1 Samuel 28 · An Iconic Story
Saul at Endor
Heaven goes silent on a terrified king, so he disguises himself and goes at night to a medium he had outlawed — and what comes up terrifies her, not him.
Rosa paints the apparition as unmistakably real (a tall, lit, upright figure, more solid than anything else in the room) and puts the king face-down on the floor beneath it. Look at where the woman is: recoiling, hand raised, further from the figure than the king is. That is the detail the retellings usually lose, and it is the detail verse 12 insists on. Rosa is also taking a side in an argument that is eighteen centuries old, which this page lays out below rather than settling.
The Night the King Went Out the Back Way
1 Samuel 28, told plainly
Samuel is dead. Saul, earlier in his reign, had driven every medium and spiritist out of the country (the Law commanded it, and he enforced it. Now the Philistine army is massed at Shunem, Saul's army is on Mount Gilboa, and when the king sees the size of the camp against him his heart shakes. He asks God what to do. Nothing comes back) not by dreams, not by Urim, not by prophets. Three doors, all shut.
When Saul saw the Philistine army, he was afraid and trembled violently. He inquired of the LORD, but the LORD did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.The verse names all three legitimate channels: and reports the same answer from each of them.
So the king who outlawed mediums tells his servants to find him one. He puts on a disguise and goes at night, with two men, to a woman at Endor. She is careful: she knows exactly what Saul has done to people like her, and she will not act until he swears an oath that nothing will happen to her. Then he asks her to bring up Samuel.
And something happens that terrifies her. The text says: when the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice (and in the same breath she knows who her customer is. Saul asks what she sees; she says an old man coming up, wrapped in a robe. The king bows his face to the ground. What he is told is not new: the kingdom is torn out of his hand, exactly as Samuel had said while he was alive, and tomorrow he and his sons will be where Samuel is. Saul falls full length on the floor. And the woman) the criminal, the outlaw, the one with everything to lose: makes him eat before she sends him back into the dark.
THREE DOORS · ALL SHUT
Dreams
A message given directly to the man himself, while he slept.
Nothing came. The text says so without explaining why.
1 Samuel 28:6 →Urim
An answer through the high priest, wearing the ephod, at the sanctuary.
Saul had ordered the priests at Nob killed: eighty-five of them, in one day. The survivor fled to David, and took the ephod with him.
1 Samuel 22:18 →Prophets
An answer through a seer, speaking the word of the LORD.
Samuel is dead, and buried at Ramah. The prophet who had anointed him is the one man Saul now wants.
1 Samuel 28:3 →and then: not a door, but a floor that opens
Then Saul said to his servants, “Find me a woman who is a medium, so I can go and consult her.” “There is a medium at Endor,” his servants replied.
The chapter's whole argument is in the sequence: three legitimate channels go quiet, and a man who cannot bear the silence goes looking for a fourth. Barnes is blunt about what silence from God does and does not license.
1 Samuel 28:7 →Scripture shown is the Berean Standard Bible.
The Lord answered him not - He used the three methods by which supernatural intelligence was ordinarily given: - 1. Dreams. - The person prayed for instruction; and begged that God would answer by a significant dream. 2. Urim. - This was a kind of oracular answer given to the high priest when clothed with the ephod, on which were the Urim and Thummim. How these communicated the answer, is not well known. 3. Prophets. - Who were requested by the party concerned to consult the Lord on the subject in question, and to report his answer.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on 1 Sam 28:6
That Saul received no answer - when he inquired of the Lord by dreams, which was an immediate revelation to himself; by Urim, which was an answer through the high priest clothed in the ephod; or by prophets, which was an answer conveyed through some seer speaking by the Word of the Lord 1Sa 22:5 - was a reason for self-abasement and self-examination, to find out and, if possible, remove the cause, but was no justification whatever of his sin in asking counsel of familiar spirits.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on 1 Sam 28:6
Six Places the Retellings Drift
what the text actually says, against what the story has become
THE MEDIUM DID NOT CONJURE HIM UP
Whatever she normally did, the narrative gives her a fright rather than a success. Verse 12 has her screaming at what she sees, and the scream is what exposes the king. Barnes says the apparition was real and that she was utterly unprepared for it; Wesley says she saw Samuel instead of the spirit she was expecting.
