The Cost of Speaking to the Dead

ENG 233
Response 3
19 October 2010

The Cost of Speaking to the Dead

    When Saul feels himself abandoned by God, he resorts to consulting a necromancer in order to gain information he feels he needs to survive or win the upcoming battle with the Philistines. There are multiple aspects of irony involved in this including Saul’s previous actions as a ruler and a repeated tenant of Mosaic Law.

    Long before Saul faced this particular problem, Moses stood on Mt. Sinai and listened to Yahweh list off an incredible amount of specifically detailed to rather generally interpreted laws that would govern the people in their own lands. Included in this ad nausem list was “You will not allow a sorceress to live” (Ex. 22:17). Nothing further was mentioned by God to Moses about exactly what sort of traits, actions, and characteristics were to be included in defining a sorceress (other than, by the nominative noun, being female).

    So, when generations later, it is stated in 1 Samuel 28:3 that “Saul … expelled the necromancers and wizards from the country,” it might come as a surprise to some readers that Saul himself consulted with just such a character. He first “consulted Yahweh, but Yahweh gave him no answer” (1 Sam. 28:6), so Saul—apparently lacking no advisor in the spanning gulf between prayer and necromancy—commanded of his servants to “‘Find a necromancer for me,” (which, much like the Law of Moses stated, implied such practitioners were inherently female; making it all the easier for upstanding religious men-folk to despise them) “so that I can go and consult her.’” The response comes surprisingly quick from his servants: “‘There is a necromancer at En-Dor’” (1 Sam. 28:7).

    The irony of this brief tale is told clearly within it when the necromancer herself asks the disguised ruler, “‘[Y]ou know what Saul has done, how he has outlawed necromancers … from the country; why are you setting a trap ... to have me killed?’” Saul then violates at least a second of the Mosaic Laws when he places his own word as that of God’s and offers a divinely-instituted promise (something beyond his his power) in telling the necromancer, “‘As Yahweh lives … no blame shall attach to you for this business’” (1 Sam. 28:9-10).

    What follows is the summoning of Samuel by the necromancer, a stern lecture from the ghost to Saul about over-stepping the boundaries of his kingship and religion, and the slaughtering of a fatted calf to pay for the consultation of black arts. The necromancer feasted on roasted meat while Saul had a main course of bitter ironic poisoning followed by an apéritif of just desserts.


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