The Hard Journey to Heaven, according to Jacob of Serugh (Part 1)
Many people are familiar with the harrowing and adventure-filled story of Elijah in 1 Kings. King Ahab of Israel marries Jezebel, and then BOOM, Elijah shows up: Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbite in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” (1 Kings 17:1). The very next verse is a command to run: The word of the Lord came to him, saying, “Go from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan (1 Kings 17:2-3). This is something of a pattern with Elijah throughout his ministry – he does some remarkable deed of power, and then he runs away and God takes care of him (in this case feeding him by ravens).
Now the drought was so severe that there was a famine, and the wadi where Elijah found water dried up, too. Further, we find out, Ahab has been seeking Elijah to kill him and Jezebel has slaughtered almost all the prophets of the Lord in the land.
But Elijah goes to mount Carmel, and has his famous showdown with the prophets of Baal. The fire of the Lord falls on Elijah’s offering of wet wood and meat and Elijah convinces the people to kill the prophets of Baal. Elijah ends the drought, commands the kind, and is victories.
But the 1 Kings 19 begins:
Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there (1 Kings 19:1-3).
After all his deeds of power, Elijah is on the run again – fleeing from Jezebel!
For many Church Fathers, Elijah’s flight was something of a problem. How is it that Elijah, the great prophet Elijah, was afraid of some measly woman?
He raised the dead! He caused a drought! He had the power of God on his side! But he was afraid – not of an army, but of one woman. They had to understand. They had to explain.
Some authors, such as Methodius of Olympus (d. 312) allegorize the situation. The Great Elijah did not literally flee a woman. Instead, Jezebel represents pleasure and his flight shows how purity requires fleeing from pleasure (Symposium 10.3). A Pseudo-Chrysostom work called On the Parable of the Fig Tree sees Elijah’s flight as didactic, telling people they should RUN from sexual immorality the way that Elijah fled from Jezebel.
But over and over again, Christian men returned to the question – why did Elijah run away?
No one that I have found thus far gives this question as much thought as the Syriac author Jacob of Serugh (d. 521). I’ve written about Jacob before on this blog. I think no one gives us a sense of what’s at stake for our ancient authors in reading Jezebel as he does. She is an existential threat for him.
He considers Elijah’s flight at length in his homily “On Elijah When He Fled from Jezebel”.[1] According to Jacob, Elijah is a type for Christ meaning that what he does is sort of like a preview for what Jesus does. The idea, for many Christian authors, is that stories in the Old Testament foreshadow Christ. What this means for how Jacob reads the Jezebel story is that Elijah had to do what he did, so that he could prefigure Christ.
But how does Elijah running away related to the life of Jesus?
“Sin manifested itself physically in Jezebel,
While he, Elijah, prefigured our Lord allegorically.
By all of the prophets massacred by her
The offspring of Adam were clearly signified.
He alone escaped from her, from Jezebel,
Just as it is the Son who alone defeated Sin.
Sin destroyed the entirety of the children of Adam,
And only our Lord escaped victorious.” (lines 37-44, trans. Kaufman)
Jacob’s idea is that Jezebel represents sin – she literally is sin manifest. Elijah represents Jesus – and while sin has destroyed the entire race of humanity, Jesus alone escaped. Elijah, in a way, predicts that Jesus will escape sin and conquer it through his escape from Jezebel. Some Christian authors have read Elijah’s flight as problematic or something that renders him less good than those who did not flee.[2] But for Jacob, the flight is prophetic and testifies to nothing less than the salvation of humanity.
“Elijah fled. (It was not just for the sake of fleeing, as has been thought.
But rather that he might be symbol and prototype for the Son of God.)
Sin manifested itself in Jezebel, as we have said,
And he dropped everything and fled so that none of its fumes would reach him.
The prophet was stainless in order to serve as a clean slate for the image of the Son.” (lines 75-79, trans. Kaufman)
Elijah is not feeling for his own sake but so that he could show forth Jesus’s great escape. Jesus escaped death – and through Him, all the Sons of Adam are freed. In the story of Jezebel, Jacob sees a story of all of our fates. Sins slaughters all people.
But Elijah got away so he could act as a prototype of Christ – through whom we all get away.
***
But Jacob was not done with Elijah – because Elijah did not just run, he was afraid. And he then experienced all sorts of awful things which I will discuss further in a future post.
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[1] This homily is now available in English thanks to the labor of Stephen A. Kaufman. All translations here are from Kaufman. Kaufman, Stephen A., trans. The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug: Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Elijah. Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 18. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009.
[2] For example, Aëtius of Constantinople says in his Encomium on John the Baptist 7 that John is better than Elijah because when faced with a similar circumstance, he did not run away.
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