SAUL HAD NOT RUN OUT OF OPTIONS: HE HAD DESTROYED ONE
Verse 6 names three ways of asking God, and Saul used all three. But one of those doors he had shut himself: the priests of Nob, killed on his order, and the ephod carried away to David. The silence of heaven was a reason to examine himself, and Barnes says plainly it was no justification for what he did next.
THIS IS NOT A STORY ABOUT OCCULT POWER
Scripture gives its own verdict on the night, and the verdict is about Saul, not about her: he died for his unfaithfulness, for asking counsel of a medium, and because he did not enquire of the LORD. The chapter is a king's obituary. It is not a demonstration of a technique.
THE TEXT NEVER CALLS THE WOMAN A FRAUD
It never calls her genuine either. What it reports is her terror in verse 12 and her kindness in verses 21 to 25: she risks her life to keep a promise to the man who had hunted people like her, and then feeds him. Scripture is remarkably restrained about this woman, and so is this page.
“GODS” DOES NOT MEAN SHE SAW SEVERAL
The Hebrew word elohim is plural in form and is used constantly of one being: including of God Himself. Wesley works through both possibilities in the sentence below: either she is using ordinary Hebrew usage, or she is speaking as a pagan would. Nothing in the verse requires a crowd.
VERSE 19 IS NOT A PROMISE ABOUT HEAVEN
“Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me” has been read as a word about Saul's eternal standing. Wesley and Henry both read it as a statement about death: with me, in the state of the dead. What the verse settles is where his body will be tomorrow. Nothing about his soul is settled here, and this page will not settle it.
But when the woman saw Samuel, she cried out in a loud voice and said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!”The hinge of the chapter, and the verse every reading has to account for: she screams first, and works out who he is second.
That is, a God, and divine person, glorious, and full of majesty and splendour, exceeding not only mortal men, but common ghosts. She used the plural number, gods, either after the manner of the Hebrew language, which commonly uses that word of one person: or, after the language and custom of the heathens.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on 1 Sam 28:13
thou and thy sons shall be with me, that is, in the state of the dead, separate from the body
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on 1 Sam 28:19
Seven Miles Around an Army, in the Dark
the ban, the road, and a change of vocabulary the narrator makes on purpose
Start with what the Law says, because Saul knew it and had enforced it. Israel was forbidden to consult the dead, and the prohibition is not vague: it lists the practices by name. That is what makes the king's journey so strange: he is not a man stumbling into something he never heard of. He is the man who cleared the country of it.
Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, practices divination or conjury, interprets omens, practices sorcery, casts spells, consults a medium or spiritist, or inquires of the dead. For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD. And because of these detestable things, the LORD your God is driving out the nations before you.The ban, by name. Scripture treats these practices as real enough to be forbidden: and forbids them all the same.
You must not turn to mediums or spiritists; do not seek them out, or you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God.The same pair of words the chapter keeps using for the woman at Endor.
He knew the heinousness of the sin of witchcraft, else he would not have cut off those that had familiar spirits; yet now he had recourse to that as an oracle which he had before condemned as an abomination. It is common for men to inveigh severely against those sins which they are in no temptation to, but afterwards to be themselves overcome by them.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on 1 Sam 28:7
Then look at the map. Endor lies seven or eight miles from the slopes of Gilboa, on the far side of the hill from Israel's camp: which means the king of Israel travelled at night, in a disguise, around an enemy army, to break his own law, on the eve of the battle that would kill him. Barnes measures the risk. It is not a detail; it is the measure of how badly he needed an answer.
En-dor (see Jos 11:2 note) was seven or eight miles from the slopes of Gilboa, on the north of little Hermon, where the Philistines were encamped; so that Saul must have run great risks in going there.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on 1 Sam 28:7
And notice what the narrator does with his vocabulary. In verse 6 Saul asks the LORD. In verse 7 he uses a different verb — the one Hebrew normally reserves for consulting a false god. The writer changes his word at the exact moment the king changes his source. That verb, the ordinary one for asking, is also the root of the king's own name: Saul means asked for. The man named “asked for” dies having asked the wrong one.
