About a year ago, I was attending a meeting of youth group at my church, and after a fun game of some ultimate frisbee, and far too much ice cream, we took some time to dig into scripture. Specifically, Chapter 18 of the book of 1st Kings in the Bible.

It's a powerful passage that touches on themes of the holiness, patience, and justice of God. For those who haven't read the passage, here's a quick synopsis:

• After three years of drought, the word of the Lord comes to Elijah (A Prophet), instructing him to present himself to King Ahab.
• Obadiah, a devout believer in the Lord who works for Ahab, meets Elijah. Elijah instructs Obadiah to inform Ahab of his return.
• Ahab calls Elijah the "troubler of Israel." Elijah counters that it is Ahab and his family who have troubled Israel by forsaking the Lord's commands and following Baal.
• Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest on Mount Carmel to prove who is the true God.
• Two bulls are prepared for sacrifice, one for Baal's prophets and one for Elijah. The prophets of Baal call on their god from morning until noon without success.
• Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal, saying: "Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."
• Elijah rebuilds the Lord's altar, digs a trench around it, and douses the sacrifice with water. He then prays to God, asking Him to reveal Himself to Israel.
• God answers by sending fire to consume the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and even the water in the trench. The people acknowledge the Lord as the true God.
• Elijah orders the people to seize the prophets of Baal, and they are killed.
• God sends a great rain to break the drought, and symbolize the cleansing of his people.

This passage had a profound effect on me through the miracoulous work that God uses to show himself to his people. Specifically, I was amazed at the Energy required to instantly vaporize 4 * 3 barrels of water, not to mention the bull, and 12 rocks.

The first thing I set out to do was figure out the mass and volume of all of these materials. I knew that I would be working with ancient units of measurement, but I wasn't expecting the variety that I'd soon come across. either way, I began with the water.

Here's the raw text:

³² And with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord: and he made a trench about the altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed. ³³ And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood. ³⁴ And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time. ³⁵ And the water ran round about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water. (1 Kings 18 32-35, KJV)

So it looks like there are 12 barrels of water that are poured, and they at least fill a trench that has a volume of 2 measures of seed. Easy, right?

To begin, let's standardize our measurement system. Since I enjoy role-playing as a scientist, I'm going to use the litre for volume and standard metric for everything else.

I'm also going to use the The Jewish Study Bible, which estimates that the biblical seah equals 7.7 litres

Using this, we can find that: $2seah * \frac{7.7litre}{1seah} = 15.4litre$

This looks great, but let's see what other internet sources say.

The first source I found online was defendinginerrancy.com, which states that the total volume of water amounts to "about 13 quarts". That's 12.3026 litres. That's a lot less than the 15.4 litres that I calculated, but let's keep going.

The next source that I visited was https://claudemariottini.com/. In the article I read, Prof. Claude Mariottini consults quite a few bible transltions (including many I hadn't heard of), and eventually quotes a paper he wrote, and claims that "a seah is equal to 7 [freedom] quarts", and therefore the water volume is 13.2489 litres.

In his paper, he has a really handy table of measurements, which caused me to doubt the truthfulness of the Jewish Study Bible. This Professor seemed to have a better grasp on biblical units of measure than my perception of an average bible translator.

With all this evidence in mind, it seemed like the volume was closer to 12 or 13 litres, but since I didn't want to piss off the translators for the Jewish Study Bible, I chose to round up to 13.

Next, I turned my attention to the bull atop the altar. I let go of my shame, and typed into the search bar, calories in a bull. The first search result was a reddit post on r/theydidthemonstermath by u/Sexy-Octopus. There, I found the general equation of:

And from there, I searched the internet and found:

• a publication claiming, that an average steer weighed 235.5 kg at time of death with a bone:meat:fat:other ratio of 16 : 73.9 : 8.3 : 133.3
• a USDA article claiming that steak contains 2710kcal per kg
• another USDA article claiming that beef bones contain 3010kcal per kg
• a final USDA article claiming that beef fat contained 9020kcal per kg

I'm also going to assume that all the organs of the cow are basically muscle but with less energy density, about 1700 kcal per kg

With this Information, we can find that:

That's a lot of energy! Definitely more than I could eat in one serving. Regardless, this calculation was completely tangential and unrelated to the actual question, namely, "how much energy is required to evaporate the entire sacrifice"

We can define our initial (i) energy with:

And we can define our final (f) energy with:

Thereforce, we can calculate our $\delta$ energy with:

And then we can calculate the total energy with:

Of course, I am only using summation notation and set theory to attempt to impress people, and make the bible translators for the Jewish Study Bible think twice before sending me hatemail. I'm actually just going to use a spreadsheet like a normal person.

I found the mass of the water based off of it's density, and then from there, I started my spreadsheet. At that point, it looked like this:

From here, I went looking for the size of the rocks that made up the altar. I started with an intreguing article from biblicalarchaeology.org which goes in-depth into the sacrifice practices of early iron age israelites, and describes an archeological dig, which has some fascinating results. I won't spoil it, so you'll have to read it if you are interested.

To start, it didn't have my information, which was super lame, but It did contain some great information about altars in general. It seems that israelites had two main types of altars:

• small incense altars, which never exceed a half a meter (19 freedom inches) in length or width.
• burnt offering altars, which have construction instructions ranging from 8 to 32 feet long, but could be smaller for personal, non-ceremonial purposes.

biblicalarchaeology.org also provides a great comparison chart for the altar construction.

Even so, I couldn't find any information about personal 12-stone altars, as are described on many occasions on the bible. I even searched wikipedia for any traces of 12-stone altars and came up with nothing. However, I didn't bother with consulting The Jewish Study Bible. I had lost trust with their measurement translation.

It seemed at this point I'd need to either get in contact with an altar expert, do an in-depth readthrough of Leviticus (the least exciting book of the bible), or assume that I have similar body compesition and body measurements to elijah, and use my max 1x12 deadlift weight as the assumed weight of each stone.

I was at quite the dilemma, as I'd have to confront social anxiety by arguably wasting the time of an expert, bore myself out of my mind with Leviticus, or deal with performance anxiety and scientific inacuracy of assuming myself to be just as buff as a dude who outran a chariot, and hiked for 40 days on one meal.

Update 9/18/24:

After reaching this dilema, I didn't add anything to this blog post for 2 months. I reached out to my youth pastor, to see if he knew anyone from bible colege who could help me out, but he didn't know anyone

Update 11/17/24: I have now realized that this post has been in the works for 4 months, So I'm just gonna post this and move on. I might return If I recieve new information.