Strata: Who’s Right? You Decide

Overlooking the Bay of Haifa on the slope of Mount Carmel is a large artificial, rectangular cave venerated to this day as Elijah’s Cave and associated with Elijah’s famous contest with the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:20–40). The cave may have been created as early as the time of Herod. For hundreds of years pilgrims have come here seeking guidance from the prophet or a cure for an ailment or a husband for a daughter or to celebrate some good fortune. Its walls are covered with hundreds of names incised by visitors—a treasure trove for scholars.

These names have been studied by a number of scholars, most prominently by the distinguished Israeli archaeologist and classicist Asher Ovadiah of Tel Aviv University in the 1960s. He published two preliminary accounts of his study, one in 1968 in a two-page report in a French scholarly magazine and the other in a popular Hebrew magazine in 1969.

Beginning in 2002 Israeli scholar Tal Ilan, who teaches at the Freie Universität in Berlin, began publishing a multi-volume Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity. In Part II, published in 2012, she includes an appendix (written with her colleague Olaf Pinkpank) devoted to an examination and analysis of the names in Elijah’s Cave.