Elijah the Fiery Prophet

The Prophet Elijah (feast 20 July) is the most liturgically and popularly alive of all the Old Testament prophets in the Orthodox world — the zealot of Horeb who met God not in wind, earthquake, or fire but in a still small voice; who was taken up alive in a chariot of fire; who stood with Moses at the Transfiguration; and whom the Church, following Malachi and the Gospel, awaits as a forerunner of the Second Coming. This file treats his life, his Slavic Ilyin-den piety, and the received eschatological expectation, handled soberly.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with attention to Slavic popular piety)

The Zealot of the Living God

Elijah the Tishbite bursts into the biblical narrative without genealogy or introduction, in the reign of the apostate king Ahab and his Baal-worshipping queen Jezebel (1 Kings 17–19; 21; 2 Kings 1–2). His whole prophetic career is a war for the sole worship of the God of Israel against the cult of Baal. He shuts up heaven so that no rain falls for three years and six months (1 Kings 17:1; cf. James 5:17); he is fed by ravens at the brook Cherith and by the widow of Zarephath, whose meal and oil do not fail and whose dead son he raises (1 Kings 17); and on Mount Carmel he confronts the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal in the great contest of the sacrifices, calling down fire from heaven to consume his water-drenched offering while Baal answers nothing, so that the people cry, “The Lord, he is the God” (1 Kings 18:38–39). This zeal — “I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts” (1 Kings 19:10, 14) — is the hallmark the tradition seizes on: Elijah is the pattern of the uncompromising prophet, and the monastic and hesychast tradition took him, with John the Baptist, as a founding figure of the ascetic life, the desert-dweller clothed in a mantle of hair (2 Kings 1:8), fed by God in the wilderness. The Carmelite tradition of the West likewise claims Elijah as a spiritual father, but the dense liturgical veneration of Elijah as a saint with a great summer feast is above all an Eastern and especially a Slavic phenomenon.

Horeb and the Still Small Voice

After Carmel, fleeing Jezebel’s threat, the exhausted Elijah journeys forty days to Horeb — the mountain of God, Sinai — and there receives the theophany that the Orthodox tradition treasures above even the fire of Carmel. The Lord passes by: “a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks… 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 19:11–12) — the LXX’s “voice of a gentle breeze” (phōnē auras leptēs). The zealot of the fire is taught that God is met most deeply not in the spectacular but in the stillness, the “sound of sheer silence.” The Fathers read this as an anticipation of the hesychia, the inner stillness, in which the God who transcends all phenomena is known — Elijah on Horeb joining Moses on Sinai as a biblical warrant for the apophatic and hesychast tradition (see The Jesus Prayer, for the stillness in which God is sought). It is a theologically weighty correction within the Elijah story itself: the God of the still small voice is the same God as the God of the fire, but He is not to be domesticated as the prophet’s own weapon.

The Fiery Ascent

Elijah does not die. At the end of his course, walking with his disciple Elisha, “there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire… and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven,” letting fall his mantle to Elisha as his double portion (2 Kings 2:11). This ascent — Elijah taken up alive — is the source of two great strands of tradition. It makes Elijah, with the patriarch Enoch (Genesis 5:24), one of the two figures of the Old Testament who did not see death; and it becomes the ground of the expectation that Elijah will return before the end (see below). The fiery chariot became Elijah’s iconographic emblem: the standard Orthodox icon shows him ascending in a wheel of flame, handing down the mantle, and this image — fire, heaven, ascent — is the seed of the immense popular piety around his feast.

