And after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)
Like many, I love the dynamic example of revelation Elijah experiences in his oft-cited encounter with the divine in 1 Kings 19. The contrast of that quiet voice with the tempest, earthquake, and fire that precede it is striking, especially in light of the way it inverts the pattern of theophany that has been established already in the record. At Sinai, for example, when the mountain shook, and thunder and smoke came upon it, there was to be no mistake that God was there. The cloudy pillar by day and the pillar of fire by night were constant signals of God’s presence among the people of Moses. But in Elijah’s experience, he is told specifically that God was not in any of the showy or violent displays.
The sense of difference with the Moses stories is all the more remarkable when we recall that 1 Kings narrates details of Elijah’s ministry in ways that leave little doubt that in the narrator’s mind he was the prophet like Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. Like Moses, Elijah provides food and water by miraculous means, demonstrates miraculous control over the elements, flees for his life, fasts forty days in the wilderness, and is summoned to a divine encounter at Horeb (Exodus 33:21, 1 Kings 19:11). And yet here, suddenly, is a very dramatic difference. God is not in the awesome displays; instead, there is a still small voice. What is going on?
Elijah was no stranger to displays of divine fearsomeness. In the chapter right before this one, we see him call down fire from heaven to consume his sacrificial offering in his contest with the priests of Baal, whose god fails them in their own attempt to have their sacrifice acknowledged. Elijah’s God memorably consumes not only Elijah’s sacrifice but the altar of stones on which it lies and even the ditch full of water that Elijah had poured all over it. After winning the contest over whose God was real, Elijah ordered the execution of the 450 priests of Baal.
And yet the show of force doesn’t work. Ahab, the wicked king of Israel, and Jezebel, his just-as-awful queen, are still unrepentant in their idolatry, just like Pharaoh, who continued to resist Moses’s demand to let Israel go after Moses had called down ten terrible plagues. Threatened by them, Elijah flees for his life. It is at this point that the similarities between the stories of Moses and Elijah begin to be inverted in significant ways.
In Exodus, Pharaoh’s intransigence is met with a divine command to Moses to prepare the first Passover, as the destroyer is about to go through, killing the firstborn child of anyone not under the protection of the blood of a firstborn lamb on their doorposts. Note that no Israelite lifts a sword here. But in Elijah’s story, without divine command, the prophet orders the slaughter of the priests of Baal.
Ahab, Jezebel, and their idolatrous priests are not characters with whom anyone is meant to sympathize in this story. And yet in the ensuing events, there may be a gentle divine rebuke of some of Elijah’s tactics, too. Had he pressed his advantage too far in taking up the prerogative of divine judgment and capital punishment upon the priests of Baal? That is a question that attentive readers might carry with them into this chapter.
The theme of Moses inverted plays out further as Elijah, fortified by an angel’s food for the road, journeys forty days back to Horeb, mirroring in reverse, as it were, the exodus of the children of Israel through the wilderness of Sinai over the space of forty years. There in the cave that recalls the “cleft of a rock” in which Moses was hidden, “the word of the Lord” comes to Elijah, asking, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” He answers defensively. “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts:1 for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Here is some irony, since Elijah himself has just presided over the killing of hundreds of prophets—albeit false ones. God hears his explanation—rooted firmly enough in defending the first and second of the Ten Commandments—and responds with the famous object lesson:
And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11–13)2
While God is explicitly not in the dramatic phenomena that precede the stillness, and the text is ambiguous as to what there was to be heard—a sound? a voice?—it is clear that its quietness was the point and that Elijah was meant to detect something divine in it. He clearly does, for upon hearing it, Elijah “wrapped his face in his mantle.” Then, in a gesture of both fear and attraction, he moves to the entrance of the cave.
What was Elijah supposed to learn from his encounter with the voice of perfect mildness? There are various ways to read this story. Drawing on the deep wells of the Jewish commentary tradition, a modern interpreter of the Hebrew scriptures, Jonathan Sacks, observes that the Lord approaches the issue obliquely yet knowingly, asking just as before, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” Such a pointed question, asked in the exact same words as before, but now after a potent object lesson, suggests that God was trying to convey a message. But Elijah responds with the same answer he gave before: “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts. . . .” The zeal is still there, and so some Jewish commentators have suggested that he may have missed the point.
“Elijah, by giving the same answer after the vision as he had done before it, showed that he had not understood that God was telling him to adopt the way of the ‘still small voice’ in the future. As a result, God then told him that someone else must take his place. Elijah must hand his mantle on to Elisha.” And, almost as an aside, God lets Elijah know that, in fact, there are seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18)—a quietly devastating unlacing of the prophet’s fantasy of being the last righteous person standing.
If this seems a harsh reading of Elijah, note that it, too, has a Mosaic parallel, since Elisha’s name is etymologically related to Joshua, Moses’s successor after Moses’s own rash act at Meribah cost him the right to enter the promised land (Numbers 20:12).3
God’s remonstrance with Elijah is not because there was no legal warrant for putting the priests of Baal to the sword. The law of Moses was clear that he could have been justified in doing so (see Deuteronomy 13 and 17). That is perhaps why God is not more severe than he might have been with Elijah. The issue being quietly explored in this story, however, is whether zeal is the path of wisdom. Specifically, is extrajudicial violence—even as punishment for an offense against the law—not itself a perpetuation of lawlessness? As Jonathan Sacks writes, “It is exceptionally dangerous to believe you have privileged access to the mind of God and that you have the right to act on His behalf. God is God, and humans are all too human. That is why legal and political processes exist, and why the zealot, who circumvents both, is often more of a danger than the danger he claims to avert.”
