The Bible's Witch of Endor:
No Betty Crocker

The chapter describes a witch's conjuring and a meal she serves a (supposedly) witch-hating king. Why, in a tract that despises witches and prizes hospitality, is a witch shown to be both successful in materializing a prophetic ghost and hospitable in succoring her worst enemy?

The chapter in Samuel starts by telling us that King Saul had rid the land of mediums and wizards (1 Samuel 28:3). Now the Philistine army is threatening; the prophet Samuel is dead. King Saul gets no advice from dreams or from any supernatural source, and he is sore afraid of the Philistines. He asks his men to seek out a witch that he may inquire of her, and his men do so. Saul, in disguise, and two of his men go to the witch. Saul asks her to bring up someone that he will name, but she reminds him that King Saul has cut the witches and diviners out of the land and accuses him of laying a deathtrap for her. Saul swears by the Lord that no punishment will come to her and asks her to materialize the dead prophet, Samuel.

When the witch succeeds in calling Samuel forth from the dead, she recognizes that her customer is the king. She cries out that he is Saul and that she has been deceived. Saul commands her to tell him what she sees, and she describes an old man with a mantle. Saul knows that this apparition is Samuel, and he bows before the prophet. Samuel and Saul have a question-and-answer period that goes badly for Saul, and he falls to the ground in fear and in frailty, for he has been fasting all day and all night. The witch comes in to Saul, sees his terror, and suggests that, as she listened to him and took her life in her hands, he should now listen to her and have a morsel of bread to strengthen him on his way. Saul at first refuses, saying, "I will not eat," but his men and the witch convince him, and he rises from the earth and sits upon the bed. The witch quickly kills a calf, takes flour, kneads and bakes unleavened bread, and brings it before Saul and his servants. They eat and leave.

One professor has argued that the severity of the prophet was balanced by the tenderness and hospitality of the witch. ...To read the text his way seemed too pro-witch to me. Given the Bible's firm anti-witch stance ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Exodus 22:17; "There must not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that uses divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch," Deuteronomy 18:10), I could not believe the [Bible's] author intended to show the woman in so favorable a light.

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