3. And Samuel had died. This second obituary notice for Samuel, with a pluperfect verb, is introduced in order to set the stage for the conjuration of Samuel’s ghost.

Saul had taken away the ghosts and the familiar spirits from the land. The two Hebrew terms, ʾovot and yidʿonim, are generally paired, and both refer to the spirits of the dead. (The latter is derived from the verbal root y-d-ʿ “to know,” and so prepares the way for the reappearance of the theme of [withheld] knowledge that has been stalking Saul from the beginning of his story.) The ghosts and familiar spirits are linked metonymically with the necromancers who call them up—it is the latter who of course would have been the actual object of Saul’s purge—but the terms themselves primarily designate the spirits. Biblical views about postmortem existence tend to fluctuate. Often, the dead are thought to be swallowed up in “the Pit” (sheʾol) where they are simply silenced, extinguished forever. Sometimes, the dead are imagined as continuing a kind of shadowy afterlife in the underworld, rather like the spirits of the dead in Book 11 of the Odyssey. Following on this latter view, necromancy in the ancient Hebrew world is conceived not as mere hocus-pocus but as a potentially efficacious technology of the realm of spirits, which, however, has been prohibited by God, Who wants no human experts interfering in this realm. Saul, then, has been properly upholding monotheistic law—reflected in Leviticus—in proscribing necromancy, but in his desperation, he is now about to violate his own prohibition.

6. the LORD did not answer. One last time, Saul is excluded from divine knowledge, all the accepted channels for its conveyance, being enumerated here—dream interpretation, oracular device, prophecy.

8. Saul disguised himself and put on different clothes. The narrative motivation is obvious: as the very ruler who has made necromancy a capital crime (see verse 9), Saul can scarcely come to engage the services of a necromancer unless he is disguised as a commoner. But his disguise also is the penultimate instance of the motif of royal divestment. As we have seen, clothing is associated with Saul’s kingship—the torn or cut garment is the tearing of his kingship, and among the ecstatics surrounding Samuel, Saul stripped himself naked. Now, in an unwitting symbolic gesture, he divests himself of his royal garments before going to learn of his own impending death.

9. you yourself know. An ironically emphatic use of “to know” to the man who never knows what he needs to.

he cut off the ghosts. In place of the more abstract term, “to take away,” used by the narrator in verse 3, she, from her perspective as a threatened practitioner, chooses the violent verb “to cut off.”

why do you entrap me. She uses the verb of entrapment with neat precision, for she fears that the stranger who has come to her may be an undercover agent for Saul’s necromancy enforcement authority.

10. Saul swore to her by the LORD. The irony of Saul’s doing this in a negotiation with a conjurer of spirits is vividly caught by the Midrash: “Whom did Saul resemble at that moment? A woman who is with her lover and swears by the life of her husband” (Yalkut Shimoni 2:247:139).

12. the woman saw Samuel and she screamed in a loud voice. What terrifies her is not the apparition of Samuel but the sudden realization of the identity of her nocturnal visitor. How does she know it is Saul? The most persuasive explanation has been offered by Moshe Garsiel. As other biblical references to conjuration of the dead suggest, the usual method would be for the necromancer to listen to and interpret the supposed “chirping” (tsiftsuf) or murmuring sounds made by shadows or wispy wraiths believed to be the presences of the dead. (There is scant biblical evidence for the claim that the necromancer was a medium from whose throat the ghost spoke.) In this case, however, the spirit appears not as a murmuring wisp or shadow but as the distinctly defined image of Samuel, in his prophet’s cloak (see verses 13–14), and the woman of Ein-Dor immediately realizes that it is only for the king that the prophet Samuel would have thus risen from the underworld in full-body image. It is noteworthy that the narrator is discreetly silent about the actual mechanics of the conjuration procedure, perhaps out of a kind of monotheistic reticence.

13. Do not fear. But what do you see? Saul assures her that even though he is the very king who prohibited necromancy, he will stand by his vow that no blame will be attached to her. What he urgently wants to know is the identity of the conjured presences—she can see the spirit, but he cannot, so once more Saul needs some mediation for the knowledge he seeks.

A god do I see rising up from the earth. The Hebrew balances precariously on a linguistic ambiguity that has no happy English equivalent. The word for “god” here is ʾelohim, which when treated grammatically as a singular (it has a plural ending) usually means God. In the plural, it often refers to “gods” in the polytheistic sense. It also occasionally means “angel” or “divine being,” and some have argued, unconvincingly, that it sometimes means “judge.” A further complication here is that the ghostwife uses ʾelohim with a plural participle (and hence the King James Version renders it as “gods”). It seems likely that the grammatical crossover we have just reviewed encouraged a fluidity of usage in which the plural might sometimes be employed with a singular sense, even when the referent was not the one God. In the immediately following question and response between Saul and the woman, it is presupposed that she has seen only one male figure, and the narrator has already told us she has seen Samuel. When she says she sees ’elohim rising up, she probably means an imposing figure like unto a god or an angel, or perhaps she is using it as a term for “spirit.”

