Elijah's Cave

The cave faces north. The Israel Antiquities Authority's 2021 survey gives the main chamber as roughly rectangular, 8.7 by 13.5 metres and 4.3 metres high, with an opening near the entrance leading east into a square side chamber of 3.2 by 3.3 metres and 2.3 metres high, reached up three steps. Popular accounts, including the Hebrew Wikipedia article, give the room as 14.40 metres long, 8 metres wide and 5 metres high and put the side room in the western wall rather than the eastern one. The figures are close enough to be the same room measured twice and far enough apart that the page gives both.

Almost nothing you stand on or sit on is ancient. The stone paving in both rooms was laid long after the cave's use in antiquity, and it rests on a concrete floor carried on concrete pillars that the Antiquities Authority puts at probably the 1980s, with a gap of about 0.4 metres between that slab and the rock walls east and west. Two stone benches run along the southern wall, and when part of the western one was taken down in 2021 to run services, a large stone basin turned up inside it in secondary use, and the original wall behind it was found to have been coated in greyish plaster.

The rock itself is the exhibit. Conservation in 2021 sprayed the soot off the walls and the lichen off the cave front, removed encrustation by hand, pinned loose rock with basalt pins and filled cracks with a lime mortar tinted to match. The team's conclusion was that the cave now has to be held at a constant 20 degrees and 60 per cent humidity, with the air conditioning running without interruption, and that no one may drill into these walls again.

• Main chamber: 8.7 by 13.5 m, 4.3 m high (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2021)
• Square side chamber: 3.2 by 3.3 m, 2.3 m high, up three steps
• Two stone benches along the southern wall, partly dismantled during the 2021 works
• Hewn niche in the centre of the southern wall, and a second, raised niche in the side chamber
• Stone paving over a concrete floor on pillars, probably 1980s

Y. Olami surveyed the cave in 1985. Asher Ovadiah then documented roughly 150 inscriptions on its walls, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, publishing them from 1969 and again in 2015 with Rosario Pierri. Tal Ilan and O. Pinkpank went back over them in 2012, and in 2023 Walter Ameling republished the set as numbers 6435 to 6614 of the fifth volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. Dating rests on the letter forms rather than on any stratigraphy, and on that basis the cultic inscriptions begin in the first or second century of the common era.

The 2021 cleaning made the walls legible again and Avner Ecker and Noam Bar-David re-read the lot using 3D scans and reflectance transformation imaging. That produced 33 new readings and 15 inscriptions that had never been recorded at all. The best of them is on the western wall of the main chamber, inside a carved tabula ansata frame that the 2015 catalogue had listed as empty: multispectral imaging brought up an inscription written in ink, beginning in Greek with a formula that translates as 'With good fortune, in remembrance of Heliophon'. The name Heliophon is not otherwise known in this country, and the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names has it mostly around Greece, the Greek islands and western Asia Minor.

The rest of the new material is small: thin scratched or inked graffiti, plus little crosses cut over older inscriptions. Whether those crosses are Byzantine or later depends on how they relate to the Greek texts underneath, and the excavators say plainly that this has not been settled. Among the older recorded marks are engravings of the seven-branched menorah and a Hebrew inscription reading 'Yitzhak ben Kuma'.

The Antiquities Authority describes the cave flatly as sacred to followers of the four religions in the country: Muslims, Christians, Jews and Druze. Each has its own name for it and its own reason. Muslim Arabs call it el-Khader, the Green, after al-Khidr, and credit the place with the power to bring rain. Arab Christians call it Mar Elias. European Christians called it the School of the Prophets, on the assumption that Elijah taught his disciples in the large room. Druze veneration of Elijah is central rather than incidental, and is part of why the Druze settled the Carmel at all.

Custody has moved. Hebrew Wikipedia records that until 1948 the cave was a Muslim Sufi endowment whose holders let members of other religions pray there, and the Antiquities Authority's reading of the small arched niche cut inside the larger one in the southern wall is that it served as a mihrab in the period when the cave was a mosque. Hooks and cuttings in that same niche were in use until recently to hang a cloth over holy books kept inside it. Today the room is run as a Jewish prayer hall, with a curtain, a partition between the men's and women's halves, and notes pushed into the rock.

