indicate where they might find water and feed for the domestic service animals. Obadiah had not gone far when he encountered Elijah. The text in Hebrew notes with emphasis just what a shock this was for the chamberlain.
Elijah instructed him to call his lord, but Obadiah was reluctant. This was not a good time to provoke the king with a goose chase after a prophet notorious for disappearing the way Elijah did. Ahab, under pressure from Jezebel, had sent emissaries searching for Elijah to all the weaker neighboring kingdoms, demanding they swear an oath that they had searched and not found the prophet. But Elijah promised he would camp out right on that spot because he had a word from the Lord to deliver to Ahab. So Obadiah delivered the message and Ahab went back to meet Elijah.
Ahab made a tart comment about how Elijah had caused all kinds of trouble for the kingdom, implying the drought was Elijah’s fault. But the prophet reminded him that the only trouble in Israel came from betraying the God who had made it such a powerful nation and gave them the land. Seeing that Ahab was leading the nation to serve the various imaginary manifestations of the sky god Baal, the same deity who had failed to bring rain during the past few years, he should call the prophets to come and represent their deities against this one prophet of Jehovah on Mount Carmel, one of the major sites of Baal worship.
Given how these things go, we can bet that 450 prophets of Baal, along with 400 prophets of the Asherah, all sumptuously supported by Jezebel, would be a fair equivalence of how many prophets of Jehovah she had slaughtered. Elijah was proposing a test that no one could ignore.
Keep in mind that it took several days for this meeting to be arranged. Messengers went out across Ahab’s domain, announcing this big event. While it’s simply impossible that every resident would have liberty to come up to Mount Carmel, we can be sure a representative sample of ruling elders, nobles, and other people of leisure showed up. Mount Carmel has several peaks divided by ravines, some rather steep. There would have been among these peaks a common ancient shrine where a large number of people could gather to watch. When the crowds came, the chief leaders would have been in the front rows. Elijah confronted them with a question as to whether they would make a choice, but they stared in silence.
So this test was arranged in the idolaters’ favor. They got to choose from two bulls for their offering, and would go first in calling on their deity to send fire from the sky. Was he not the lord of the heavens? They did their thing from mid-morning to noon, when Elijah mocked them. So they went into a frenzy, which was common in their rituals for another couple of hours. Nothing happened with the offering. When the prophets wearied, Elijah called the people away from their altar and asked them to assemble before the place where he had waited for this show to wind down.
Tradition tells us that the “evening offering” was around 3PM in our reckoning. At this time, Elijah gathered the uncut stones from the old altar to Jehovah; this altar had been desecrated some decades previously when the worship of Baal was restored under Jeroboam. The symbolism of twelve stones for the Twelve Tribes was a poignant reminder that Jehovah was God of the whole nation, not just Judah. It was an elaborate ritual in itself just to set things up. This included digging a trench that could hold something like 20 liters of water. Then he cut up the bull and had water poured over it repeatedly until the trench was full.
His prayer was simple, asking that God remind all the observers present that He was the only real God, and that He had commissioned Elijah to speak for Him. The fire fell and consumed everything down to the ground, including the altar, evaporating all the water in the process. The people duly prostrated themselves before Jehovah, declaring Him to the one true God of Israel. Upon this highly emotional moment, Elijah commanded that the prophets of Baal and Asherah be seized. The people took them into custody, and Elijah led them down the slope on the northeast side of Carmel to the Wadi Kishon, where these idolaters were slaughtered. This was exactly what the Covenant demanded.
Ahab stood by and let all of this happen, of course. Had he been a man of real action, he could hardly have restrained Elijah from commanding the people like that after such an embarrassing demonstration of how wrong the king was. So Elijah advised the king to go back up to the spot on the hill where he parked his chariots and eat his picnic dinner, because Elijah could hear a heavy downpour coming.
With nothing better to do at that moment, Ahab went back up and did so. Elijah then went back up to the big flat spot where the fire had fallen from the sky and began praying with his face between his knees on the ground. He sent a servant to check from the higher peak, gazing out toward the Mediterranean Sea to find any clouds. Each time the servant came back to announce there was nothing, Elijah prayed a little longer, and then sent him again — seven times. When the servant finally reported seeing a tiny patch of cloud over the sea to the west, Elijah sent his servant to warn Ahab to pack his stuff and head back to Jezreel, lest he be caught in a storm.
That single cloud rapidly spread into a massive rain front that blew on shore. So Ahab headed down the winding road that dropped down the slope and into the valley below. Elijah was miraculously empowered and ran straight down the side of the mountain on foot, then continued loping cross-country, along the fifteen miles or so of fairly flat plain to the City of Jezreel. He arrived ahead of Ahab’s chariot convoy, and was able to announce in the city gates what had happened up on Mount Carmel.
Always loved the imagery of falling fires that burn everything up. It’s the very definition of an abject lesson.