Mount Carmel, Elijah's Mountain: Muhraqa, Haifa and Visiting

Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel

The story is set in the 9th century BC, in the reign of Ahab, king of Israel (the northern kingdom), and his Phoenician wife Jezebel, who promoted the worship of Baal. After three years of drought announced by Elijah (1 Kings 17:1), the word of the Lord sends the prophet to present himself before the king (1 Kings 18:1).

The challenge (1 Kings 18:19-24)

Elijah asks Ahab to gather "all Israel" to Mount Carmel, together with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of the groves "which eat at Jezebel's table" (1 Kings 18:19). Before the crowd, he asks the question that sums up the whole episode:

"How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word."

1 Kings 18:21 (KJV)

Each side lays a bull on a pile of wood without lighting it: "the God that answereth by fire, let him be God" (1 Kings 18:24). The prophets of Baal call on their god from morning until noon, then until evening, with no answer; Elijah mocks them.

The fire of the Lord (1 Kings 18:30-39)

Elijah then repairs "the altar of the Lord that was broken down" with twelve stones for the twelve tribes, digs a trench around it and has the offering and the wood drenched three times. He prays at the time of the evening sacrifice:

"Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God."

1 Kings 18:38-39 (KJV)

The story ends in violence: Elijah has the prophets of Baal seized and "brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there" (1 Kings 18:40). The Kishon (Nahal Kishon) still flows at the foot of Carmel, through the Jezreel Valley.

The little cloud (1 Kings 18:41-46)

Elijah then climbs "to the top of Carmel", bows down to the ground with his face between his knees, and sends his servant to look towards the sea, seven times over.

"And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand."

1 Kings 18:44 (KJV)

The sky grows black, the rain finally falls, and Elijah runs ahead of Ahab's chariot all the way to Jezreel, down in the valley. Beyond the miracle, the text sets two gods of rain and fertility against each other on a mountain famous for its greenery: it is the God of Israel, not Baal, who ends the drought.

Where did Elijah confront the prophets of Baal?

The biblical text only speaks of "mount Carmel" and "the top of Carmel": it names no precise spot. The identification with Muhraqa, on the south-eastern spur of the range (about 480 m above sea level), is a matter of tradition. In Arabic the place is called el-Muhraqa, "the place of burning"; in Hebrew, Keren HaCarmel, "the horn of Carmel".

The case for the tradition

• The site looks straight down on the Jezreel Valley and the course of the Kishon, where Elijah brings down the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:40).
• At the foot of the slope, a mound known in Arabic as Tell el-Qassis, "the hill of the priests", has been linked by local tradition to the slaughter of the prophets of Baal.
• On clear days the Mediterranean can be seen from the spur, which fits the servant sent to "look toward the sea" (1 Kings 18:43), as can the direction of Jezreel, towards which Elijah runs.

What we actually know

No excavation at Muhraqa has uncovered an Iron Age altar that could be linked to the story. The tradition is old: in the 12th century the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela reported that the site of Elijah's altar was shown on Carmel. The Carmelites acquired the land in 1867; the present building dates from 1883. Other spots on the range have been proposed in the past, none of them conclusively; Muhraqa remains the place of memory recognised by Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze pilgrims, all of whom revere Elijah.

Mount Carmel in the Bible: Elisha and "the excellency of Carmel"

Elisha, Elijah's successor

After Elijah is taken up, his disciple Elisha "went from thence to mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria" (2 Kings 2:25). It is again on Carmel that the Shunammite woman, whose son has just died, comes to find him: "she went and came unto the man of God to mount Carmel" (2 Kings 4:25). The text suggests that the range served as a place of retreat for the prophets of the northern kingdom.

An image of beauty and fertility

For the prophets and poets, Carmel stands for lush, green land. The Hebrew word karmel in fact means an "orchard" or "planted garden"; the popular etymology kerem El, "vineyard of God", is less certain. Isaiah announces the renewal of the desert in these words:

"The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God."

Isaiah 35:2 (KJV)

The Song of Songs compares the beloved's head to Carmel ("Thine head upon thee is like Carmel", Song of Solomon 7:5 in the KJV, 7:6 in the Hebrew); by contrast, Amos makes the withering of "the top of Carmel" a sign of judgement (Amos 1:2), and Jeremiah speaks of "Carmel by the sea" (Jeremiah 46:18). The Book of Joshua mentions Carmel on the border of the tribe of Asher (Joshua 19:26).

