Samuel, Saul and the medium of En Dor

A desperate king

Saul, the first king of Israel, had once driven the mediums and spiritists out of the land. Now, on the night before the battle in which he would die, abandoned by God because of his own rebellion, he went to one of them in disguise.

And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams or by Urim or by the prophets. And his servants said to him, “In fact, there is a woman who is a medium at En Dor.”

Saul asked the woman to bring up Samuel, the prophet who had anointed him and who had died some time before. The woman saw “a spirit ascending out of the earth”, described “an old man ... covered with a mantle”, and Saul “perceived that it was Samuel” (1 Samuel 28:13-14). Saul himself saw nothing; he bowed to the woman’s description. The figure then spoke, foretelling Saul’s defeat and death and saying, “tomorrow you and your sons will be with me” (1 Samuel 28:19).

Many readers conclude that Samuel really appeared and therefore that the dead are conscious and can be summoned. Let us test that conclusion.

What God had already said about mediums

There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you.

‘Give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek after them, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.

“One who calls up the dead” is an abomination. If the dead could really be called up by such people, God would be forbidding something that worked, something that put His people in touch with their departed loved ones and with His own prophets. The far more natural reading is that God forbids it because what answers is not the dead. Isaiah makes exactly that argument:

And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

“Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?” The question expects the answer no, because the dead cannot help the living. They know nothing. The test of any spirit is “the law and the testimony”, the written Word.

What the story itself shows

Look again at the details. God had refused to answer Saul “by dreams or by Urim or by the prophets”. Are we to believe that the same God who refused every legitimate channel then allowed His prophet to be fetched by a forbidden one? That a medium, whom God calls an abomination, had power over the rest of a holy man, and that Samuel, who was righteous, would be “disquieted” (1 Samuel 28:15) from the sleep that Scripture calls peace? And where did the figure come from? “Ascending out of the earth,” not descending from heaven. If the righteous dead were in heaven with God, Samuel should have come down, not up.

Then there is the message. The figure says that tomorrow Saul and his sons “will be with me”. Saul died by his own hand, rejected by God. Jonathan, his son, was a man of faith. Were both of them going to be with Samuel, in the same place? Only if “with me” means “in the grave”, which is exactly what the Bible says of all the dead. The figure told the truth about the battle, as the enemy is well able to do, but the entire scene is one that God forbade, and the inspired verdict on it is given in Chronicles: Saul died “because he consulted a medium for guidance. But he did not inquire of the Lord; therefore He killed him” (1 Chronicles 10:13-14). The record calls it consulting a medium, not consulting Samuel.

Who answered?

The Bible does not leave us guessing about who impersonates the dead. Paul warns that Satan “transforms himself into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). Jesus foretold that the last days would bring “false christs and false prophets” who would “show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). John saw “spirits of demons, performing signs” going out to the whole world before the end (Revelation 16:14). A spirit that claims to be a departed loved one, that knows things only the departed knew, that brings comfort and perhaps even accurate predictions, is precisely the deception that these passages describe. And it rests entirely on the first lie: “You will not surely die.”

Why this matters now

Spiritism is not an ancient curiosity. The claim that the dead can speak to us, through mediums, through “signs”, through apparitions, through channelled messages, is a global industry and a growing one. Grieving people are its first target. The Bible’s teaching about death is the only complete protection against it. If the dead sleep, then whatever is speaking is not the person we loved, and we are free to refuse it without any fear that we are refusing them. “Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony!”