There is a wisdom higher than zeal in restraint, in the measured response, in due process, and in truth spoken with the potency of a lowered voice.
Our modern culture is saturated with zealotry. Think of the burgeoning genres of vigilante fiction or revenge thrillers in literature, television, and film; think of the polarized rhetoric of social media; think of the scorched-earth partisanship we see in today’s political theater, and the grotesque displays of bravado with actual weapons, real armed forces, and lives at stake. If we suppose God is pleased with such behavior, with such zealotry, then we may expect soon to find that we have no more need of the still small voice at all. Perhaps it has already ceased to strive with us, having found even less it could teach us than it taught Elijah.
In the Book of Mormon, we read of peoples like ourselves in need of repentance who experience fearsome manifestations of fires, earthquakes, and clouds of darkness, and after these “a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper” that “did pierce even to the very soul” (Helaman 5:30; and compare 3 Nephi 11:3–5). The voice, of course, is the voice of Christ, and at first it can be hard to understand. Why? Is it because Christ mumbles? Or is it because his is “not a harsh voice, neither . . . a loud voice”—the only kind of voice we now have ears to hear? Perhaps his voice will remain unintelligible or even unheard until we finally settle down and listen with renewed humility—with hearts and ears and eyes pointed “steadfastly towards heaven, from whence the sound [comes]” rather than in whatever other direction our polarized environment has dragged the needle of our inner compass.
President Dallin H. Oaks, in his first extended remarks after becoming the president of the Church, focused on the pointed message of his predecessor, Russell M. Nelson, becoming a second prophetic witness that “in coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.” President Oaks added his own warning: “You live in a season in which the adversary has become so effective at disguising truth that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived. Many obstacles lie ahead. The distractions will be many.”
If the still small voice—the quiet “voice of perfect mildness”—is a sound we can only hear when we are listening, are we listening?
D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.
Art by Max Beckmann (1884–1950).
The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.
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The KJV has “jealous” here, but the meaning is now rendered more accurately by modern translations as “zealous.”
It’s worth pausing on that final phrase, since it is translated in so many evocative ways, including: “a gentle little breeze,” “the sound of a light whisper” (Harper Collins Study Bible), “a soft whisper” (NET), “the sound of a minute silence” (Alter), and “the sound of sheer silence” (YAB, NRSV).
Both names derive from the same Hebrew root י-ש-ע (y-sh-ʿ), meaning “to save,” “to deliver,” or “to bring salvation.”
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Thank you for this. I've been wondering about zeal lately, and Elisha the prophet, and Ahab and Jezebel. I had not read any of the scriptures or conference talks you'd mentioned here in my own studies. They were very helpful. I do have some questions for you at the end of this comment.
In Hosea 1:2-4, Hosea the prophet is commanded to have a child with Gomer, and name the child Jezreel, as a sign that the Lord will, "avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu." A lot of commentators think this refers to an incident from 2 Kings 9 & 10 in which Jehu was anointed to be the new King of Israel by Elisha. In becoming King, Jehu was commanded by Elisha to overthrow and end the idolatrous reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Jehu follows through with the order of Elisha, killing Ahab and Jezebel. He also has Ahab's 70 sons beheaded in Samaria, carries their heads in baskets north to Jezreel, and places them in front of the gates of the city for all to see.
According to the scriptures, Jehu was blessed for following the commandments of the Lord. He was told that "thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel" (2 Kings 10:30). For this reason, it is my assumption that the bloody act for which Jehu was blessed, is not the same one for which Israel was later punished. However, a lot of commentaries on the Old Testament say that this is the act which Hosea was referencing, because of the attitude, or motivation, or intentions with which Jehu carried out the death of Ahab's children. 70 beheadings and carrying the heads so far north, was too extreme. Too zealous. So, I've been thinking about this lately. Can a civilization be punished for an act which was sort of commanded / sort of rewarded. I've really wondered about this. Your comments on the Zeal of Elijah pushing him beyond the intended bounds of a commandment make a lot of sense in the story of Elisha and Jehu.
The quote from President Oaks, too, is doing a lot of: “You live in a season in which the adversary has become so effective at disguising truth that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived. Many obstacles lie ahead. The distractions will be many.” It's really a straight, and narrow path that the Lord asks us to walk on.
Do you have any thoughts on Hosea's child, and the act that was being avenged? Do you believe Jezreel's name is a reference to Jehu's 70 beheadings, and the display of the heads?
If so, is Jezreel's name also a reference to an overzealousness that was in Israel at the time of Hosea? At the time of Hosea's prophecy Israel is about 9 years away from being attacked Assyria, and 12 years away from being completely destroyed by Shalmaneser V and Sargon II. They're vassals to Tiglath-Pileser III.
Perhaps Hosea's child, Jezreel, is an encouragement to not be zealous against Assyria? Get out of the Syro-Ephraimite confederacy? This is what Isaiah was preaching against in Isaiah 8--a peer of Hosea. Could the name be a sign of destruction of Israel, but also an encouragement to avoid confrontation with Assyria?
I think the switch from loud to soft is significant. And it just goes to show that we don't need to have a violent God of the Old Testament. We can have the loving God of the New Testament and follow the example of Jesus Christ, just quietly going about doing good.