July 20th in the Byzantine rite is the feast of the Holy and Glorious Prophet Elijah, a man whose singularly exalted status in salvation history suggests that his life deserves more attention than it receives. In my experience, eastern Christianity has been more faithful than western Christianity in celebrating the monumental figures of the Old Testament—men and women whose actions and interior lives emerge not from the records of mere mortals but from the Holy Bible, wellspring of divine Wisdom and the world’s greatest work of literature.
Elijah rebuked a king, brought down “the fire of the Lord” upon Mount Carmel with his prayers, vanquished four hundred and fifty pagan prophets, brought abundance to a desolate widow, raised the widow’s son from the dead, received nourishment from the hand of an angel, conversed with the Almighty on Mount Horeb, divided the Jordan River, and ascended to heaven in a flaming chariot. This is a life that has been studied and contemplated for millennia. This is a story that ignites and ennobles the imagination, and will until the end of time. This is a man who demonstrates to every nation and every age that Christianity is, or at least should be, a religion of heroes.
The interminable doctrinal disputes that began with the Protestant Reformation have turned our attention away from the literary qualities of the Bible. Indeed, one of the delights of being Catholic is the freedom to savor the Bible as a work of art, without fretting over how exactly its poetic, narrative, and epistolary texts should be translated into dogmas. Mother Church has done this work for us—if we humbly accept her magisterial teachings, we ipso facto accept that the Bible cannot contradict them, and then the many obscure passages of Scripture become as so many dark caves and shadowy woodlands where wonders await us if we are willing to explore, and contemplate, and pray.
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| Elijah and the widow’s son. Early sixteenth century. |
Among the Bible’s forgotten literary qualities are genres
and poetic forms that enrich the Truth-telling stories which the good God has
written for us. John Milton, of Paradise Lost fame, believed
that the Bible was superior to the classics as a work of literature. That’s a
bold assessment coming from a Renaissance humanist, and also a compelling one
given that Milton was a prodigiously intelligent scholar and classicist.
The epic, defined as “a long narrative poem of heroic action,” is arguably the most influential literary genre in history. The three most famous examples in Western culture are the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but we could also mention the Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Song of Roland, and even humanity’s oldest surviving work of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is only natural that we would find epic in Holy Scripture as well. Milton interpreted the Book of Job, which was written almost entirely in verse, as an epic, and traces of epic are found, for example, in the poetical prose of Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels.
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| Elijah awakened by an angel. Fifteenth century. |
The epic mode of thought was more instinctual for
inhabitants of the pre-modern world. Not only timeless masterpieces like
the Aeneid but also countless oral poems, folk tales, and
sagas formed minds and hearts in the poetics of heroism, mortality, prophecy,
noble adventure, divine intervention, sacred tradition, majestic language, and
communal identity. Modern readers such as ourselves have been raised in and
influenced by a very different imaginative and artistic environment, and I
don’t think we can fully appreciate and honor the Prophet Elijah without
consciously reading his life story as that of an epic hero. I’ll provide some
guidance on how to do that in Part Two of this essay.
Addendum: Elias vs. Elijah; or, The Prophet and His English
Names
The prophet’s name is a source of much confusion in the
English-language biblical tradition. To my great consternation, modern bibles
prefer “Elijah,” which has normalized the pronunciation /ɪˈlaɪdʒə/, with the
final consonant pronounced like the “j” in “jump” or the “s” in
“pleasure.” There is no such sound in the Hebrew name אֵלִיָּה, which if we
ignore the initial aleph would resemble “eleeyah.” The consonant in question
here is Hebrew yod, which corresponds to English “y” in “you” (and also happens
to be a name for the phonetic
symbol ⟨j⟩).
During the surge of English-language bible translation in
the sixteenth century, “i” and “j” were two different forms of the same letter.
We see an example of this in the 1587 Geneva Bible, where the prophet’s name is
spelled once as “Elijah” and once as “Eliiah” in the same verse. The more
common spelling by far in the Geneva Bible is “Eliiah,” where the second “i”
may have had a consonantal value similar to that of modern English “y.” The
first edition of the King James Bible also used both “Eliiah” and “Elijah.”
Glenn Bauscher’s translation of the Syriac Bible has
“Elyah,” which, though novel, is highly commendable. The most anomalous
spelling appears in a nineteenth-century translation of the Septuagint carried
out by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton: he predominantly used “Eliu,” because
the Septuagint predominantly used the genitive form Ηλιου (“Eliou”)
instead of the nominative form Ηλιας (“Elias”). I don’t like the sound of
“Eliu,” but neither am I inclined to argue with anyone whose name includes “Sir
Lancelot.”
The spelling “Elias” appears in the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Bishops’ Bible (1568), and the Douay-Rheims (1609). The prophet’s Hebrew name ends in the letter hei, equivalent to English “h”; the “-s” ending is a Greco-Roman phenomenon: Greek pronunciation didn’t allow for an “h” sound at the end of a word, and translators of the Septuagint replaced the “-ah” in names such as “Elijah,” “Isaiah,” and “Jeremiah” with “-as.” This was carried over into the Vulgate and thence to some English versions of the Bible.
