I Samuel 28

This chapter is built like a vice, closing in on Saul from both sides. It opens with David, trapped in an impossible spot — living among the Philistines for safety, and now their king Achish tells him flatly: you're marching with us against Israel (28:1-2). David gives a slippery, non-answer answer, the kind you give when you're buying time and hoping God makes a way out Keil-Delitzsch Old Testament. That thread gets dropped here — it'll resolve two chapters later — but it's placed right before Saul's story specifically to make you feel the contrast: David, cornered but quietly trusting; Saul, cornered and coming apart.

Then the scene shifts entirely to Saul, and the chapter's real subject: verse 3 quietly plants two facts — Samuel is dead, and Saul had banned mediums and psychics from the land. Both details matter enormously for what follows. The Philistines camp at Shunem, Saul camps at Gilboa, and Saul looks at the enemy army and simply falls apart with fear (28:4-5). He does what any king of Israel should do — he inquires of the LORD. But nothing comes back. No dreams, no priestly Urim, no prophets (28:6). Heaven has gone silent on him. This is the hinge of the whole chapter: a man who spent his reign drifting from God now finds the door locked when he finally knocks.

So Saul does something staggering — he goes looking for the very thing he outlawed. Disguised, at night, he travels to a medium at Endor (28:7-8), the same king who once purged the land of exactly this practice John Gill. The scene that follows is famously strange: Samuel actually appears, and even the medium is terrified — this isn't the séance trick she expected (28:11-14). And Samuel's message to Saul isn't comfort. It's a death sentence, and it's not a new word — it's the old word from chapter 15 about Saul's disobedience over the Amalekites, restated with brutal finality: the kingdom is gone, torn away and given to David, and tomorrow Saul and his sons die (28:16-19). Saul collapses, starving and terrified, and the chapter ends almost tenderly — the medium, the very woman he came to condemn, feeds him a meal like a last supper before his death (28:20-25).

Christians disagree sharply over what actually happened at Endor: is this a real appearance of Samuel permitted by God for judgment, a demonic impersonation, or the medium's fraud exposed by God's sovereign intervention? The text itself seems to lean toward it being genuinely Samuel — the narrator says plainly "the woman saw Samuel" and the prophecy comes true exactly — but the ethics of necromancy condemned everywhere else in Scripture ( Deuteronomy 18:10-12) makes this one of the most debated scenes in the Old Testament.

1 Samuel was likely put into its final form sometime during the Israelite monarchy, drawing on older court records and prophetic accounts, though the events themselves belong to roughly 1010 BC, near the very end of Saul's reign. The book was written for a nation that would look back at Saul as a cautionary tale and at David as the template for the kind of king God actually wanted.

At this point in the story, David is living in Philistine territory, having fled Saul's murderous jealousy, and has convinced the Philistine king Achish that he's now loyal to him — even raiding Israel's enemies while telling Achish he's raiding Israel itself (see 1 Samuel 27:12). The Philistines were a coalition of city-states along the coastal plain, technologically ahead of Israel (they controlled iron), and a near-constant military threat for generations — this wasn't a one-off battle but a rerun of a war Israel had fought over and over ( 1 Samuel 17:1, 13:5, 7:7) Tyndale.

Mediums and necromancers — people who claimed to summon the dead or spirits for information — were a common feature of the wider ancient world, and the Torah bans them outright ( Leviticus 19:31, Deuteronomy 18:10-11) precisely because Israel was supposed to get guidance from God alone, through prophets, priests, and dreams — the very channels listed in verse 6. Saul himself had enforced that ban, likely as part of general religious reform early in his kingship. That he now has to go in disguise, at night, to the very kind of woman he outlawed, tells you everything about how far his kingship — and his relationship with God — has unraveled by the end of his life Matthew Henry.

In verse 6, Saul "inquired" (שָׁאַל, shâʼal, H7592) of the LORD — and it's almost a cruel irony that this word shares its root with Saul's own name, שָׁאוּל (Shâʼûwl, H7586), meaning "asked" or "asked for." Saul was Israel's answer to a people who asked for a king ( 1 Samuel 8), and now the man named "Asked" asks God a question and gets nothing back. The silence lands hard because of who's asking.

Verse 6 also lists exactly how God used to speak: חֲלוֹם (chălôwm, H2472, "dream"), אוּרִים (ʼÛwrîym, H224, "Urim" — the priestly lots used for guidance), and נָבִיא (nâbîyʼ, H5030, "prophet"). All three doors are shut. That's the whole crisis in one verse Strong's.