Ilyin-den: The Slavic Piety of the Prophet Elijah

Nowhere is Elijah more alive in the Orthodox world than among the Slavs, where his feast of 20 July, Ilyin den (“Elijah’s Day,” Russian Ilya Prorok, “Elijah the Prophet”), is one of the most kept days of the summer. In Russian and wider Slavic folk piety Elijah became the master of thunder, rain, and the harvest: the fiery chariot was heard rolling across the sky as thunder, and Elijah’s Day was reckoned the turn of the summer, after which the waters cool and the harvest is gathered. Scholars of Russian folk religion have long noted that Elijah, the prophet of fire and rain from heaven, absorbed in the popular imagination the functions and much of the imagery of the pre-Christian Slavic thunder-god Perun — a substitution characteristic of the way older nature cults were taken up and transfigured under Christian names, though the process is one of folk assimilation, not of official theology (Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, on Elijah/Ilya and the thunder motif; W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, University Park: Penn State Press, 1999, on the syncretic folk calendar). This popular layer is reported here as the ethnographic fact it is, distinct from the Church’s liturgical veneration; the Church honors Elijah as the fiery prophet and forerunner, not as a weather-spirit, but the folk feast testifies to how deeply the prophet’s imagery had entered the Slavic imagination.

Two further marks of Elijah’s popular hold are worth naming. Chapels and churches dedicated to the prophet were characteristically built on heights — hilltops and high places — recalling both Carmel and Horeb and the ascent into the sky; the association of Elijah with high, thunder-swept places is widespread across the Orthodox Balkans and Greece as well, where mountain-top chapels of the Prophet Elias (Profitis Ilias) crown countless summits. And Elijah lent his name and figure to the hero of the Russian epic, Ilya Muromets, in the folk memory — a further sign of the prophet’s absorption into the deep culture of the Slavs.

Elijah and the Second Coming — Handled Soberly

The Old Testament closes with a prophecy of Elijah’s return: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5–6; the closing verses are numbered 3:22–24 in the Septuagint). The New Testament takes this up in two registers. The angel promises that John the Baptist will go before the Lord “in the spirit and power of Elias” (Luke 1:17), and Christ says of John, “if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come” (Matthew 11:14; cf. Matthew 17:10–13) — so that John fulfills the Elijah-prophecy typologically, as the forerunner of the First Coming (see St. John the Forerunner). Yet Christ also says, in the future tense, “Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things” (Matthew 17:11), and this, joined to the two witnesses of Revelation 11 who prophesy, are slain, and are raised — traditionally identified in patristic exegesis as Elijah and Enoch, the two who did not die — grounded the received expectation that Elijah will return in person before the Second Coming of Christ.

This expectation is a genuine and ancient strand of Orthodox eschatological tradition, but it is to be handled with the sobriety the Church counsels on all questions of the last things. It is not a dogmatic definition but a widely held patristic and liturgical expectation; the identification of the two witnesses as Elijah and Enoch is a strong tradition but not a conciliar dogma, and the Church discourages the feverish, date-setting eschatology that has often attached to such figures. The proper Orthodox posture is watchfulness without speculation — receiving the expectation of Elijah’s return within the whole hope of Christ’s coming, and refusing to convert it into a timetable (this eschatological reserve is treated more fully in Orthodox Eschatology; see also Eschatology). Elijah, in the Orthodox imagination, thus stands at both ends of sacred history: present at the Transfiguration as witness of the Prophets (see Aaron, Joshua, and the Transfiguration), and awaited before the End as the forerunner of the great and dreadful Day.

References

The Holy Bible, KJV (1 Kings 17–19; 21; 2 Kings 1–2; Malachi 4:5–6, LXX 3:22–24; Matthew 11:14; 17:10–13; Luke 1:17; James 5:17; Revelation 11).
Holy, Glorious Prophet Elijah (20 July), Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast; the life; the veneration.)
Ivanits, Linda J. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989. (Elijah/Ilya the Prophet in Russian folk religion; the thunder motif and the assimilation of Perun imagery.)
Ryan, W. F. The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999. (The folk calendar and Ilyin den.)
“Elijah,” OrthodoxWiki (the fiery ascent; the veneration; the mountain-top chapels of Profitis Ilias).
The Festal Menaion / The Menaion for 20 July, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (the hymnography of the feast).