¹⁷ Then God heard the boy crying, and the Angel of God called to Hagar from the sky, “Hagar, what’s wrong? Don’t be afraid! For God has heard the lad’s cries as he is lying there. ¹⁸ Go and get him and comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.”

⁷ Then the Lord told him, “I have seen the deep sorrows of my people in Egypt and have heard their pleas for freedom from their harsh taskmasters. ⁸ I have come to deliver them from the Egyptians and to take them out of Egypt into a good land, a large land, a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’—the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites live. ⁹ Yes, the wail of the people of Israel has risen to me in heaven, and I have seen the heavy tasks the Egyptians have oppressed them with. ¹⁰ Now I am going to send you to Pharaoh, to demand that he let you lead my people out of Egypt.”

¹⁶ “About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin. You are to anoint him as the leader of my people. He will save them from the Philistines, for I have looked down on them in mercy and have heard their cry.”

¹⁷ But one day the woman’s son became sick and died.

¹⁸ “O man of God,” she cried, “what have you done to me? Have you come here to punish my sins by killing my son?”

¹⁹ “Give him to me,” Elijah replied. And he took the boy’s body from her and carried it upstairs to the guest room where he lived, and laid the body on his bed, ²⁰ and then cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, why have you killed the son of this widow with whom I am staying?”

²¹ And he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, please let this child’s spirit return to him.”

²² And the Lord heard Elijah’s prayer; and the spirit of the child returned, and he became alive again! ²³ Then Elijah took him downstairs and gave him to his mother.

“See! He’s alive!” he beamed.

²⁴ “Now I know for sure that you are a prophet,” she told him afterward,^[a] “and that whatever you say is from the Lord!”