Grenville J. R. Kent
And the king said to her, “Do not be afraid; but what do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a divine being coming up out of the earth.” And he said to her, “What is his form?” And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped with a robe.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and did homage. 1 Samuel 28:1, 14.
The narrative in 1 Samuel 28 is used by supporters of the immortalsoul theory to argue that Samuel appeared and spoke after his death, and therefore all humans are conscious after death. Historically the chapter has had two major interpretations:
This view appears first in the apocryphal book of Sirach 46:16-20 (ca. 180 B.C.). Some saw Samuel as a disembodied soul, but Augustine (AD 354-430) and others thought Samuel arrived as a resuscitated whole person, with a body like Jesus’ resurrection body or Moses’ body at Jesus’ transfiguration.1 So the belief that Samuel really appeared does not require a belief that he was only a disembodied soul or that all people are only disembodied souls after death.
Yet the argument that Samuel really appeared raises serious problems: Could mediumship really disturb the rest of God’s faithful prophet? Would God send a prophetic message through a medium – a condemned source (Deut 18:10; Lev 20:6) – especially while refusing Saul guidance via approved methods (1 Sam 28:6)? Some see the medium as a fine example of women’s ministry, “offering spiritual guidance and insight,”2 but that interpretation would set a dangerous precedent of expecting divine wisdom through mediums today (see 1 Tim 4:1; 2 Thess 2:8-11).
Tertullian (AD 155-220) and other Church Fathers taught that a demon or Satan impersonated Samuel so as to deceive Saul. This second view best fits the text.
We know from Scripture that Saul was vulnerable to the demonic (1 Sam 16:14-16, 23; 18:10; 19:9). Samuel warned him against the “sin of divination” or witchcraft (Heb. qesem, 1 Sam 15:23), yet Saul asked the medium to divine (Heb. qasam, 1 Sam 28:8); the word qasam is usually used in connection with pagan diviners (Num 22:7; Josh 13:22; 1 Sam 6:2).
Pagan practices at En-Dor – En-Dor was likely a Canaanite, not an Israelite, settlement (Josh 17:11-13), and recent archaeological discoveries show that the Canaanite religion involved ancestor worship, using rituals very similar to the one the woman performed for Saul. A Ugaritic tablet describes a ritual for conjuring up dead ancestors, including the recently deceased king, to bless the current king.3 These ancestors, “the dead and deified kings of Ugarit,”4 were believed to become divine beings in the underworld and so were called 'Elohim — exactly the same word Saul’s medium uses for the “gods” (KJV) she says are ascending from the ground (1 Sam 28:13).
Many commentators miss that in Hebrew the medium uses the word 'Elohim in the plural (matched by a plural participle, “they are ascending,” 1 Sam 28:13). This plural construction is how polytheists speak (cf. 4:8; 17:43), envisioning various gods. Saul misses her plural and focuses on Samuel: “What does he look like?” The woman then copies his singular: “An old man is coming up” (singular participle, 28:14). She tells Saul what he wants to hear, afraid because he has removed her fellow occult practitioners (28:3). The apparition she conjures up uses Yahweh’s name seven times, but saying “Lord, Lord” does not prove anything; polytheists were tolerant of mixed religions (cf. Exod 32:4, 5).
The woman feeds Saul, earning approval from many commentators for kindness, yet the writer describes her killing the animal not with the verb “to butcher” (tabach, cf. 1 Sam 25:11), but “to slaughter for sacrifice” (zabach).5 She performs a “cultic ritual slaughter.”6 Israel’s past apostasy included eating sacrifices to the dead: they “ate and bowed down before these 'Elohim” (Num 25:1-3; Ps 106:28), with disastrous results. So her seeming kindness actually leads Saul into an act of pagan worship. This may explain why at first he did not want to eat (28:23).
Saul’s punishment is increased – This supposed “Samuel” massively increases Saul’s punishment for old sins that were already dealt with. Saul’s unauthorized sacrifice (1 Sam 13:10-14) and spoil-taking (15:13-35) had been punished by removing his kingship, but now “Samuel” adds that Saul will be given to the Philistines, as will Israel’s army, and that tomorrow Saul and his sons will be “with me” (28:19). No new offences are mentioned (28:18), so why would God in fairness add to Saul’s punishment? The message sounds calculated to burden Saul with guilt and fear, crushing any possible hope or repentance. The next day Saul commits suicide (31:4, 5). Does that message match God’s character? Even the toughest divine rebukes imply a gospel of grace and hope through repentance.
