Where does one begin when contemplating ancient Near Eastern and early Israelite beliefs and rituals about death and the afterlife? Any foray into what appears at first glance to be three interrelated, yet consecutively “experienced” processes—life, death, and afterlife—should begin with a comment on what they are not, or more accurately, were not, before addressing what they were. Precedent justifies the following premises. Those ancient concepts of the early Israelites are not our concepts, save for those elements and components in ours that might somehow be ultimately derivative of theirs. Yet derivation is no guarantee of preserved fidelity to ancient origins. The millennia spanning the significant gap between the age of the biblical authors and our own all but insures that much has intervened and where seeming commonalities might exist, these may only reveal still other ancient and exotic traditions that time, space, action, and agency have dramatically transformed. The story, however, does not end here.
Over the course of the past several decades, the study of death and afterlife in early Israel and in the wider ancient Near East has benefitted immensely from research advances in a number of interrelated subfields or domains. These recent findings highlight the presence of both differentiation between and commonalities among the world’s many ancient and modern cultural traditions. For example, the continuing interpretation of new and existing archaeologically retrieved mortuary data has employed a range of anthropological approaches that in turn have provided innovative results along several fronts. Complementing this, the recovery of epigraphic data related to or found in mortuary environments has provided many new insights often directly derived from ancient societal contexts. Finally, there is the ongoing refinement and innovation that characterize the interpretation and translation of pertinent biblical terms, concepts, and developments, which to a significant degree are both indebted to and convergent with those elaborations and advances taking place in the archaeological and epigraphic research currently in progress.
One such central term or concept, namely Sheol (Hebrew šĕʾôl) has gone through a number of such interpretations and revisions as the quintessential term designating the “domain” for which the Israelite dead were thought ultimately destined and for the most part, where they remained never to escape. As the Israelite version of the widely attested netherworld of the ancient Near East, šĕʾôl has been conventionally understood spatially, that is, as the realm where the deceased eventually arrived following death. Traditionally, the focus of commentators has centered on such locative aspects highlighted in the descriptors employed by the biblical writers. Yet given that šĕʾôl is depicted in a variety of other ways by assorted terms and concepts, one might cautiously resist privileging one complex of literary (i.e., spatially oriented) figures over other metaphoric clusters simply on the basis of something so illusory as numerical dominance in a rather limited literary corpus. Similarly, that šĕʾôl is often described by commentators as portraying the ultimate place of destiny hardly justifies the hyper-interpretation of šĕʾôl as intricately reflecting all the essential aspects of an ancient tomb, let alone the netherworld in its entirety, or even death as a total abstraction. This is especially so given that šĕʾôl is also portrayed as a watery realm, a place of abandonment, or that highly emotive descriptors expressive of nothing more than shear anguish in the face of death can be attached to šĕʾôl. All of these clusters are obviously figurative images and reflect the highly speculative nature of the quest by ancient authors to attribute signification to such an elusive and fragmented concept as šĕʾôl, one well beyond the full comprehension of the living: šĕʾôl was all of the above and none.
Experts have long noted the seeming contradiction between šĕʾôl as a dismal place or existence and the portrayal of death otherwise as a peaceful reunion with the ancestors in the afterlife. Earlier attempts at attributing one or the other to a historically older stratum of religious belief overlaid by still another belief lack compelling support in the archaeological or the textual records. These seemingly irreconcilable concepts more likely reflect the collective attempt to give expression to two interrelated but successive stages or phases in what constituted a larger, more complex process in the Israelite conceptualization and experience of death and dying. It is proposed here that šĕʾôl in all its occurrences shares a common trope—spatial and otherwise—the actual immediate, emotively charged experience of dying or vividly experiencing the genuine threat of death as if one were irreversibly being thrust toward its very edge. Notwithstanding its spatial and tomblike overtones (Suriano 2016), šĕʾôl’s primary symbolic significance was in encapsulating a victim’s full awareness and deeply personal experience of death’s arrival, and at the same time, in giving expression to the observation of that victim’s dying by those still living who witnessed it.
Descriptors reflective of the irreversibility of dying and of the sense of abandonment created by personal experience and observation were invoked to describe the death experience in the immediacy of the present either as one was physically and existentially in the midst of dying or in the more advanced stages of the dying process (“nearing death”). As the dying individual experienced separation from the living community, from one’s loved ones and from one’s personal life as one could only know it, not only prior to, but up to the very moment of crossing over that crucial juncture called death, one can readily imagine the dying person invoking such descriptors in their final moments. One can also imagine those living who, having witnessed such expressions uttered in anguish by their dying loved ones and in the immediacy of the moment, invoking an array of dark and dismal descriptions to convey their experience as onlookers. Given that living survivors intimately beheld the bodily, auditory, and other sensory responses of their dying loved ones gasping for their last breath, terms such as šĕʾôl were summoned to express the emotional trauma, the cognitive dissonance, even the much anticipated, yet dreaded desiccation of the body. Such were conveyed by the victim while actually dying and by the living while registering their experience as direct bystanders. They were at the same time shared experiences within the living community and expressive of the disruptive, disjunctive, and disorienting effects of death’s inevitable arrival as well as its observable, more immediate outcomes on the collective. The eyewitnesses to the loss of a loved one not only employed, but eventually generated a repertoire of rites and beliefs that would constitute a conventional lexicon and ritualizing “handbook” of death and dying, grief and mourning, and finally burial, one ultimately shared by all community members.
While such a lexicon of terms, concepts, and accompanying rituals employed to depict the deceased’s experience was constructed by the living, the grieving survivors could only speculate about what the future held beyond the dismal process of dying for their newly deceased. Yet the communal consensus seems to have embraced the belief that part and parcel with every man’s fate or destiny, the deceased family member would eventually re-unite with those from one’s extended family who had passed on long before in some meaningful coexistence. The living imagined and materially constructed such a postmortem existence as the ultimate destiny for those lost loved ones, who would also one day become their distanced ancestors in the beyond and with whom the living themselves would one day reunite.
