Part 145

Van de Velde gives a vivid delineation of the precise locality of the Carmel contest. He was, it is believed, the first traveler who identified the site of the “Burning.” The rock shoots up in an almost perpendicular wall, more than two hundred feet in height on the side of the vale of Esdrelon. This wall made the burning visible over the whole plain and from all the surrounding heights, so that even those left behind and who had not ascended Carmel would still have been able to witness, at no great distance, the fire from Heaven that descended on the altar. Here the place must have been, for it is the only point of all Carmel where Elijah could have been so close to the brook Kishon as to take thither the priests of Baal and slay them, return again to the mountain and pray for rain, all in the short space of the same afternoon. Down 250 feet beneath the altar plateau is a vaulted and very abundant fountain. While all other fountains were dried up, one can well understand that there might have been found here that superabundance of water which Elijah poured so profusely over the altar.