{"id":62538,"date":"2019-09-05T16:14:41","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T13:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=62538"},"modified":"2023-04-05T17:19:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T14:19:57","slug":"elijah-presents-himself-to-ahab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/elijah-presents-himself-to-ahab\/","title":{"rendered":"Elijah Presents Himself to Ahab"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[927,858],"acf":{"old_id":"62538","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":54356,"related_cahpter":"305","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"And terrifies Ahab\u2019s servant Obadiah in the process","content":"

18:9 \u201cAnd he said, \u2018How have I offended, that you should place your servant in Ahab\u2019s hands to put me to death?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The exchange between Obadiah and Elijah is one of the most spectacular deployments of the biblical technique of contrastive dialogue, in which the two speakers are sharply differentiated by antithesis in tone and attitude and, often, by an opposition between brevity and prolixity (see, for example, Joseph and Potiphar\u2019s wife in Genesis 39). Elijah expresses a concise imperative, \u201cGo and say to your lord Elijah is here,\u201d and then the steely resolution at the end of the dialogue, \u201cAs the Lord of Armies lives, Whom I have served, today I will appear before him.\u201d Obadiah, on the other hand, terrified by the prospect of conveying this message to Ahab, spouts a stream of highly nervous volubility, anxiously repeating twice what he regards as Elijah\u2019s impossible order to him and at the same time defending his own record as a God-fearing man. The effect is almost comical: he is a good man and has incurred danger in his loyalty to the Lord, but he is also an ordinary man, susceptible to fear. The contrast to the iron-willed Elijah is striking. At the same time, Obadiah\u2019s terror vividly reflects Ahab\u2019s ruthlessness as a paganizing monarch.<\/span><\/p>\n

From: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible<\/em>, vol. 2: Prophets, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, ad loc. By permission of the author.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":54890,"id":54890,"title":"Alter-Cover","filename":"Alter-Cover.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alter-Cover.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem\/alter-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"alter-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":54889,"date":"2019-05-05 07:18:18","modified":"2022-01-31 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