The sharing has not always been smooth. The Carmelite order says a Mass in the cave once a year on 14 June, the feast of Elisha. In 1954, after an ark was installed in the cave, the monks arrived to find they could not hold it, and it took about three weeks to arrange a solution; the following year officials of the Ministry of Religions had to intervene to get the Mass said again. It is worth knowing what the room is before walking into it: it is a functioning place of prayer for people who are not tourists, and it is quiet.

In the centre of the southern wall of the main chamber is a hewn niche, and the carvings around it belong to several different periods. Ovadiah recorded scale motifs on both sides of it and a lotus on its left. The 2021 documentation added something nobody had published before: a carved relief of uraei, rearing serpents, above the niche. The design is Egyptian in origin, the excavators date the carving to the Roman period, and their reading is that these reliefs flanked an object of pagan worship standing in the niche.

That fits what else is under the floor. Probes cut through the concrete down to bedrock in 2021 confirmed Hellenistic pottery in the south-western corner, and the first excavation in the cave, by A. Zemer, had already produced finds from the Hellenistic, Byzantine and Ottoman periods and the British Mandate. A trial excavation in December 2019, about 20 metres north-west of the entrance and dug ahead of a new access path, found the foundations of a mid-nineteenth-century building along with Hellenistic, Byzantine, Mamluk and Ottoman pottery, sixteen clay tobacco pipe fragments, and imported coffee cups from Kutahya and from China.

None of this proves what the cult was. Mount Carmel had a well-attested pagan sanctuary: Michael Avi-Yonah published a Greek inscription from the mountain reading 'To Heliopolitan Zeus of Carmel', and Suetonius has Vespasian consulting an oracle there while Tacitus describes an altar with no image and no temple around it. The Haifa tourism association repeats the suggestion that the cave housed the oracle of the god of Carmel. What the excavation report will say is narrower and more useful: the reliefs above the niche probably indicate worship at the spot as early as the Roman period.

Two grottoes on the Carmel are called Elijah's Cave, and visitors regularly end up at the wrong one. The lower one is this shrine on Allenby Road. The upper one is a small grotto beneath the high altar of the church at the Stella Maris monastery, reached down a few steps from the nave, with a stone altar and a statue of the prophet in it. The Discalced Carmelite friars who have custody of that monastery call their one Elijah's grotto.

For a while the same order held both. The Sacred Congregation in Rome approved the Carmelites' return to the Carmel on 30 January 1627 and sent Father Prosper of the Holy Spirit, prior of the Carmelite house in Aleppo. On 29 November that year he signed an agreement with Ahmad Turabay, the emir who ruled the mountain, handing the order Elijah's Cave and the summit for a monastery and gardens, and he said Mass in the cave. Between 1631 and 1635 he converted it into a church.

It did not hold. The Muslim dervishes who had held the cave before him protested, and the protest reached Istanbul. In 1635 Prosper gave up the cave and built instead on the slope between the Greek church and the cave, cutting most of the building into the hillside at what is still called Prosper's Cave. He died there in 1653 and the place was destroyed under Daher al-Umar. The monastery moved to its present site above the upper grotto, was wrecked in Napoleon's campaign of 1799, was demolished on the orders of Abdullah Pasha in 1821, and reopened in its current form in 1836.

The busiest day of the year is the day after Shabbat Nachamu, the first of the seven sabbaths of consolation following Tisha b'Av, when people come up from Haifa, Tiberias and Safed to pray. The national holy places centre gives the site's annual hillula as 12 Av. Richard Pococke, writing in 1738, already recorded that visiting on the Saturday after the Sabbath of Consolation had become a custom, and that Christians, Jews and Muslims all venerated the place. A nineteenth-century report describes a hillula here at Lag Ba'omer as well; the operator says that practice has thinned out in recent years.

The cave has a long reputation as a healing site, and specifically as a place for mental illness. People thought to be mentally ill were brought here from a distance and left in the cave for several days in the hope that they would be cured through Elijah. The Hebrew sources call the visit 'the ziyara of Haifa'. Alongside that, the cave draws the same prayers as other shrines in the country: for the health of the sick, for a marriage partner, and for children.

The physical traces of all this are what you see on arrival. Curtains hang on the southern wall, where the niche sits roughly where an ark would. Notes go into the rock. Candles are lit outside, at the stand the operator provides, rather than in the chamber, which is now climate-controlled to protect the inscriptions. Pilgrims once added their own names to those walls, which is how the corpus of 150 inscriptions came about, and is emphatically no longer permitted.