Bible Dictionaries
Zarephath

　　ZAREPHATH (Authorized Version in the account of Elijah’s sustenance by the widow there. This Evangelist—apparently the only Gentile-Christian NT writer—seizes as does no other upon the thought that the boundless grace of God has been extended in certain typical cases to remote Gentiles, even to the superseding and exclusion of those who were of the stock of Abraham and dwelt within the Holy Land. The choice, among all others, of the widow of pagan Phœnician Zarephath, and of Naaman the leper of heathen Syrian Damascus, to receive the favours of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, filled the crabbed synagogue hearers of Nazareth with wrath and murder (Luke 4:25 ff.).

　　Wilbur Fletcher Steele.