Enquire - A different word from that in 1Sa 28:6, though nearly synonymous with it. It is more frequently applied to inquiry of a false god, as e. g. 2Ki 1:2; Isa 8:19; Isa 19:3.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on 1 Sam 28:7
When men tell you to consult the spirits of the dead and the spiritists who whisper and mutter, shouldn’t a people consult their God instead? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?A prophet, centuries later, asking the question this chapter puts in narrative form.
One more piece of context, and it is the one the retellings almost always cut. The message Saul receives is not news. Samuel had passed this sentence on him years earlier, in daylight, while alive: the kingdom torn away, given to a neighbour better than he. What the king crosses a battlefield in the dark to hear is a verdict he already had.
As Samuel turned to go, Saul grabbed the hem of his robe, and it tore. So Samuel said to him, “The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to your neighbor who is better than you.The robe torn in Samuel's hand, and the sentence: spoken long before Endor, and repeated there almost word for word.
Four Things the Chapter Will Not Tell You
named as silence: this is the story where filling the gaps has done the most damage
No story in the Old Testament has attracted more invention than this one, and almost all of it grows in four gaps. The gaps are worth naming precisely, because once they are named, the amount that Scripture actually claims here turns out to be small: and the amount it refuses to claim turns out to be the interesting part.
What the woman saw, and by what means
The text reports her scream, and then her words: gods coming up out of the earth, an old man, covered with a robe. That is all. Nothing about how, nothing about what she had done, nothing about what she usually did instead. Clarke reads her reaction as the tell: this was not the thing she was used to dealing with:
This sight alarmed the woman; it was what she did not expect; in this she could not recognise her familiar, and she was terrified at the appearance.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on 1 Sam 28:13
Whether God sent Samuel or permitted something else
This is the whole of the ancient dispute, and the reason it has never been settled is that the narrator declines to help. He uses the name, straightforwardly, as many times as he needs it: and he never once tells the reader what he means by it. Eighteen centuries of careful readers have carried that weight differently. The positions, and who holds each, are set out further down this page.
Saul's eternal standing
“Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me” tells the reader where Saul's body will be within a day. Wesley leaves the state of their souls out of it explicitly, and Henry reads “with me” as the state of the dead rather than a destination. It is a sentence about death. People have made it a sentence about heaven or hell in both directions, and it is neither.
The woman's name, and what became of her
She is never named. After she kills the fattened calf, bakes unleavened bread, and persuades a broken man to eat before he walks back to his death, she leaves the Bible entirely. Whatever else the chapter is doing, it declines to make a monster of her: and it declines to make a heroine of her either.
When the woman came to Saul and saw how distraught he was, she said to him, “Look, your maidservant has obeyed your voice. I took my life in my hands and did as you told me.She reminds the king what she risked to obey him: and then does something for him that nobody required.
What Scripture Itself Does With This Night
an honest note first: and then the line the Bible does draw
The New Testament never cites this chapter. There is no apostolic reading of Endor to lead with, and this page will not invent one. What Scripture does supply is its own summary of the man — written centuries later, in Chronicles — and it is not about the medium at all.
So Saul died for his unfaithfulness to the LORD, because he did not keep the word of the LORD and even consulted a medium for guidance, and he failed to inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse.The Bible's own verdict on the night: three counts, and the last one is that he did not enquire of the LORD.
Read that last clause beside chapter 28 and something opens up. Saul did enquire of the LORD — verse 6 says so. Chronicles is not contradicting it; it is saying that a man who asks and, when he does not like the silence, goes somewhere else, has not really asked at all. And then Chronicles finishes the sentence: the kingdom is turned over to David the son of Jesse. The line that runs to Christ passes through this night. The old king's last door closes, and the new king's reign begins on the other side of it.
There is a contrast a Christian reader will feel here, and it is offered as this page's own reading rather than as a claim the text makes. A king goes out at night, in a disguise, to the dead, to ask about tomorrow: and is told the truth, and is destroyed by it. The Gospels answer a generation that demanded a sign with a different night and a different grave: not a man calling the dead up in the dark, but the dead walking out at dawn, in his own name, uninvited.