14. wrapped in a cloak. It is the cloak, meʿil, that clinches the identification for Saul—the same prophet’s cloak that he clung to and tore. From childhood, when Samuel’s mother would make him a new meʿil each year, to the grave, Samuel is associated with this garment.

15. Why have you troubled me. In perfect character, Samuel begins by addressing an angry question to Saul, using a verb that refers to disturbing a person from sleep, or from the sleep of death. In divergence from the usual necromantic procedure, the ghost of Samuel speaks directly to Saul, who in turn questions Samuel himself. In fact, the ghostwife appears to have absented herself at this point, for the indication in verse 21, “And the woman came to Saul and saw that he was very distraught,” is that she is returning to the room after having left it.

I am in dire straits, and the Philistines are fighting . . . and God has turned away . . . and I called to you. The desperate Saul spills out all the causes for his desperation in one breathless run-on sentence, which this translation tries to reproduce.

neither through prophets nor dreams. Addressing a prophet, Saul makes prophecy the first item. He deletes the Urim—perhaps, it has been suggested, because of his guilty recollection of his massacre of the priests at Nob.

16. why do you ask me. Once again, in this case sardonically, there is a play on Saul’s name (Shaʾul) and the verb “to ask” (shaʾal).

17. the LORD has torn the kingship from your hand. As this particular clause highlights, Samuel’s entire speech is a recapitulation of the denunciatory speech he made to Saul at the end of the Amalek episode (chapter 15). The tearing of the kingship “from your hand” visually recalls Saul’s hand grasping the torn skirt of Samuel’s cloak. There, Samuel had said God would give the throne to “your fellow man who is better than you.” Now, of course, he can spell out the name David.

18. you did not heed the voice of the LORD. The phrasal motif of “heeding the voice” from chapter 15 is again invoked. After Samuel’s return to the underworld, the woman of Ein-Dor, on a purely mundane plane, will speak twice about heeding voices (verses 21–22).

19. And tomorrow—you and your sons are with me. Saul, having come to seek advice on the eve of a great battle, is given a denunciation concluding with a death sentence, conveyed in these words with spooky immediacy, as the ghost of Samuel beckons Saul and his sons down into the underworld. This entire scene is conceivably one of the inspirations for Macbeth’s encounter with the three witches, though the biblical writer, in contrast to Shakespeare, places it at the penultimate moment of his doomed king’s story.

The camp of Israel, too. There is no need to perform textual surgery on this sentence simply because it repeats the burden of the first sentence of the verse. It would be perfectly in character for Samuel to rub in the news of the imminent catastrophe: not only will you and your sons perish, but, as I have said, all your forces will be defeated by the Philistines, your kingship ending in wholesale failure.

20. Saul hastened and flung himself full length on the ground. Most translators have interpreted the second verb here as an involuntary one (“fell”). But the verb “to hasten” (miher) is generally part of a sequence of voluntary actions, as its use in verse 24 (“and she hastened and butchered it and took”) neatly illustrates. Saul, in his terror and despair, flings himself to the ground, and then scarcely has the strength to get up. The Hebrew for “full length” includes the component qomah, “stature,” and so is a reminder that the man of majestic stature is now cast to the ground in final defeat.

for he had eaten no food. There is no convincing evidence to support the claim of some scholars that a person had to fast before seeing a necromancer. Perhaps Saul’s fasting is a reflex of his distraught condition, but he may well be fasting because he is about to enter into battle. (It appears that his two bodyguards have also not eaten.) This would invite a connection, which has been made by both Fokkelman and Garsiel, with the vow of abstinence from food that Saul earlier imposed on his troops (chapter 15). There, he was ready to put Jonathan to death for having tasted a bit of honey; here, he will end by partaking of a feast.

22. a morsel of bread. She says this to play down what she will serve him, which is a hearty dinner, with a main course of veal.

24. the woman had a stall-fed calf. It would have taken several hours to accomplish this slaughtering and cooking and baking. One must imagine Saul sitting in the house at Ein-Dor, brooding or darkly baffled or perhaps a little catatonic. It is an odd and eerie juncture of the story. David has already twice been saved, from death and then from bloodguilt, by women. Saul is now given sustaining nurture by a woman—but only to regain the strength needed to go out to the battlefield where he will die.