“God permitted the devil, to answer the design, to put on Samuel’s shape, that those who would not receive the love of the truth might be given up to strong delusions and believe a lie. . . . That the devil, by the divine permission, should be able to personate Samuel is not strange, since he can transform himself into an angel of light! nor is it strange that he should be permitted to do it upon this occasion, that Saul might be driven to despair, by enquiring of the devil, since he would not, in a right manner, enquire of the Lord, by which he might have had comfort” (Matthew Henry’s Bible Commentary on 1 Samuel 28:7-14 [online edition] http://blueletterbible.org).
Suspiciously, too, this “Samuel” quotes Samuel’s words but never rebukes Saul for the “sin of divination” that the real Samuel warned about (1 Sam 15:23; cf. 28:8) and which proved a fatal sin for Saul (1 Chron 10:13, 14).
Inaccurate predictions – The woman’s prediction also contains inaccuracies. Saul was not handed over to the Philistines, but committed suicide; and his body, though taken, was recovered by the inhabitants of Jabesh- Gilead (1 Sam 31:12, 13). Also, not all of Saul’s sons died the next day; a few chapters later “Ish-Bosheth son of Saul” appears (2 Sam 2:8-10). By contrast, the real Samuel spoke Yahweh’s word accurately (1 Sam 3:19-21).
Also, this “Samuel” said Saul and his sons would be “with me” (1 Sam 28:19); but where? What view of the afterlife puts a godless king and a godly prophet in the same place? Not the traditional teaching of heaven and hell; nor the consistent New Testament description of the grave and of heaven and hell. The medium would answer: in Sheol, the underworld where all souls go. Yet her worldview is not that of the Bible.
Neither Saul nor the woman saw the real Samuel – Some object that the text says “Saul knew that it was Samuel” (1 Sam 28:14, NIV). Yet Saul lay face-down, seeing nothing and relying on the medium’s description. The word “know” (yadac ) is used of perceptions (KJV, “perceived”) or beliefs that can be wrong: e.g., in 1 Samuel 4:6 the Philistines’ yadac that a god has come into the Israelite camp, but it is in fact the ark.
What of the description that “the woman saw Samuel” (1 Sam 28:12)? No doubt she did envision Samuel but that does not prove he was there. The narrator reports that some Israelites “saw” from their point of view that “Saul and his sons were dead” (31:7), but in fact not all his sons died: the narrator himself carefully specifies how many (31:6). In a similar way the narrator seems to report from the woman’s point of view what “Samuel said” to Saul (28:15, 16). Narrating a character’s viewpoint is a common technique involving “the language of appearance.”7 The same technique is used to describe the Philistine god Dagon as a person: “and look, Dagon was fallen on his face” (5:4). Dagon is of course a lifeless stone idol, but the narrator imitates a Philistine point of view. The narrator’s description of what the woman and Saul perceived is a technique of subtle suspense writing, letting readers feel the power of the deception until the many textual “warning lights” make us go back and read more carefully about how Saul was finally brought down.
According to Scripture, only the Creator has the power to raise the dead (John 11:25), and God was certainly not responding to the bidding of the medium of En-Dor, who was under the divine edict of death for practicing sorcery (Lev 20:27). The scene in 1 Samuel 28 dramatically depicts a Canaanite séance where a medium promises “gods rising” from the underworld, but a demon impersonates Samuel to deceive Saul into feeling hopelessly guilty and giving up on Yahweh and on life. The devil is in the details.
1 See Jude 9. Moses and Elijah were called “men” not spirits in Luke 9:28-33.
2John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, 2 vols. (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), 1:604.
3M. Dietrich, O. Lorenz, and J. Sammartin, eds., Die Keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1976), 1.161. See also Bill T. Arnold, “Religion in Ancient Israel,” in David W. Baker and Bill T. Arnold (eds.), The Face of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches (Grand Rapids, MI: Apollos, 1999), 415.
4 4Ibid., 1.39:5.
5 5F. Brown, S. Driver and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999 [1906]), 257.
6J. Milgrom, “Profane Slaughter and a Formulaic Key to the Composition of Deuteronomy,” Hebrew Union College Annual 47 (1976):1, 2; see also Pamela Tamarkin Reis, “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 73 (1997): 16.
7Basil F. C. Atkinson, Life and Immortality: An Examination of the Nature and Meaning of Life and Death as They Are Revealed in the Scriptures (Taunton, MA: Self-published; printed by Goodman and Sons, n.d.), 33.