This chapter locates the origin of the online essay in the era of the pre-commercial Internet, when communication occurred largely over message boards, forums, and listservs. The author then charts the history of the essay, and essays by women in particular, across a variety of platforms and publications, including personal blogs, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, and BuzzFeed, before concluding with an argument for the emancipatory political potential of the personal essay.

Chapter 2 presents a detailed study of the first major leg in the Elijah cycle in relation to its immediate context, 1 Kings 12–16. It begins by observing that Elijah functions as a theological icon rather than as a complete psyche on par with the protagonists of modern histories and novels. An agrarian hermeneutic applied to this same material illumines the text’s holistic interest in physiological healing (1 Kings 17), agroecological renewal (1 Kings 18), and social health (1 Kings 19). As a result, Elijah the Tishbite emerges as the prototypical ancestor of Yhwh’s preserved remnant, a prophetic community that the implied reader, too, is encouraged to join. In contrast to the political and theological disaster that the larger book of Kings narrates, 1 Kings 17–19 suggests that Yhwh raises the dead in multiple dimensions.

Chapter 3 examines three progressively related chapters whose main character is Ahab, not Elijah, and thus whose connection with the Elijah narratives (or lack thereof) has attracted much scholarly discussion. It demonstrates that an agrarian hermeneutic generates new insight on the unit’s rhetorical coherence alongside 1 Kings 17–19. In contrast to Elijah’s theological submission to and physiological dependence on Yhwh, 1 Kings 20–22 dramatizes Ahab’s corresponding theological autonomy from Yhwh, leading to the material loss of life and land. Ahab’s story – interwoven with Elijah’s (see 1 Kings 21) but also remaining separate from it (1 Kings 20 and 22) – therefore pre-enacts the Exile in which the book of Kings resolves.