1 Kings 17:18
And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son? And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?
The cry belongs to the time when Elijah sought refuge in a heathen land at Zarephath, which belongs to Zidon, after he had been hidden by the brook Cherith and the brook dried up because of the continued drought. It stands within Elijah's work in the northern kingdom that leads to his confrontation with Ahab, in which he declares that Ahab and his father's house have troubled Israel. The speaker is the widow of Zarephath, the mistress of the house where Elijah found asylum when there was no safety for him in the land of Israel. She was not an Israelite and never had the privileges and blessings of God's chosen people, but she was a believer in the true God who walked in all the light shining on her pathway, and God had commanded her to sustain Elijah.
She is the woman who had shared her food with Elijah, after which her life and her son's life were preserved. The verse is spoken after her son fell sick so severely that no breath was left in him, so that he died. In anguish, grief, and fear she addresses Elijah as a man of God and interprets her son's death as a judgment that called her sin to remembrance, charging him and asking whether his coming had brought about her child's death.
In answer Elijah took the son from her bosom up into the loft where he stayed and laid him on his own bed, stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the Lord, and the Lord heard him so that the child's soul came into him again and he revived. Elijah then brought the child down out of the chamber into the house and delivered him alive to his mother. After the child lived again the woman recognized Elijah as a man of God and affirmed that the word of the Lord in his mouth was truth. The episode to which the verse belongs shows that God blesses those who help others in need.