Mount Carmel and the Fire of Elijah
Before it was a devotion, Carmel was a place. It exists, it can be visited, it has coordinates, vegetation, and a wind off the sea. A traveler who lands in Israel and heads north toward the city of Haifa meets a range of mountains that runs almost to the water, dividing the coastal plain from the interior of Galilee. This is Mount Carmel.
The name means something close to garden or orchard in Hebrew, a fertile land, and the mountain earns it. Much of the Holy Land is dry and stony, yet Carmel keeps green slopes, springs, caves, and a freshness that sets it apart from the country around it.
This first fact has to be fixed in mind before any other. The devotion of Carmel took root in a particular mountain and in the memory of a man who lived on it.
Take Carmel out of geography and treat it only as a symbol, and its force is lost. The symbol came later, and it came because a land and a story were already there.
The story that gives Carmel its soul is told in the First Book of Kings, and its protagonist is the prophet Elijah. The setting is the kingdom of Israel under King Ahab, married to Jezebel, a foreign princess who brought into the nation the worship of Baal, the Canaanite god of fertility and rain. The kingdom had abandoned the Lord of its fathers and given itself to gods who did not exist. Fidelity, once the duty of all, had become the cause of a few, and Elijah stood almost alone.
Elijah proposed a trial before all the people, and the place he chose was Carmel. The scene, told in the eighteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings, is among the most dramatic in all of Scripture.
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