Elijah on Mount Carmel

Abstract

The eighteenth chapter of I Kings, describing the trial scene on Mt. Carmel, has probably caught the attention of everyone at some period. My own interest was re-awakened through reviewing a short monograph by Otto Eissfeldt called Der Colt Karmel. In 1952, or thereabouts, Avi-Yonah, one of the foremost Israeli archaeologists of the day, while visiting the museum of the Monastery of Elijah which stands on the ancient traditional site of his triumph on the N.W. spur of Mt. Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean, found a stone foot inscribed in Greek: ~tl cHi\W7TOAEtT?} KapJ1-~AqJ / r. lOVA. EVTVXClS / Koi\(wv) KatlTapEVs-, To Heliopoleitan Zeus Carmel from Gaius Julius Eutychas, citizen of Caesarea . This Caesarea lay on the sea-coast some twenty miles south of Carmel, but of course we know nothing more of this Eutychas, though the lettering of the inscription is said to suggest a date about A.D. 200. The weight of the stone foot makes it unlikely that it has been carried very far from its original home in some sanctuary on Mt. Carmel itself. It seems indubitable that this stone foot is not part of a statue, but a votive offering commemorating a successful divine intervention in the votary's affairs2• This find is of importance because of the occurrence in the inscription of the word Karmelos as a divine name. Classical authors such as Tacitus, Suetonius and Orosius have also referred to the existence of a sanctuary on Mt. Carmel, the first named going so far as to state that the name of the deity as well as of his home was Carmel3-a statement which had been rejected by several scholars in the past but which now seems to be proved, since the inscription on the stone foot would indicate that the well-known Zeus Heliopoleites has been identified with the local god Carmel-a very common type of identification, as may be verified from A. B. Cook, Zeus I, pp. 549-576, etc. Already in 1935, however, Albrecht Alt had advanced the theory that the Baal against whom Elijah campaigned on Mt. Carmel in the 9th century B.C. was simply the local deity of Mt. Carmel-the ba'al or Lord of the area. The surprising thing is that through the vicissitudes of over a millennium of troubled history the god Carmel somehow managed to preserve his identity.

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