1 Kings 17:19

Verse 17 opens with “after these things”. The Hebrew word behind “things”, dâbâr, means a word or speech and also a matter or affair, and here it gathers up all that has happened in 1 Kings 17 so far. Elijah had announced the drought (1 Kings 17:1), the ravens had fed him by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:2–7), and God had sent him to a widow of Zarephath whose barrel of meal and cruse of oil lasted all through the famine (1 Kings 17:8–16). Into that household, kept alive by a daily miracle, came the son’s illness.

The verse calls the woman “the mistress of the house”. The home was hers, and she was the one who had taken the prophet in, so the blow fell on Elijah’s own hostess. Her son was all she had left. In 17:12 she had spoken of “me and my son” as the whole of her household, and for a widow the death of her only son meant the loss of the one who would care for her in old age and carry on her family. When the women of Bethlehem rejoiced over the child born to Ruth, they called him “a nourisher of thine old age”. That hope is what this mother lost.

The sickness was “so sore”. The word is châzâq, an adjective from the verb châzaq, to be strong, and it means strong, hard or intense. This was a heavy illness, and it ran on “that there was no breath left in him.” The word for breath, nᵉshâmâh, is the breath of life, the same word as in the creation of man, when God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). With that breath gone, the boy was dead. Scripture states it plainly so that we know what follows is a raising from death, more than a recovery from fainting or fever.

The death comes right after God’s goodness to this home, and the order matters. God’s care had carried the family through the famine, and now it would carry them through a death in the house. His blessing in one season leaves his people still mortal in the next, and in this house it opened the way for a greater work than the meal and the oil.

The widow’s first words, “What have I to do with thee?”, are a way of putting distance between herself and the one she speaks to. She calls Elijah “man of God”. ʼîysh is the ordinary word for a man, and joined with ʼĕlôhîym, God, the phrase ʾîš ʾĕlōhîym names a man who belongs to God and acts for him. She knows exactly who Elijah is, and in her grief she treats his holiness as the cause of her trouble.

“To call my sin to remembrance” uses zâkar, to remember, here in the form that means to bring something to remembrance or to mention it. Her sin is ʻâvôn, iniquity or fault, a word that can also mean the punishment that iniquity brings. She fears that a holy man living under her roof has brought her guilt before God, and that God has answered it by taking her son. Many in her day, in Israel and outside it, took a death like this, above all the death of a child, as God’s punishment for a particular sin. Long afterwards the disciples asked the same kind of question about a man born blind.

Elijah answers her accusation with four words: “Give me thy son.” The word for son, bên, is the ordinary word for a son. “He took him out of her bosom”, where chêyq is the bosom or lap, the place where a mother holds her child, so she had been holding the dead boy in her arms. Elijah lifts him from her and takes the weight of the moment on himself.

He carries the boy “up into a loft, where he abode”. The loft, ʻălîyâh, is an upper room, from a word for going up. Such rooms were built on the flat roof or as a second storey, often reached by an outside stair, and they were used for guests, for quiet and for prayer. This was Elijah’s own lodging in the widow’s house. There he “laid him upon his own bed”. The word miṭṭâh means a bed, and it can also mean a couch or a bier. Elijah lays the dead child where he himself sleeps, as though the boy were in his own keeping.

The upper room gave Elijah a place apart from the grief below, where he could give himself wholly to prayer. Elisha did the same with the Shunammite’s son, shutting the door and praying to the LORD (2 Kings 4:32–37).

“He cried unto the LORD”. The verb qârâʼ means to call out or cry unto, and Scripture uses it of people in need calling on God. Elijah’s prayer is an urgent cry from a troubled heart. He begins “O LORD my God”, the language of a man who knows God as his own.

His question is “hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?” The verb is râʻaʻ, to do harm or bring evil, and here the evil is calamity, the harm that has fallen on the widow. The word “also” adds this grief to the drought and famine already on the land. To “sojourn”, gûwr, is to stay somewhere as a guest. Elijah is a guest in this house, and his hostess, who fed him from her last handful of meal, has lost her son while he lived under her roof. His concern is for her.

“And he stretched himself upon the child three times”. The verb mâdad means to stretch or to measure, and here it means to stretch oneself out. Elijah lays his whole body over the child, and he does it three times, crying to the LORD as he does so.

His prayer is short and plain: “O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again.” He names God as Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, and as ʼĕlôhîym, God, a name plural in form that speaks of the fullness of his majesty. The soul is nephesh, from a word meaning to breathe, and it means a breathing creature, life, soul or self. Here it is the boy’s life, which had gone out of him. “Come... again” is shûwb, to turn back or return, and “into him” is qereb. Elijah asks God for something no one had yet seen: for a life that had departed to return to the body it left.