A sacred mountain: from prehistory to the Carmelite order

The prehistoric caves of Nahal Me'arot

On the western slopes of the range, above the coastal plain, four caves in a cliff face — Tabun, Jamal, el-Wad and Skhul — make up the Nahal Me'arot Nature Reserve (Wadi el-Mughara, "the valley of the caves"). Excavated from 1929 by the British prehistorian Dorothy Garrod, they have yielded a sequence of occupation spanning some 500,000 years: Lower Palaeolithic tools, remains of Neanderthals (Tabun) and of early Homo sapiens (Skhul), then settlements and burials of the Natufian culture (el-Wad), around 15,000 to 11,500 years ago, at the dawn of sedentary life. Since 2012 the site has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "Sites of Human Evolution at Mount Carmel".

A sacred summit in antiquity

Carmel seems to have been regarded as sacred long before and long after Elijah. Some scholars recognise the promontory in a "holy headland" named in the lists of Pharaoh Thutmose III (15th century BC), an identification that is still debated. In Roman times the historian Tacitus reports that the future emperor Vespasian consulted an oracle on Carmel, at an altar with neither temple nor statue (Histories II, 78).

From hermits to the Carmelite order

In the 12th century, in the Crusader period, Latin hermits settled in the caves of the north-western slopes "in imitation of the prophet Elijah". In the early 13th century (between 1206 and 1214) they received a rule of life from Albert, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem: this was the founding act of the Carmelite order (the Carmelite friars and, later, the Carmelite nuns). Driven out after the fall of Acre in 1291, they spread across Europe; Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross reformed the order in the 16th century. Devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, celebrated on 16 July, comes from here, as does the scapular, which Carmelite tradition links to a vision of Saint Simon Stock in the 13th century, whose historicity is debated.

What to see on Mount Carmel today

The Muhraqa monastery

The small monastery of the Discalced Carmelites at Muhraqa stands at the end of a forest road, a few kilometres south of the Druze town of Daliyat al-Karmel. In the garden, a large statue of Elijah, sword raised, stands over a prophet of Baal; its base carries a verse from Ben Sira, in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, about the prophet who "arose like fire" (Sirach 48:1). The simple chapel has an altar of twelve stones recalling the one in the story (1 Kings 18:31). The highlight of the visit is the roof terrace.

The view over the Jezreel Valley

Jezreel Valley, GalileeTel Megiddo: a Canaanite city in the time of JoshuaA Canaanite city the Bible says was defeated but never dispossessed: four thousand years of history at the crossroads of Egypt and Mesopotamia.View site →

From the roof, the view takes in the whole Jezreel Valley: the course of the Kishon at the foot of the slope, the mound of Megiddo to the south-east, Mount Gilboa, Mount Tabor and the hills of Nazareth to the north-east, and on clear days the sea to the west and even Mount Hermon in the distance.

Stella Maris and Elijah's Cave in Haifa

At the other end of the range, on the headland above Haifa, the Stella Maris monastery ("Star of the Sea", a title of the Virgin Mary) is the mother house of the Discalced Carmelites. The present church, opened in 1836, replaced a monastery damaged in 1799, when Napoleon had his wounded from the siege of Acre cared for there, and destroyed in 1821. Beneath the high altar, a grotto is venerated as Elijah's. Further down the slope, on Allenby Road, another Elijah's Cave, arranged as a Jewish place of prayer with separate sections for men and women, also draws Christian, Muslim and Druze pilgrims, many of whom identify Elijah with al-Khidr.

Mount Carmel National Park

Most of the range lies within Mount Carmel National Park, Israel's largest, recognised by UNESCO as a biosphere reserve in 1996. Marked trails, pine and oak woodland, the Hai-Bar reserve (fallow deer, roe deer) and, to the south, the Nahal Me'arot caves make for a fine day outdoors. The range still bears the scars of the December 2010 fire, which killed 44 people; a memorial honours them. On the coast, Caesarea Maritima is only about thirty kilometres to the south.