Immediately Saul fell flat on the ground, terrified by the words of Samuel. And his strength was gone, because he had not eaten anything all that day and night.The king full length on the ground, with no strength left in him: and he has not eaten all day or all night.
The woman had a fattened calf at her house, and she quickly slaughtered it. She also took flour, kneaded it, and baked unleavened bread. She served it to Saul and his servants, and they ate. And that night they got up and left.The last meal in Saul's life is served by the woman he had outlawed, in the house he came to in disguise.
The questions underneath this chapter — what happens to a person between death and resurrection, and what Scripture actually says about the spirits it forbids — have pages of their own: the state of the dead and the unseen realm. This page does not re-argue them.
Three Readings, and Who Holds Each
honoured readers of Scripture have differed here for eighteen centuries: the evidence each side stands on, laid out
This is the oldest live argument in the chapter, and it is worth saying at the outset that the men on both sides of it loved Scripture and read it carefully. Nobody here is opposing anybody. They are looking at the same twenty verses and weighing two things differently: what the narrator says, and what the Law forbids.
“What does he look like?” asked Saul. “An old man is coming up,” she replied. “And he is wearing a robe.” So Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed facedown in reverence.The verse the argument turns on: the woman describes, Saul concludes, and the narrator writes the name.
the reading · A
Samuel really appeared: God permitted it, and the medium did not produce it.
who holds it
Adam Clarke · Albert Barnes · John Wesley · Augustine of Hippo (twice) · Justin Martyr · Origen of Alexandria: and Tertullian, who allows it for this one case and refuses the idea everywhere else.
what it stands on
The argument is textual. The narrator writes “Samuel,” not “a spirit,” eight times over. The woman is frightened by her own result. And what the appearance says is true, specific, and happens the next day.
the reading · B
A deceiving spirit in Samuel's likeness.
who holds it
Matthew Henry, who says it in as many words: “this evil spirit in Samuel's mantle.”
what it stands on
The argument is theological. Deuteronomy 18 forbids precisely this; God had already refused to answer Saul; and it is hard to hold that a forbidden rite obtained what prayer could not.
the reading · C
Whatever the woman normally did, this was not it.
who holds it
Albert Barnes and John Wesley both land here on their way to Position A; it is less a third theory than a reading of verse 12.
what it stands on
The scream. She cries out with a loud voice at what she sees, and in the same breath works out who her customer must be. Barnes: she was “utterly unprepared for it.”
POSITION A, IN THEIR OWN WORDS
When the woman saw Samuel - That Samuel did appear on this occasion, is most evident from the text; nor can this be denied from any legitimate mode of interpretation: and it is as evident that he was neither raised by the power of the devil nor the incantations of the witch, for the appearances which took place at this time were such as she was wholly unacquainted with.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on 1 Sam 28:12
Saw Samuel - The words are express, the woman saw Samuel, instead of the spirit whom she expected to see, God ordering it so for his own glory. She cried with a loud voice - Terrified and astonished, and thence easily conjectured, whom she had been talking with.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on 1 Sam 28:12
It is manifest both that the apparition of Samuel was real, and also that the woman was utterly unprepared for it. Why hast thou deceived me ... - She perhaps inferred that Samuel would have answered the call of none inferior to the king. Or it may be the presence of an inhabitant of the world of spirits brought a sudden illumination to her mind.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on 1 Sam 28:12
Samuel comes up, and note that she does not say that she saw the soul of Samuel.
Origen of Alexandria· Homily on 1 Kings 28.3.2, 7.1 (253)
POSITION B, IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Had she believed that it was really Samuel whom she saw, she would have had more reason to be afraid of him, who was a good prophet, than of Saul, who was a wicked king.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on 1 Sam 28:12
It is cold comfort which this evil spirit in Samuel's mantle gives to Saul, and is manifestly intended to drive him to despair and self-murder.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on 1 Sam 28:15
The strangest witness on the list
Tertullian is writing around AD 220 against people who claimed they could summon the souls of the prophets, and he is scathing about the claim in general. Then he makes one exception, and it is this chapter: which means his sentence stands on the opposite side from where his argument seems to be heading. It is quoted here exactly as he wrote it, so a reader can see the shape of it rather than take a summary:
Why, even now the followers of Simon [Magus] are so confident of their art that they undertake to bring back the souls of the prophets from hell. And this, I believe, because their power lies in their ability to deceive. This power was actually granted to the witch of Endor, who brought back the soul of Samuel after Saul had consulted God in vain. Apart from that case, God forbid we should believe that any soul, much less a prophet, could be called forth by a demon.
