Shawna Dolansky on Elijah's use of "magic"

The use of magic to support Elijah’s claim to be a prophet of Yahweh is explicit in 2 Kgs 1:9-14. Ahaziah king of Samaria sends several army troops to bring Elijah into custody. When the first two approach and request that he descend from his mountain and accompany them, Elijah answers each captain of fifty in the same way: “If I am a man of God, let fire come down from the heavens and consume you and your fifty men.” And no sooner does he call for it than “fire from God descended from the heavens and consumed him and his fifty men.” Elijah himself initiates and dictates the nature of the magic, and God immediately complies; and it is all performed in the interest of demonstrating Elijah’s status as a “man of God” and his authority to speak on Yahweh’s behalf. Similarly, the earlier miracles that Elijah performs for the widow and her son provoke the following reaction from the woman: “Now [by] this I know that you are a man of God and the word of Yahweh in your mouth is true” (1 Kgs 17:24). (Shawna Dolansky, Now you See It, Now you Don’t: Biblical Perspective on the Relationship between Magic and Religion [Winona Lane, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008], 69)