1 Kings 19 Bible study: A still small voice

The chapter opens straight after Carmel. There the people had fallen on their faces and said, "The LORD, he is God! The LORD, he is God!" (18:39), and "The LORD’s hand was on Elijah" (18:46). Now "Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword" (19:1). Jezebel sends a messenger with an oath by "the gods": "So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I don’t make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time!" (19:2). "When he saw that, he arose and ran for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there" (19:3). Beersheba was the southern end of the land, "from Dan even to Beersheba" (4:25), and it is in Judah, not in Ahab's kingdom (12:20). Then Elijah goes on alone, "a day’s journey into the wilderness" (19:4), sits down under a juniper tree (tap juniper), and asks to die: "It is enough. Now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers" (19:4) (tap enough). The chapter gives his words and doesn't explain them.

1 Kings 19:19→leads toLuke 9:61-62

Elijah found Elisha "plowing with twelve yoke of oxen" and "put his mantle on him" (19:19). Elisha said, "Let me please kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you" (19:20), and Elijah answered, "Go back again; for what have I done to you?" (19:20). Elisha went back, fed the people with the oxen, and "went after Elijah, and served him" (19:21). On the road, a man said to Jesus, "I want to follow you, Lord, but first allow me to say good-bye to those who are at my house" (Luke 9:61). "But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for God’s Kingdom.”" (Luke 9:62). Jesus doesn't name Elisha, and Luke doesn't mention 1 Kings 19, so setting the two side by side is a reading: some hear in Jesus' words the same kind of call, a man at the plow asked to follow and asking to go home first; others read Jesus' words on their own, as his answer to the man in front of him (Luke 9:57-62), and draw no line to Elisha.

דְּמָמָהdemamahsay de-ma-MAH

"After the fire, there was a still small voice" (19:12). In Hebrew the three words are qol demamah daqqah. Brown-Driver-Briggs gives qol (H6963) as "sound, voice"; demamah as "(silence) whisper"; and daq (H1851), here in the form daqqah, as "thin, small, fine". Strong's gives demamah as "quiet calm, silence, still". These notes give no rendering of the phrase beyond those. The Hebrew Bible uses demamah only three times. Job 4:16 has demamah and qol side by side: "Silence, then I heard a voice" (Job 4:16). And a psalm says, "He makes the storm a calm, so that its waves are still" (Psalm 107:29), where calm is this word. Daq is the "small" of the manna, "a small round thing, small as the frost on the ground" (Exodus 16:14).