1 Samuel28chapter 28

1 Samuel 28:1-2

David has been living among the Philistines since chapter 27, and Achish now calls in the debt: Saul's rival is ordered into battle against Saul's own nation. David's answer at verse 2, Surely thou shalt know what thy servant can do, commits to nothing while sounding like consent, and Achish hears only what he wants to hear. The king rewards the ambiguity by naming David keeper of his head for ever, captain of his own bodyguard.

1 Samuel 28:3

buried him in Ramah: The narrator pauses to recall two facts before the chapter's real business: Samuel is dead and mourned, and Saul had once purged the land of mediums and wizards, obeying the law of Leviticus 19:31 and Deuteronomy 18:10-11. Both notices are placed here on purpose, so that the king who goes to consult the dead in the next verses does it against his own law and without the prophet who might have restrained him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the notice as the narrator's own explanation for what follows: Saul is left without any lawful means of enquiry precisely because he had cut off the unlawful ones.

1 Samuel 28:4-5

Shunem and Gilboa face each other across the valley of Jezreel, and Endor lies just beyond the Philistine camp on the far side of the ridge, so Saul's night trip later in the chapter will cross ground his own enemy is holding. Verse 5 gives the king's state before he does anything: he was afraid, and his heart greatly trembled, the same dismay that gripped the whole army at the sight of Goliath in chapter 17, except now no young shepherd stands ready to answer for him. Matthew Henry reads the fear as the guilty blood of Amalek and the innocent blood of the priests at Nob finally catching up with him.

1 Samuel 28:6

This is Saul's one recorded enquiry of the Lord as king, and it meets total silence across all three lawful channels: dreams, Urim, and prophets. The pattern set against David's own habit of enquiry, at 23:2, 23:4 and 30:8, and after him 2 Sam 2:1, 5:19 and 5:23, makes the contrast the book's own argument rather than a later reader's addition. Chronicles states the verdict this chapter leaves the reader to draw: he enquired not of the Lord, therefore he slew him.

1 Samuel 28:7-8

Saul does not go himself first; he sends his servants to find what his own decree had made illegal to keep. Endor lay seven or eight miles from Gilboa on the far side of the Philistine camp, so reaching it by night meant passing near the very army Saul feared. He goes disguised, in another man's clothes, because he does not want the woman to know who is asking and suspects she would refuse a king the practice she might risk for a stranger.

1 Samuel 28:9-10

The woman names Saul's own law back to him without knowing who stands in front of her, and her fear is for her life rather than for the sin itself, which Matthew Henry notes is the common order among sinners, dread of punishment before dread of judgment. Saul answers with an oath sworn by the very name whose law he is about to break, As the Lord liveth, promising a safety he has no standing to promise since the penalty was never his to waive. The narrator leaves the irony to stand without comment: a king invokes the Lord to guarantee the success of consulting the dead.

1 Samuel 28:11-14

Saul names exactly who he wants, and the woman's own reaction settles a question the older commentaries return to: she cries out and immediately recognizes Saul, as though what appeared was not the sort of spirit her own art was used to raising. She first calls it gods ascending out of the earth, a general word for a supernatural being rather than a claim of deity, and only when Saul asks for a shape does she describe an old man covered with a mantle. That mantle is the detail that convinces Saul, the same garment Samuel wore when Saul tore it at 15:27 and heard the kingdom's rending read out of the tear. He falls with his face to the ground before the man whose robe had already carried this news to him once.

1 Samuel 28:15-16

The text names the speaker without qualification: And Samuel said to Saul. Two readings have stood in the church since the fathers. Keil and Delitzsch and Adam Clarke read it as a true appearance permitted by God rather than produced by the woman's craft, pointing to her own terror as proof her art had not caused what she saw. Matthew Henry calls the figure an evil spirit in Samuel's mantle offering Saul cold comfort meant to drive him toward despair, and Tertullian argues the same power that let a demon impersonate a dead man for the followers of Simon was granted once here and nowhere else in Scripture.

1 Samuel 28:17-19

The rending of the kingdom repeats what Samuel had told Saul face to face at 15:28, spoken now a second time from beyond the grave. Verse 18 names the ground that chapter had already stated: Saul did not carry out the Lord's sentence on Amalek, the war Exodus 17 swore from generation to generation and Deuteronomy 25 commanded finished. Samuel's own word at 15:23 had set rebellion beside the sin of witchcraft, and Saul closes his reign proving the comparison true by consulting one. Tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me is carried out within a day at chapter 31, and Matthew Henry reads with me only as the common state of the dead, separate from the body, stopping short of naming what company Saul keeps there.

1 Samuel 28:20

Saul collapses at full length on the ground, undone as much by a day and a night without bread as by the sentence he has just heard. John Wesley reads the fall as if the Philistines' arrows had already found him, the body giving out before the battle even begins. Adam Clarke notes that the woman had likely withdrawn during Samuel's appearance and returns only now to find the king alone and prostrate on her floor.

1 Samuel 28:21-25

The woman who kept the craft Saul's own law had outlawed is the one who feeds him when no one from his own camp is present to do it, and he refuses to eat until his servants join her in persuading him. She kills the fatted calf and bakes it unleavened only for want of time to let bread rise, not for any ceremony, and Matthew Henry recalls that Josephus praised her courtesy toward a stranger who could do nothing for her in return. The chapter ends as it began, in darkness, with Saul and his two men going away that night the way they had come.