Reasonable people might have questions about the Elijah story that I related last week.

For example, does it make sense that Elijah could round up 850 worshippers of other gods and get them to dance around a sacrificial bull all morning long in order to get their god to set it on fire?

I don’t think so. Assuming that the event actually happened, and I think it probably did because if the writers were going to make something up they could have invented something much better than a simple conjuring trick, I’m sure that the number was far fewer than 850. I expect that the biblical writers simply inflated the number just to make it more dramatic.

The same goes for Elijah having them all slaughtered. Slaughter 850 people? Who did the slaughtering? How did they dispose of 850 bodies? Assuming that there was some slaughtering, I’m sure the number was much smaller. But again, I suspect there was no slaughtering. The biblical writers were probably just trying to caution folks not to worship gods other than Yahweh.

But of course, I don’t really know.

Then there’s the question of why were the Israelites worshipping deities besides Yahweh in the first place?

Had they forgotten that Yahweh had freed them from Pharaoh’s bondage in Egypt and led them to the Promised Land?

Actually I can answer that one.

They hadn’t forgotten, because it never happened. The story hadn’t even been invented and written down yet. The book of Exodus, like most of the Hebrew Scriptures wouldn’t be compiled and inscribed on scrolls until the Babylonian Exile, which wouldn’t happen until nearly 300 years later, so the Israelites had no knowledge of the mythical flight from Egypt or Yahweh’s supposed aid in facilitating it.

Elijah’s story, like most of the Bible, is pretty ridiculous, but it did inspire Mendelssohn to write some pretty good music.