With the Philistines massed for battle and God no longer answering him, Saul, who had previously banned mediums, disguises himself to consult one at Endor, who summons an apparition of Samuel that pronounces Saul's impending defeat and death.
Further context
2 min readSamuel is dead. The Philistine army is drawn up at Shunem and Saul's forces are on Mount Gilboa, and when he sees the size of what is facing him he is terrified and his heart is filled with dread.
He enquires of the LORD and gets nothing, by any of the three recognised routes: not by dreams, not by the Urim, not by prophets. A king with no prophet, no priestly oracle and no dreams is a man with the whole apparatus of guidance switched off.
So he tells his attendants to find him a medium. The irony is stated plainly a few lines earlier: Saul himself had expelled the mediums and spiritists from the land, in line with a legal prohibition that treated consulting the dead as a capital offence.
They find one at Endor, on the far side of the Philistine lines, which means he has to travel by night through or around an enemy army to get there. He disguises himself and takes two men.
She refuses at first, pointing out that Saul has cut off the mediums and spiritists and asking whether this is a trap to get her killed. He swears by the LORD that she will not be punished, which is a strange oath for a man about to break that same law.
What happens next is unlike anything else in the Hebrew scriptures, and the practitioner's own reaction is the reason. When she sees Samuel she cries out at the top of her voice, and she immediately identifies her client: why have you deceived me? You are Saul. Whatever she had expected to happen, this was not it.
Samuel's first words are a complaint about being disturbed, and everything he then says is a repetition of what he said in life. The LORD has departed from you and become your enemy. He has done what he predicted through me and torn the kingdom out of your hands and given it to David. Because you did not obey the LORD or carry out his fierce wrath against the Amalekites, he has done this to you today. Then the new information: tomorrow you and your sons will be with me, and the LORD will also give the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines.
Saul falls full length on the ground, filled with fear and weak from having eaten nothing all day and all night.
What happens then is unexpectedly humane. The woman who has just been used and terrified sees that he is deeply shaken, insists that he eat, kills the fattened calf she has at the house, bakes bread without yeast, and serves it to him. He eats, and gets up, and leaves that night.
Whether what she raised was Samuel, a deception or something permitted for that one occasion has been argued about since the earliest Christian commentators, and the most that can be said is that her own terror suggests she was not in control of it.