Tertullian· On the Soul 57.7–9 (c. 220)
A note on the history, kept honest: among the early Christian writers whose words on this chapter can be quoted directly, the reading that the appearance was real is the one that dominates. The other reading is ancient too (the argument was already being fought out between bishops in the fourth century) but this page names only holders whose actual words are in front of it. In the sources gathered here, the deceiving-spirit reading is carried by Matthew Henry.
AND THE READING BOTH SIDES SHARE
Whatever else is in dispute, almost everyone agrees on the point verse 12 makes: the woman did not get what she was expecting. Wesley's note on the robe is the model of how to hold a question you cannot close: he states the alternative, and then says exactly what would follow from it, without pretending to know.
A mantle - The usual habit of prophets, and particularly of Samuel, chap. xv, 27. If it was not Samuel, but an other spirit in his shape, it is not true, that Saul perceived it was Samuel.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on 1 Sam 28:14
THE ARTWORK
Hang this beside the Rosa at the top of the page and you have the two positions on a wall. Van Oostsanen fills his canvas with a witches' sabbath (circles, smoke, flying figures, a whole demonic apparatus) none of which is in 1 Samuel 28; the chapter gives one woman, one room, and one scream. Rosa paints an apparition that is unmistakably real. Neither painter is reading carelessly: each has taken a side in the argument this section lays out, and has painted the chapter as his side reads it. It is worth knowing that most of what people picture when they hear “the witch of Endor” came to them from paintings like this one rather than from the text.
Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Saul and the Witch of Endor (1526). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
MannaFest does not stamp a verdict on this question. The positions are here, with the men who hold them and the evidence each stands on, and the next word belongs to Marcus.
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching: go further than this page
Commentary on the Bible
Adam Clarke · 1832
Clarke states Position A as hard as it can be stated, and he is the one who lists the three closed channels of verse 6 in order. Read him for the argument at full strength.
READ IT FREE AT BIBLE HUB →Commentary on the Whole Bible
Matthew Henry · 1710
Henry carries the other reading in these pages, and carries it seriously. He is also the best of them on Saul himself: a man condemning a sin he was in no temptation to, until he was.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →A Treatise on the Soul
Tertullian · c. 210–220
Chapter 57 is where the ancient argument surfaces in the earliest Christian writing on the subject: and where Tertullian makes his single exception for Endor.
READ IT FREE AT NEW ADVENT →Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament
John Wesley · 1765
Wesley is the model of how to hold an open question: he states the alternative plainly, says what would follow from it, and refuses to settle what the text does not settle.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →A King Who Asked, and Asked Wrongly
Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” “I am deeply distressed,” replied Saul. “The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has turned away from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.”Saul explains himself, out loud, to the one man who had told him the truth while alive: God has turned away, so I called you.
The chapter is not finally about a medium, or a mechanism, or what came up out of the ground. It is about a man who could not bear a silence. Everything he does that night follows from those first six verses: he asks, hears nothing, and cannot leave it there. The Law he had enforced, the priests he had killed, the prophet he had ignored while the man was alive: all of it is behind him, and none of it stops him. Scripture gives him three sentences at the end of Chronicles, and the last one is the whole story: he did not enquire of the LORD.
GO ON FROM HERE
Built from MannaFest's research brief on the Land and the Kingdom stories and the gate-verified 1 Samuel 28 quote pool — public-domain sources quoted verbatim (Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, John Wesley, Matthew Henry, Tertullian, Origen). The positions and their holders are assigned exactly as the brief assigns them from that pool; no house verdict is given. Hebrew word data floor-verified against the site's word-level text of 1 Samuel 28. Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible, fetched from the site's own text. Artwork: Salvator Rosa (1668) and Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen (1526), both public domain, license-verified at Wikimedia Commons.