The Fifth Mountain
Paulo Coelho, 1996
The young prophet Elijah flees Israel from the queen's wrath and finds shelter with a widow in a foreign Phoenician city. Waiting for him are a mountain no one returns from, love, and a war he cannot stop. This is a story about how to survive the inevitable and start building again.
Who it is for
For people who have survived a loss or a sharp turn in life and do not know how to go on. And for everyone who wants to understand where fate ends and one's own choice begins.
Fear ends where the inevitable begins.
The Carpenter Who Heard Angels
Elijah is twenty-three years old, and he is a carpenter in Israel. Since childhood visions and angels have come to him, but his parents did not want a prophet's fate for their son, and they apprenticed him to a trade. The visions gradually faded. It seemed that an ordinary life lay ahead: a workshop of his own and his craft.
Then his life breaks apart. Jezebel, a Phoenician princess who became the wife of the Israelite king Ahab, brings the worship of the god Baal into the country and orders the execution of prophets who will not renounce the one God. An angel orders Elijah to flee, and he leaves home.
So begins The Fifth Mountain by Paulo Coelho, a novel from 1996. Its foundation comes from the Old Testament: the First Book of Kings tells briefly how the prophet Elijah lived with a poor widow in the Phoenician city of Zarephath. Coelho renamed the city Akbar and built a whole world around a few lines of Scripture: with priests and a ruler, with a mountain no one is allowed to climb, with love and with war.
This is a novel about a question that sooner or later faces everyone: what to do when something has happened that cannot be undone? Elijah will not find the answer straight away, and he will pay a high price for it. Let's walk his path together, step by step.
A Stranger at the City Gates
Elijah comes to Akbar without money, without friends and without any right to protection. He is a stranger twice over: an Israelite in a city where the Phoenicians honour many gods, and an enemy of the Phoenician princess Jezebel. The custom of hospitality does not allow them to drive him away. But the ruler of Akbar keeps the fugitive close for his own gain: Jezebel might pay for the prophet's head.
The angel told Elijah to seek shelter with a widow, and he finds her house. The woman has a small son and almost empty stores. The Scripture describes this meeting briefly: the widow has only a handful of flour and a little oil for one last flatbread, and yet she feeds the stranger. After that, the flour and the oil in her house do not run out.
Notice how Elijah behaves in the first part of the novel. He decides almost nothing himself. The angels tell him where to go, and he goes; they tell him to wait, and he waits. He has to prove to the townspeople that he has come in peace, while he himself dreams of one day returning to Israel.
This state is familiar to many people whom life has knocked off their usual course. A person is like a passenger in a boat carried by the current: he does not row, he only holds tight to the side and waits to see where he will be washed up. Obedience helps you survive the first days, when there is simply no strength left for your own decisions. There is nothing shameful in that.
But Coelho builds the whole book as a path from obedience to choice. Keep this Elijah, the one who waits for orders, in mind: by the end of the novel he will be a different man.
If you are now in a foreign city, in a new job or after a painful break-up, ask yourself honestly: are you waiting it out, or are you already living? Waiting it out for a while is normal. What matters is to notice the moment when it is time to take up the oars again.
About the author
Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian writer and the author of The Alchemist. He writes parable novels about faith, fate and the search for one's own path.
All books by this author: Paulo Coelho
Terms from the book
- Elijah: A prophet of the Old Testament and the hero of the novel. In the Bible his story is told in the First and Second Books of Kings. Coelho portrays him as a young carpenter fleeing Jezebel's anger.
- Prophet: A person who, in the faith, passes God's words on to people and warns them of what is to come.
- Jezebel: A Phoenician princess, wife of the Israelite king Ahab. According to the Bible, she spread the worship of Baal in Israel and persecuted the prophets of the one God.
- Ahab: King of Israel in the 9th century BC, husband of Jezebel. According to the Bible, worship of Baal spread through the country under him.
- Baal: One of the main gods of the Phoenicians and other peoples of the ancient Near East.
- Zarephath: A Phoenician city on the Mediterranean coast between Sidon and Tyre, where, according to the Bible, Elijah lived with a widow. Today its site is occupied by the Lebanese town of Sarafand.
- Akbar: The name Coelho gives to the biblical Zarephath in the novel. The author invented it.
- Phoenicians: An ancient people who lived on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in what is now Lebanon. They were famous for seafaring and trade.
- Fifth Mountain: The mountain above Akbar where, in the belief of the novel's townspeople, the gods live. It is Coelho's own image: it does not exist in the Bible.
- High Priest: The chief servant of a temple, who leads the rites. In the novel he is Elijah's opponent in Akbar.
- Byblos: One of the oldest cities of Phoenicia, in what is now Lebanon. In the novel a new, simple script comes from there.
- Phoenician script: An ancient script of 22 signs that recorded only consonant sounds. The Greek and Latin alphabets grew out of it.
- Assyrians: The people of ancient Assyria, a power in Mesopotamia known for its strong army and campaigns of conquest.
All terms
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