In First Kings, chapter nineteen, verse eight, some take this fast, along with the experiences of Moses in Exodus thirty- four, verse twenty-eight, and Christ in Matthew four, verse two, to be examples of extended fasts. However, these individuals did not factor in an ordinary sense. Moses was the presence of God in a cloud that became supernaturally sustained. Elijah got two supernatural meals that kept giving him strength for forty days, as in verses six through eight. Jesus, governed by the Spirit into the wilderness, did not become hungry until after forty days.
There were many different ways God took to keep Elijah alive: he was fed by ravens, by a miraculous increase of meal and oil, by an angel, and now, to show that “man lives not by bread alone.” God keeping him alive forty days without meat, while in the meantime, he was not resting and sleeping, which might have made him the less to crave sustenance, but continually traversing the mazes of the desert, a day for each year of Israel’s wanderings, yet neither needs food nor desires it. The place, no doubt, reminds him of the manna and encourages him to hope that God would sustain him here and eventually bring him, as he did Israel. Unto Horeb, the mount of God, Which, in the direct road, was not above four or five-day journey from Beer-sheba: but he wandered, it seems, hither and thither in the wilderness, till the Spirit of the Lord led him, probably beyond his intention, to this noted mountain, that he might have communion with God in the same place where Moses had; the law, that was given by Moses, being revived by him.