C. F. Keil and Franz Delitzsch on 1 Kings 17:10-12

1Ki 17:10-12

When Elijah arrived at the city gate, he met a widow engaged in gathering wood. To discover whether it was to her that the Lord had sent him, he asked her for something to drink and for a morsel of bread to eat; whereupon she assured him, with an oath by Jehovah, that she had nothing baked (מעוג = עגּה, ἐγκρυφίας, a cake baked in hot ashes), but only a handful of meal in the כּד (a pail or small vessel in which meal was kept) and a little oil in the pitcher, and that she was just gathering wood to dress this remnant for herself and her son, that they might eat it, and then die. From this statement of the widow it is evident, on the one hand, that the drought and famine had spread across the Phoenician frontier, as indeed Menander of Ephesus attests;Josephus gives this statement from his Phoenician history: ἀβροχία τε ἐπ ̓ αὐτοῦ (sc., Ἰθοβάλου) ἐγένετο ἀπὸ τοῦ Ὑπερβερεταίου μηνὸς ἕως τοῦ ἐρχομένου ἔτους Ὑπερβερεταίου (Ant. viii. 13, 2). Hyperberetaeus answers to Tishri of the Hebrews; cf. Benfey and Stern, die Monatsnamen, p. 18. on the other hand, the widow showed by the oath, “as Jehovah thy God liveth,” that she was a worshipper of the true God, who spoke of Jehovah as his God, because she recognised the prophet as an Israelite.