I have started reading Hillel Millgram’s The Elijah Enigma: The Prophet, King Ahab and the Rebirth of Monotheism in the Book of Kings.
If you ask about the historical Elijah, there is not much to say. You can’t compare sources. For Elijah there is only the Elijah cycle in 1 Kings. 1 and 2 Chronicles only run along side Kings when dealing with Judah. Chronicles mostly ignores the northern kingdom, the setting for Elijah. So Millgram is largely limited to doing literary or narrative analysis.
He believes Kings used sources. However, he sees Kings as a unified work. He knows and basically approves of Martin Noth’s theory that Kings is part of a Deuteronomistic primary history written by a single author in Babylon during the exile.
The thing that makes this book interesting to someone who wants to connect Elijah to history is that Millgram sees the narrative in the…
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