1 COMMENTARY 1 Kings 17:7-24 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon (Luke 4:25-26). So Jesus taught after reading the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue of His hometown of Nazareth. When He left the wilderness of temptation, Jesus immediately went to Galilee to preach in synagogues. The Gospel of Luke conveys how well His Nazarene neighbors thought of Him until He brusquely reminded them of two stories in their Scriptures about God helping outsiders: the stories of a widow in Zarephath [ZAIR-uh-fath] and a Syrian general named Naaman [NAYmuhn] (through the prophets Elijah and Elisha, respectively). This did not go over well (see vv. 28-30). Before the time of Ahab, kings of the northern kingdom of Israel failed to serve the Lord properly, worshiping at the cultic centers set up in Bethel and Dan by Jeroboam I [jer-uh-bohuhm]. Yet Ahab also brought Baal worship to Israel, warranting the narrator s description: He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to arouse the anger of the LORD, the God of Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him (1 Kings 16:31-33). The Sidonian/Phoenician [sigh-doh-nee-uhn/fi-
2 NISH-uhn] god of Jezebel [JEZ-uh-bel] was Baal Shamem [BAY-uhl SHAH-mem], whom they called lord of the heavens. Before the story of the widow of Zarephath begins, Elijah, whose name means Yahweh is my God, had sworn by Yahweh, the God of Israel, that neither rain nor dew would fall until Elijah ordered it (17:1). Elijah thus reminded King Ahab that the God of Israel was Yahweh, not Baal. The Lord was completely complicit in the drought Elijah announced, for God told Elijah to hide by a brook near his hometown of Tishbe [TISH-bee] and commanded ravens to feed him there. Later, after the brook had dried up, the Lord sent Elijah to a Sidonian widow, whom God had commanded to feed Elijah. 1. Elijah in Zarephath (1 Kings 17:7-10a) 7 Some time later the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land. 8 Then the word of the LORD came to him: 9 Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food. 10a So he went to Zarephath. 7-10a. When Elijah lost the means of surviving the drought that had come upon Israel, the Lord told him to travel to Zarephath, a town controlled by the city-state of Sidon [SIGH-dohn] in Phoenicia [fih-neesh-uh]. Elijah obeyed the word of the Lord as he had when commanded to go to the brook Kerith [KAIR-ihth] (the Kerith Ravine; see v. 3) east of the Jordan, where he was fed by ravens (v. 4).
3 Zarephath (modern Sarafand in Lebanon) was far to the northwest of Tishbe; it was also south of Sidon, the city of Ahab s queen, Jezebel, and north of Tyre [TIGH-uhr] on the Mediterranean coast. Ironically, Elijah was sent to the homeland of his sworn enemy, Jezebel (18:4; 19:1-3). Additionally, another woman--a widow--of the region of Sidon was the means by which God sustained Elijah during the remainder of the drought. Clearly the Lord is no respecter of culture, ethnicity, or race, addressing this Sidonian [sigh-doh-nee-uhn] widow with orders to feed His prophet. 2. A Widow in Zarephath (1 Kings 17:10b-16) 10b So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink? 11 As she was going to get it, he called, And bring me, please, a piece of bread. 12 As surely as the LORD your God lives, she replied, I don t have any bread--only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it--and die. 13 Elijah said to her, Don t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. 14 For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.
