Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The ghost of Samuel
The dead prophet called up by a medium, in a scene that terrifies the medium herself.
1 Samuel 28:3-25, in every translation this tool compares.
A medium calls up the dead prophet, and the thing that frightens her is what actually comes up. The narrator calls him Samuel, and the message he gives turns out to be accurate. The idea that a demon was impersonating him is a later attempt to tidy the scene.
The text says Samuel, the medium is terrified by what actually comes up, and the message delivered is accurate. The demonic-impersonation reading is a later harmonization and not what the narrator reports. The medium describes what she sees as 'elohim, literally "a god," coming up out of the earth (1 Samuel 28:13), and DDD treats the episode as a plain case of Israelite necromancy in which even the effectiveness of the conjuring is left intact by the editor (DDD s.v. "Dead," 223). The ritual follows the standard ancient Near Eastern pattern for raising the dead through a pit, and nothing in the text says the woman was possessed or spoke in a trance. She conjures the spirit and reports what she sees and hears, which is not a medium in the modern channeling sense (Walton, IVP Bible Background Commentary: OT, on 1 Samuel 28:7-11). Saul recognizes Samuel by his prophet's robe (1 Samuel 28:14).
- 1 Samuel 28:3-25
- DDD s.v. "Dead," 223
- Walton, IVP Bible Background Commentary: OT, on 1 Samuel 28:3-14
