Saul Seeks a Different Route to the Word He Has Rejected

“In those days” links the muster to David’s year and four months at Ziklag (27:7). Achish’s “know thou assuredly” uses the doubled Hebrew verb, know-knowing, the form of an order rather than an invitation. David is not asked whether he will march; he is told.

David’s reply has a double edge: “thy servant” could mean what he will do for Achish or what he will do to him. “Keeper of mine head” is the chief bodyguard, the man who stands nearest the king’s person, and “for ever” makes the post permanent before a single battle has been fought.

Two facts already given in 25:1 and implied since, repeated in one breath because tonight they collide. Samuel’s burial “in his own city” of Ramah is added. Saul’s purge of mediums obeys Leviticus 19:31 and Deuteronomy 18:11; the verse records it as a genuine act of the king’s own law.

Shunem sits on the southern slope of the hill of Moreh, across the Jezreel valley from Mount Gilboa. The Philistines have come far north of their own coastal plain, onto the flat ground where their chariots have room, and the two camps can see each other.

Two verbs for fear stacked together: he was afraid, and his heart trembled “greatly”, the word used of a quaking mountain in Exodus 19:18. The man who stood head and shoulders above Israel (9:2) is shaken by what he sees across the valley.

The three recognised channels are named and each is closed. Urim was kept with the ephod, and the ephod had gone to David with Abiathar after Saul killed the priests of Nob (22:20; 23:6). Part of the silence Saul had arranged himself.

“A woman that hath a familiar spirit” is literally a mistress of an ob, a word that may mean the pit from which a spirit was called or the spirit itself. His servants know an address at once, which suggests the purge had driven the practice underground rather than out.

Endor lies on the far side of the hill of Moreh, beyond the Philistine camp at Shunem, so the journey means slipping round the enemy in the dark. “Other raiment” strips off the royal dress; the tallest man in Israel is trying to be anonymous.

The woman quotes the king’s own policy to the king. “Cut off” is the verb of legal extermination, and “snare” is a fowler’s trap. Her fear is well founded: the only law she knows is the one her visitor made.

The oath formula “as the LORD liveth” is the strongest a man of Israel could swear, and Saul uses it to promise protection for a practice the LORD had forbidden. He has sworn rash oaths before, one that nearly killed Jonathan (14:39, 44).

A two-line exchange with the name held to the end. Saul could ask for anyone, and he asks for the prophet who anointed him and then rejected him. The man who would not listen to Samuel alive now wants to hear him dead.

Her cry comes before any ritual is described, which is one reason many readers take the appearance as something she did not produce. How the sight of Samuel unmasks Saul is not explained; the connection between the two is left for the reader to feel.

“Gods” is elohim, here used for a being of more than human kind, with a plural participle for “ascending”. Saul’s “be not afraid” is almost comic from a man who has just been trembling at an army.

The mantle is a me’il, the robe Hannah made for the boy Samuel every year (2:19) and the robe whose skirt tore in Saul’s grip (15:27). An old man in a robe could be anyone; for Saul the robe is enough.

“Disquieted” is the verb for being disturbed from rest, as the dead were thought to rest. Saul’s list repeats verse 6 with one change: Urim is missing. He names prophets and dreams, and leaves out the priestly lot he lost when he killed the priests.

The word for “enemy” here is rare, ‘ar, possibly Aramaic in colouring. Samuel’s question turns the consultation back on itself: if the LORD has left, why ask the LORD’s prophet? The medium was never going to supply a second opinion.

“To him” in the King James follows the Hebrew; the Greek and a few Hebrew manuscripts read “to thee”. The rest reuses 15:28 almost word for word, the kingdom rent from Saul, except that the unnamed neighbour now has a name, David.

“Fierce wrath” is the burning of anger, the phrase used of the ban on Amalek in chapter 15. The Amalekites are not finished with this account: they are burning Ziklag even now (30:1), and an Amalekite will bring news of Saul’s death (2 Samuel 1:8).

“To morrow” sets a date, which prophecy in Samuel rarely does. The sentence names Israel twice, at the start and the end, with Saul and his sons in between. “With me” places them among the dead, in the same place Samuel speaks from.

“All along” translates “the fulness of his stature”: Saul falls his whole great length. Two reasons are given, fear and fasting. The king who once bound his army by oath to eat nothing until evening (14:24) has now gone a day and a night without bread himself.

“Put my life in my hand” is an idiom for taking a mortal risk, used by Jephthah (Judges 12:3) and of David facing Goliath (19:5). She has hearkened to his voice, the very thing Samuel said Saul failed to do with the LORD’s voice (verse 18).

She offers “a morsel of bread” and then kills a calf, the same understatement Abraham used before his feast for the three visitors (Genesis 18:5–7). Her argument is plainly practical: he has a road to walk tonight, and a battle after it.

“I will not eat” is Saul’s last refusal in the book, and it lasts one sentence. Servants and woman together press him, and the verb is strong, they urged or pressed him. The bed is a couch, the one piece of furniture in a humble house fit for a guest.

“Fat calf” is a calf of the stall, fed up for a feast, probably the most valuable animal she owned. The bread is unleavened because there is no time to let dough rise, the same haste as the first Passover.

The last meal of Saul’s life is served by the woman his law had outlawed, at a table in a house he entered in disguise. They leave “that night”, and the next time the Book of 1 Samuel shows him, he is on Gilboa.