The word for the medium's practice, אוֹב (ʼôwb, H178), appears repeatedly (verses 3, 7, 8, 9) — its root idea is "a mumble" or hollow, muffled sound, like a voice from inside a jar. It's a chillingly physical picture: necromancy imagined as a ventriloquist's trick, a voice that seems to come from somewhere hollow and dead Strong's.

And when Samuel finally speaks in verse 17, the verb is קָרַע-like language of tearing used back in chapter 15 — though here the text uses קָרָה (qârâh) in verse 10 for "befall," it's the same torn from your hand language that echoes Samuel's original judgment. The woman calls what she sees אֱלֹהִים (ʼĕlôhîym, H430) in verse 13 — "a god" or "divine being" coming up — a word usually reserved for God himself, showing just how uncanny and beyond-normal this apparition felt even to her.

This chapter is one of the darkest pictures in the Old Testament of what it looks like when a king is cut off from God — and by contrast, it makes you feel the weight of what Jesus offers. Saul cries out and heaven is silent (28:6). On the cross, Jesus himself experiences something that echoes this terrifyingly: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" ( Matthew 27:46). But there's a crucial difference — Saul's silence was earned by years of willful disobedience (28:18, tracing back to 1 Samuel 15), while Jesus's abandonment was undeserved, taken on for others. Saul's story shows a king losing his kingdom because of unrepented sin; Jesus is the King who bears the punishment for sin so that others don't have to lose theirs.

There's also a quieter thread here: Samuel's word to Saul — "the LORD has torn the kingship out of your hand and given it to your neighbor David" (28:17) — points forward to the greater Son of David, the King who would not fail the way Saul did, and whose kingdom, unlike Saul's, will never be torn away ( Luke 1:32-33). David, meanwhile, sits at the edge of this chapter caught in his own trap among the Philistines, and the way he answers evasively rather than either lying outright or fighting his own people is a small, imperfect foreshadow of the wisdom that Jesus shows under pressure from hostile authorities — never denying the truth, but not handing his enemies ammunition either ( Matthew 22:15-22).

And finally, this chapter stands as a dark backdrop against which the gospel shines brighter: Saul goes seeking the dead through forbidden means and gets only a verdict of doom. Christians go to the living God through Jesus, "the resurrection and the life" ( John 11:25), and get not doom but welcome.

Here's the thing that should unsettle you about this chapter: Saul's problem wasn't that he never prayed. He prayed in verse 6. The problem was that he'd spent years ignoring God's voice when it did come, so when he needed it desperately, there was nothing left to hear. Silence isn't always God being distant. Sometimes it's the sound of a relationship that's been neglected for so long there's nothing left to say.

And notice what desperation drove him to: the very sin he himself had banned. That's not just hypocrisy — that's what happens to all of us when we get scared enough. The convictions we hold onto in daylight get traded fast in the dark for anything that promises an answer, any answer, even a false one from a source we know is poison. Ask yourself honestly: when God goes quiet in your life — and he sometimes does — where do you run? A podcast, a substance, a relationship you know is bad for you, a search engine at 2 a.m.? Saul's disguise, his midnight walk to Endor, is not ancient history. It's a mirror.

The cost this chapter asks of you is uncomfortable: it asks you to examine whether your closeness to God today is being spent down like Saul's was — small compromises, small refusals to listen, that don't feel fatal in the moment but add up to silence later. It also asks you to trust that God's apparent silence in seasons of fear is not always abandonment — sometimes it's an invitation to wait, to repent, to listen harder rather than louder. Don't wait until you're standing on your own Gilboa, terrified, before you start actually listening.

• Lord, show me the places where I've stopped listening to you in small ways, before they become a silence I can't break through in a crisis.
• When I'm afraid like Saul was, keep me from running to fake comfort or forbidden shortcuts instead of running to you.
• Thank you that in Jesus, I have a King whose kingdom will never be torn away — help me trust him even when the road looks like Saul's did.
• Give me the patience to wait on your answers instead of manufacturing my own when you seem quiet.
• Search my heart for hidden hypocrisy — places where I condemn in others what I secretly turn to myself.

• When has God felt silent to you — and looking back honestly, had you been ignoring his voice before that silence began?
• What is your version of "Endor" — the place or habit you run to for answers when you're scared and God feels far away?
• Saul enforced a law he later broke in desperation. Where in your own life do you hold a public standard you privately abandon under pressure?
• David gave an evasive, non-committal answer to buy time under pressure (28:2). Where do you need wisdom, not just boldness, in a hard spot right now?
• If you knew tonight was your last night, like Saul did, what would you actually want to have said to God — and why haven't you said it yet?