“And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear, and when God hears a prayer in this way he attends to it and acts on it. The miracle comes as God’s answer to a man’s prayer. The answer even repeats the words of the prayer: Elijah asked that “this child’s soul come into him again”, and “the soul of the child came into him again”. God gave exactly what was asked.

“And he revived.” The verb châyâh means to live, to be alive or to be restored to life. The boy who had no breath left in him was alive again. James sums up what this chapter shows of Elijah’s praying when he writes, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16–18).

Elijah takes the child, yeled, a word meaning something born, a child, boy or lad, and brings him “down out of the chamber into the house”. The boy who was carried up dead is carried down alive, out of the room of prayer and into his mother’s home. Elijah “delivered him unto his mother”. The verb is nâthan, the common word for giving, and Elijah gives back what death had taken. Luke tells of Jesus at Nain in the same words: “And he delivered him to his mother” (Luke 7:11–17).

Elijah’s words are few: “See, thy son liveth.” “See”, râʼâh, bids her look for herself. “Liveth” is chay, alive or living. She can see with her own eyes that the son she held dead is alive, and that sight leads straight to her confession.

The widow’s last words answer her first. In verse 18 she called Elijah “man of God” in bitterness. Now she says it in faith: “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth.”

“Know” is yâdaʻ, to know, to perceive and to be sure of something by seeing it. “This”, zeh, points to her living son. Her knowledge rests on what God has done before her eyes. She had trusted Elijah’s word before, when she baked his cake first on the promise that her meal and oil would last, and now that trust is confirmed by a greater sign.

She confesses two things. Elijah is a man of God, ʾîš ʾĕlōhîym, a true servant of the LORD. The word he speaks comes from the LORD and is truth, ʾemeth, a word for stability, certainty and truth. What God says through his prophet stands firm and comes to pass. Moses had given Israel this as the mark of a true prophet: “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:21–22). God says of his word that “it shall not return unto me void” (Isaiah 55:11), and “the word of God is quick, and powerful” (Hebrews 4:12). In Zarephath that word gave a dead child back to his mother.

Zarephath belonged to Sidon, the land ruled by Ethbaal, the father of Jezebel. Ahab had married Jezebel and served Baal, and he led Israel into that worship (1 Kings 16:29–33). Baal was worshipped as the god of rain and fertility, so the drought Elijah announced was the LORD’s judgment on Israel and a plain answer to Baal’s claims. In the middle of that judgment God sent his prophet into Baal’s own country, fed a poor Gentile widow there, and raised her son. The LORD who gives rain and withholds it is also the one who gives life and restores it.

That is also God’s heart toward the helpless. Scripture calls him the defender of widows and a father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5), and here he shows it to a woman outside the covenant people. The miracle also confirms Elijah as the LORD’s prophet before the great contest with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18).

Elijah had to cry to God and plead three times for the boy’s life. Jesus raised the dead by his own word. To Jairus’s daughter he said “Talitha cumi”, and she arose (Mark 5:35–43). He touched the bier of another widow’s son, at Nain, the dead man described as “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow”, and said, “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise” (Luke 7:11–17). At the tomb of Lazarus he wept (John 11:35), and then called him out of the grave (John 11:38–44). Elijah was the means by which God gave life, while of Jesus John writes, “In him was life” (John 1:4), and Jesus says, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25–26).

The boy in Zarephath came back to a mortal life. Christ rose to a life that death can never touch again: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more” (Romans 6:9–10). He is “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20–22), and his rising promises ours. The Spirit who raised him “shall also quicken your mortal bodies” (Romans 8:11), and the hour is coming when “all that are in the graves shall hear his voice” (John 5:28–29). Even now, whoever hears his word and believes “is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24) and walks “in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). He came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), and he holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). The end of the story is a world where “there shall be no more death” (Revelation 21:4).

The widow feared that a man of God had come to call her sin to remembrance. When the Son of God came, “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and he bore that sin himself, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3, 53:4). Elijah stretched himself on one dead child, and Christ took on our flesh and our death. He still prays for his people, for “he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). And as the widow found the word in Elijah’s mouth to be truth, Jesus is the truth itself (John 14:6), and his words “are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63).

Moses sang of the LORD, “I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39). This passage shows that truth in a single house. The same God who fed the widow through the famine was Lord over her son’s death and over his life. Job, who also buried children, could say, “the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). Zarephath shows the LORD giving back what was taken.

The passage also gives us two people in grief. The widow speaks her fear and her guilt aloud, and God answers her with her son alive. Elijah brings his anguish and his bewildered question straight to God and keeps praying, and God hears his voice. Their prayers were heard by the God for whom “all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26), and he is the God we bring our own griefs to. He has shown in Christ that his last word over his people is life.