Elijah wanders in the wilderness and is given food by God, who delivers the food by way of ravens (1 Kings 17:5-7); Ely is fed by the boy and possibly mistakes him for an angel (McCarthy 172). In the book of Malachi, the final book of the Old Testament, Malachi foretells a day of judgment, a day "burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day . will leave them neither root nor branch " (Malachi 4:1). Malachi declares that God will send Elijah in advance of this fiery day of judgment. The book of Malachi "and the Old Testament itself "ends like this:.
Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6).
The mysterious catastrophe of The Road is biblical in scope and it involves fire " a lot of fire. And it has obviously turned the hearts of the man and the child to each other. These hints suggest that perhaps Ely is a prophet who predicted the catastrophe of The Road and preceded the child, who is the word of God. On the other hand, Ely has lost his faith: "I'm past all that now. Have been for years. Where men cant live gods fare no better " (McCarthy 172). He also denies that his name is "Ely " (171). Strikingly, Ely simultaneously denies the existence of God and declares himself to be a prophet in a single paradoxical sentence: "There is no God and we are his prophets " (170). These aspects of Ely point toward the possibility that God never spoke. This old man has survived not through divine assistance but rather through random chance; he and all the other survivors of the catastrophe are prophets of atheism, bearing witness to the absence of God from the universe.
The uncertainty about God's presence exists not just in the universe of The Road but also in the mind of the man.