The passage in the First Book of Samuel in the Tanakh that tells the story of King Saul, the Prophet Samuel and the Witch of Endor is one of the best-known and blood-soaked passages in the entire work. The story has long been one of the key scriptural arguments for the existence and potency of witches and witchcraft, (1) but it has also causes much disquiet among Christian theologians precisely because while expelling witches and diviners from Israelite occupied territory: the very people who are the driving force behind that action then consult one. Thus producing a contradiction in terms that one has to solve in order to derive any substantive theological sense; let alone meaning, from the story. (2)

For our purposes it is enough to say that the story is central to the witch narrative that so dominated Christianity in the late medieval and early modern era. However this excludes the fact that witch beliefs are derived directly from classical Judaism and from no-where else: the reason for this; as I have pointed out previously, is that the jews of antiquity had a unique aversion to any form of magic and sought to crush it wherever it was found. This was because they held that because their god; Yahweh, was omnipotent and omnipresent then it the use of magic that derived from an alternative source of power (i.e. it wasn't directly invoked from Yahweh in a permissible way [a-la Moses]) was thus proof that this was not the case: thus challenging the omnipotency and omnipresence of Yahweh.

This then lead jews to take drastic (and usually homicidal) action against all practitioners of magic in any form, which was made all the more ferocious because magical practices were common place among most religions at the time. This made the jewish ideas in relation to magic and the requirement for its brutal suppression potentially lethal if they got out of the small locale in which that suppression was originally practised. When this happened; vis-a-vis Christianity and its use of the Tanakh as the basis for the Old Testament, it necessarily meant that at some point witch persecutions would necessarily begin in Christian lands. (3)

We can draw from this the necessary conclusion that like it or not: the witch craze was caused by jewish ideas about the suppression of magical practises gaining a wider audience in the form of Christian theology (and thus the blood-soaked witch hunts can be somewhat ascribed as crimes of the jews).

Further to this as the central passage that is used to argue for the existence of witches and their having a real powers (as opposed to mythical or fake ones): it is well to discuss it and draw from it what conclusions we can about jews and their relationship with magical practises.

It is important to first point out however that the description 'Witch of Endor' is actually a mistranslation since it should read contextually as either the 'Medium of Endor' or the 'Diviner of Endor'. (4) In other words the 'Witch of Endor' is not actually a witch as we; or even the medieval thinkers about witchcraft, would understand one, but rather simply as practitioner of folkloric magic in order to divine the future.

This is perhaps the crux of understanding the whole 'Witch of Endor' episode in the first book of Samuel in so far: as the prophet Samuel has died and the Israelite king Saul is losing a war against the Philistines. Saul is a weak king handicapped by a not inconsiderable dollop of pure superstition and gullibility who; with his divinely-appointed controller dead, needs some way to make command decisions that are derived from the will of Yahweh. However none of Saul's dreams (dreams being a common method of divination) and the attempts at divination by the official Israelitish shamans (who used to 'see the future' when throwing bones around their tents) could give him a definitive answer on what to actually do.

Saul was at this point badly losing his war with the Philistines (who were understandably annoyed at the persistent attempts by the jews to exterminate them and steal their land) and being mentally handicapped: he decided to consult one of the non-official mediums/diviners he had been so readily expelling or executing for most of his reign. This medium/diviner resided in Endor and Saul commanded her to raise up the 'spirit of Samuel' (i.e. a form of spirit summoning/necromancy not unlike that practised by Odysseus in Homer's 'Odyssey') so that Saul could consult him as to what to do.

Hilarity ensues when the medium/diviner of Endor successfully raises the spirit of Samuel from the grave: who in turn spends a goodly amount of time berating Saul for being a moron and being unfavoured by Yahweh. To give the reader a parallel in modern jewish culture: Samuel is behaving like the typical jewish mother when berating her son for not being exactly what she has planned for him to be, while he is being the typical weak gibbering toady in the face of his overbearing mother.

Essentially Samuel is depicted as a tyrannical despot pretending to be a divinely-appointed religious authority and the control via the use of terror he exerts over Saul is so considerable that in the story we see Saul crawling on the floor blubbering and generally being a bit of a girl's blouse at Samuel's sadistic gloating that he will lose the war and the Israelites will all be killed.

What we can draw from this episode is more about the extent of belief in superstitions about magical practices among the jews in so far as Saul and the Israelites in general are depicted as being addicted to divination (which is why jewish magic has long been focused on this area to the near exclusion of all others except curses). This is because the Saul and the Israelites live in absolute terror of Yahweh who they believe to be a seriously grumpy and generally homicidal omnipotent and omnipresent divine dictator who will murder them all in a heartbeat if they but dare to eat the wrong sort of meat or fail to murder those who fall short of his (largely unknown) standards of spiritual purity.

This means that the Israelites feel they have to consult those with special skills in working out precisely what Yahweh wants them to do (i.e. practitioners of divination): in order that they do not displease him and in so doing cause their own extinction.

In other words: Saul and the Israelites without a direct line to Yahweh in the form of Samuel are absolutely hapless, because they feel that whatever they do will in some way anger Yahweh. They are searching for a new line to Yahweh and having come up empty handed: they attempt to turn to their old direct line of Yahweh (in the form of Samuel's resurrected spirit) to tell them what they should do.

What this tells us that the jews; whatever they overtly professed beliefs, were fundamentally a very superstitious people and that they sought to drive out the practitioners of magic (who weren't 'officially sanctioned' if you will) because they believed their continued presence caused offence to Yahweh by implicitly challenging his claim to omnipotence and omnipresence. However the practitioners of magic were deemed necessary as soon as the Israelites no longer knew what to do: meaning in other words that the 'monotheism' of the Old Testament is hardly that at all, but rather the veneer of it with all sorts of folkloric superstitions just under the surface.

In essence we can see then that the story of the 'Witch of Endor'; aside from 'proving' the existence and potency of witchcraft to Biblical literalists from antiquity to the present time, is actually story that narrates the weakness and superstitions of the jews in their inability to do anything without a guiding omen if you will.

The story also nicely informs of the despotic nature of the rule of the prophets such as Samuel and how they were hardly creditable individuals, but rather despots ruling their own nomadic banana republics in the deserts of the Middle East (not unlike the equally off his trolley and homicidal patriarch of Islam: Mohammed).

(1) Cf. R. Trevor Davies, 1947, 'Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs', 1st Edition, Methuen: London, p. 10
(2) Cf. J. Rogerson, 2006, 'Historical Criticism and the Authority of the Bible', p. 851 in J. Rogerson, Judith Lieu (Eds.), 2006, 'The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York
(3) Cf. Derek Collins, 2008, 'Magic in the Ancient Greek World', 1st Edition, Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 159-162
(4) Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1972, 'Witchcraft in the Middle Ages', 1st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, p. 54

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-jews-and-witch-of-endor.html