Mount Carmel

The measurements first, with the source named for each. The ridge runs about thirty nine kilometres and rises to about 546 metres on modern survey figures. The distance from Carmel to Jezreel is given as about ten miles by Jamieson, Fausset and Brown on 1 Kings 18:45 and as at least sixteen miles by Albert Barnes on 18:46. That gap is real and this page prints both, because a runner starting at one end of a twenty four mile ridge is not starting where a runner at the other end starts. John Gill, citing Heinrich Bunting's Travels, gives Shunem to Carmel as sixteen miles, Bethel to Carmel as fifty six, and Carmel to Samaria as thirty two. The most useful piece of evidence about worship on Carmel comes from the text itself. Elijah "repaired the altar of the LORD that had been torn down" (18:30). Israel's God had been worshipped on this mountain before the contest, at a site somebody had destroyed. The commentators of the tradition read the verse the same way. Matthew Henry: "Probably on that mountain they had an eminent high place, where formerly the pure worship of God had been kept up as well as it could be any where but at Jerusalem." John Wesley: "This had been built by some of their ancestors for the offering of sacrifice to the God of Israel, which was frequently done in high places." The Baal in view is the Phoenician storm god of Jezebel's Sidon, the god who was supposed to send lightning and rain. Adam Clarke read the Carmel Baal as Apollo, that is, as the sun, and argued that this gave the other side every advantage in a test by fire. That identification is Clarke's own reading and not the consensus, and it is given here as his. The self-cutting of 18:28 is attested outside the Bible. Gill lists the priests of Bellona and the worshippers of the Syrian goddess and of Isis, and Barnes writes that "the practice of inflicting gashes on their limbs, in their religious exercises, was common among the Carians, the Syrians, and the Phrygians." Israel's own law forbade it, at Leviticus 19:28 and Deuteronomy 14:1. Three classical writers describe Carmel as a holy mountain with an altar and no image. Tacitus in Histories 2.78 names the mountain and the god by one name and says the ancestors handed down no statue and no temple, only an altar and reverence, and he reports Vespasian sacrificing there in AD 69. Suetonius reports the same oracle in his life of Vespasian, written in the AD 120s, and the two accounts are independent enough to count as two. Iamblichus, around AD 300, calls Carmel the most holy of all mountains and says access to it was forbidden to many. None of the three is quoting the Bible, and all three describe the situation 1 Kings 18 assumes. The Assyrian record touches the ridge once and the identification is disputed. Shalmaneser III's annals say that in his eighteenth year, 841 BC, he took tribute from Jehu of Israel and from Tyre and Sidon at a place called Ba'li-ra'si, a cape facing the sea in front of the land of Tyre. One reading identifies that cape with Carmel, which is the headland that fits the description and the traditional boundary between Israel and Phoenicia, and that is the more commonly held position. The other places Ba'li-ra'si further north, at Ras en-Naqura or near the Dog River, on the ground that the annals put the cape before the land of Tyre. Both readings are named here and neither is settled. The tribute of Jehu itself is not in dispute; it is in the annals and on the Black Obelisk in the British Museum, one dynasty after Ahab. One Egyptian claim is often repeated and could not be checked. What can be said without a flag is that the Egyptian campaign route of the fifteenth century BC ran along the foot of Carmel, because Megiddo sits at the eastern end of the passes through the ridge. The traditional site of the sacrifice is el-Muhraqa, the place of burning, at the southeastern end of the ridge. It fits the text on three counts. It overlooks the Kishon valley where 18:40 puts the killing, there is a spring nearby, which the water of 18:34 needs in a drought, and the sea is hidden from the site itself but visible from a rise a few minutes above it, which is what 18:43 describes when Elijah stays put and sends the servant up to look. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley recorded that last observation from his own travel, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown pass it on. A mound below the site is called Tell el-Qassis, the hill of the priest. No excavation has identified an altar there and the written tradition is medieval, so the fit is an argument and not a proof. Nothing in the Enochic or Second Temple literature attaches to this mountain. The Watchers of 1 Enoch come down on Mount Hermon and swear their oath there, Carmel is not named in the Enochic books or in Jubilees, and the one Second Temple work that touches this ground is the Lives of the Prophets, a first century Jewish collection that preserves the traditions told about Elijah. That silence is worth stating rather than filling. What is not disputed about Carmel is that the ridge is Carmel and always was, that it formed the boundary with Phoenicia, that it was a holy mountain with an altar and no image, and that an altar of the LORD stood on it before Elijah rebuilt it. What is disputed is the exact spot of the sacrifice, the identification of Ba'li-ra'si, and the Egyptian list entry.