4 15 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. 16 For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah. 10b. Elijah started small, asking only for water, a request the widow did not resist. She stopped her work of gathering sticks, and went to find some for him. This must have been the signal to Elijah that this was the same widow referred to him by the Lord. From her point of view, here was a stranger, whom she recognized as the person the Lord had commanded her to feed ( I have directed a widow there to supply you with food, v. 9). Imagine her consternation on first hearing the word of the Lord, the God of Israel! The Lord fully expected her to comply with His command in spite of her great poverty and the fact that she was not from Israel or Judah, the lands of God s people. 11-12. Elijah made a second request: And bring me, please, a piece of bread. This, however, was too much for the widow! Clearly Zarephath was also suffering from the drought, for she had no bread; she and her son were about to eat their last meal. As surely as the LORD your God lives: The Sidonian widow swore to the stranger by the Lord s life, just as Elijah had sworn to Ahab in verse 1 when he pronounced a long drought. 13-14. Presumptuously, but necessarily, Elijah asked this poor widow with a fatherless son to make him bread and bring it to him first, before making bread for her son and herself. Yet he introduced his request with: Don t be afraid. He underscored his words with a promise from the
5 Lord in the formula of an oracle: Her jar of flour and her jug of oil would not run dry until the rains returned. Elijah promised that the Lord would indeed send rain to her land--not Baal, the god of the Sidonians, but the LORD, the God of Israel! (See 2 Kings 4:1-7 concerning Elisha and a prophet s widow.) 15-16. Thus we see the Lord s provisions in Phoenicia, in the region of Sidon, at Zarephath in the home of a woman with a young son with whom Elijah came to reside for the duration of the widespread drought. The Lord provided for those outside of Israel/Judah--namely this widow, who recognized and obeyed the word of the Lord to feed a stranger over her own family. 3. The Widow s Son (1 Kings 17:17-24) 17 Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. 18 She said to Elijah, What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son? 19 Give me your son, Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. 20 Then he cried out to the LORD, LORD my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die? 21 Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the LORD, LORD my God, let this boy s life return to him!
6 22 The LORD heard Elijah s cry, and the boy s life returned to him, and he lived. 23 Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, Look, your son is alive! 24 Then the woman said to Elijah, Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD from your mouth is the truth. 17-20. Tragically, inexplicably, the widow s son sickened and died while Elijah remained with him and his mother. The widow called Elijah, perhaps sarcastically in her grief, man of God. She blamed him for her son s grave illness and death: What have you against me? Her reference to her sin is formulaic, indicating that misfortune was often thought to be punishment. Elijah immediately grasped her son and took him to his own bed in the upper room where he was staying. He cried out against the Lord in distress, questioning whether the Lord was the cause of this crisis, this disaster, this great evil, against the woman with whom he stayed. 21-23. Elijah s intercessory intervention was loud and physical, demanding the boy s restoration to life from the Lord his God. The LORD heard Elijah s cry and restored the widow s son to health and to his mother, into whose arms Elijah placed him. Look, your son is alive! Elijah told her. The Sidonian widow of Zarephath turned to the man of God, whose anguished prayers did not go unheeded. 24. As a result of her son s resurrection to life, and like the Midianite Jethro in Exodus 18:11, the Sidonian widow confessed: Now I know. Both the widow and Jethro were outsiders to Israel who proclaimed the power of Yahweh over all gods. In the widow s case, she confessed full
7 recognition that Elijah was a man of God and that he spoke the true word of the LORD, the God of Israel. The statement in this verse is the purpose of the narrative: Receivers of the text will know, as the widow did, that Elijah was truly a man of God, that God provided words of truth through His prophet, and that God responds to prayer. A contest between the Lord and Baal is not as explicit in the story of the widow of Zarephath as it is in the next chapter, when Elijah challenged Baal s prophets, which is the climax of Elijah s drought pronouncement. Nonetheless, the widow s story is the first stage of that contest and it foreshadows that contest. In Baal s own territory of Phoenicia, the Lord supplied sustenance for His prophet, for the widow who showed faith, and for her son. Furthermore, the Lord even raised her son to life. She became fully convinced of the Lord and the role of Elijah in the same way that Israel later did in chapter 18, when the Lord dramatically overcame the utterly silent, ineffective, and ultimately-recognized-as-nonexistent Baal. This non-israelite widow demonstrated her trust in the Lord by obeying Him, feeding His prophet at risk to herself and son, and seeking help from the prophet in her grief and despair. Elijah s authority as the man of God for this time of crisis in Israel was further established by his stay with her in Zarephath of Phoenicia, the land of Baal Shamem. When Jesus recalled the Sidonian widow to His friends and neighbors in Nazareth when He sat to teach them in the synagogue, they were incited to murderous rage. They were offended by Jesus references from their own Scriptures to outsiders who were touched by God: All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the
8 town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way (Luke 4:28-30). BY KAREN STRAND WINSLOW