ABSTRACT
The first and most general reduction which modern historiography has made to the Elijah story has to do with its supernatural features. First, with regard to the genre, there is no difference between this story and the other Elijah narratives such as would permit us to move this particular one especially close to historiography. It has an important place in the Elijah tradition and it is generally appealed to without hesitation for the picture of the historical Elijah. In one of the stories which provide the foundation for our investigation, the place of the action is certainly Carmel, in a second story very probably so, and in the expansion of the third, Elijah sits on the top of the hill. Questionable though that may seem in many respects for today's taste and today's theology, we cannot simply brush it aside as hero-worship in the nineteenth-century style, resting on secondary sources.
