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James 5 links Elijah’s prayers with stopping and starting rain, a detail absent from the Hebrew text but found in later Jewish traditions. 4 Ezra shares this view and shows Elijah praying for rain and for the dead to rise.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
4 Ezra 7:109
2 Esdras
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
107 and Joshua after him for Israel in the days of Achan, 108 and Samuel in the days of Saul, and David for the plague, and Solomon for those who would worship in the sanctuary, 109 and Elijah for those that received rain, and for the dead, that he might live, 110 and Hezekiah for the people in the days of Sennacherib, and many others prayed for many? 111 If therefore now, when corruption has grown and unrighteousness increased, the righteous have prayed for the ungodly, why will it not be so then also?”
Date: 70–132 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
James 5:17
New Testament
15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up—and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 So confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great effectiveness. 17 Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and there was no rain on the land for three years and six months! 18 Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land sprouted with a harvest. 19 My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back,
Date: 80–90 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Finally, we come to Elijah, whom James connects to prayer (James 5:17-18). While a reasonable assumption on James' part, this is something of a strange reference in that to begin the drought the canonical Elijah simply appears and makes an announcement that only by his word will rain come (1 Kings 17:1). At the end of the drought there is prayer for fire from heaven (I Kings 18:36-37) and a posture that might imply prayer for rain (I Kings 18:42), but no explicit connection of prayer and rain. Jewish tradition, however, did connect Elijah and the Carmel narrative to prayer (Mishnah Taanit 2:4). More importantly, however, 4 Ezra 7:39 (109) states in a context of intercessory prayer that 'Elijah [prayed] for those who received the rain, and for one who was dead, that he might live'. Again, we cannot claim that James actually knew and used 4 Ezra, for in all probability it was completed after James was already published, but 4 Ezra witnesses to a Jewish evaluation of Elijah that was current in James' world and colored how James interpreted the canonical account ..."
Peter H. Davids, “The Pseudepigrapha in the Catholic Epistles,” in The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, JSPSup 14 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 233.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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