The material and textual evidence indicates that in addition to the living having experienced firsthand the dying process of both their loved ones and fellow community members, they also observed and participated in post-death performances. Upon death’s full completion, they might perform various ongoing, intermittent rituals that a community considered conventional. It goes without saying then, that these two stages experientially gripped the living (like the dying). The immediate dying experience itself evoked references to šĕʾôl in outpourings of grief and mourning, while the burial and funerary rites that followed added a profound sense of finality to the death of a loved one. Following on these, the living survivors enacted various ongoing mortuary rituals to commemorate the former lives of the deceased. These two experiential moments were the most intense emotionally and the latter, in some ways, more so than the former as the witnessing of a loved one dying followed by the realization that their death was irreversible, may well have had the cumulative effect of “piling stone upon stone.”
The idea that the netherworld or postmortem existence beyond šĕʾôl was the destiny for all the dead does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that such a fate was therefore less than desirable. Only when the notion of another contrasting fate became a genuine option for some—in the form or resurrection or immortality—did the more conventional belief about humanity’s common fate possibly imply a less-than-ideal outcome for others. When those who were facing death became desirous and deserving of a better, more satisfying fate than those who did not, the belief in a shared common fate was supplanted in some circles by differing fates of which, one was reward and the other, punishment in the afterlife. In the case of ancient Israelite religion, this idea involving postmortem retributive justice was a late developing, teleological construct that was projected onto an eschatological plain. It determined the value of a life lived between physical birth and death from a very different perspective. Yet such late, alternative constructions of death and afterlife were foreign to the way in which the value of a life lived between birth and death had been assessed for centuries, if not millennia, among ancient Israelites and their forebears, the Canaanites. If life spanning the years from birth to death was not previously perceived as ending unnaturally in dissolution, but rather ending quite naturally, other stimuli obviously provoked the later embrace of a pervasive retributive frame.
Assuming that death was early on viewed as the natural outcome for everyone and regardless of whether or not there were varying levels of existence in the netherworld (e.g., that for elites vs. that for common folk), then in a manner of speaking, the flesh could indeed be put back on the bones of a life blessed and well-lived with all that that entailed. Such an exemplary life would have been characterized by well-being, longevity, good mates, healthy children, numerous descendants, and by the sufficiency of means to live a prosperous life. With all that in view, one could be confident that from the moment death arrived, one’s life legacy could be remembered, memorialized, even emulated by those still living. These all were contributing factors to the “good life” and therefore, to the “good death” in a genuinely meaningful manner.
But the question begs: could one die a “bad death”? By a bad death, it is not meant one that involved a violent or agonizing death as was so common in the ancient world of the greater Levant. Rather, a “bad death” as intended here refers to a bad state of existence after death (irrespective of such later concepts as a hades or a hell). A bad death would not be amenable to a good death as good death has been defined above: an acceptable fate shared and experienced by all as part and parcel of one’s natural course of life. As suggested in what follows, a bad death—or what will be coined going forward, “the death after death”—was indeed the fate of some when certain extenuating factors came into play.
What was this dreaded “death after death”? It entailed the possible obliteration of or total memory loss by the living of a person’s life and legacy following death, whether that occurred unwittingly or by design. War or conflict might result in the sudden and untimely death of all living descendants who were able to recall the life and legacy of a family member who had passed away. Who then was left to memorialize their ancestor? Alternatively, the living might be displaced by war and the graves and epitaphs of the dead simply abandoned or deliberately destroyed by enemy invaders. With the passage of time, successive generations of dislocated descendants would assimilate into their new worlds and in the process lose all recollection of their deceased descendants back in the homeland. What was the possible outcome? Any and all memory of the dead and their legacy achieved while alive might be lost or obliterated among the living (see Mansen 2018 on the problematic non-burial of the dead).
Furthermore, what does this loss of memory of the deceased imply with regard to attendant beliefs concerning the post-mortem ontological existence of such forgotten or annihilated dead? If one can assume that the larger surviving community of which a dead individual was a former living member embraced the belief in the post-mortem existence of the dead, did those survivors believe that such a forgotten dead no longer existed as an animate being in the afterlife? Ontologically speaking, had that animate being, whatever its form—a spirit, a life force, a ghost—irreversibly ceased to exist concomitant to the living’s loss of memory of that deceased person? Likewise, did the failure to memorialize the dead or to preserve the material testimonies to their lives and legacies result in the belief that their post-mortem animate state had been eradicated; the dead no longer existed in sentient, animate form?
Such annihilation of the memory of the dead and the objects commemorating their death did have real, practical consequences at least in certain spheres that comprised the world of the living. For example, with the eradication of on-site ancestral graves and tombs or the removal of commemorative stelae and epitaphs from the family lands, property rights could more readily be contested and even illegitimately claimed by others, or confiscated and transferred to new owners with no connection to the family who had lived for generations on the property in question. Once all prior claims to or evidence of a family’s ownership had been removed, property and lands were up for grabs.
No direct evidence exists that would substantiate a belief in the post-mortem annihilation of the animate dead (or of whatever aspect was believed to have persisted ontologically beyond death). As for the deceased’s prospective ontological or “animate” state: what might that existence have entailed in the context of ancient Israelite beliefs about the afterlife? Biblical references to revenants and familiar or family ghosts—the ʾōbôt and the yiddĕōnîm—seem to point to some animate aspect of the individual that survived death, whether one is speaking of the identifiable dead, those fully anonymous, or even those forgotten and/or as yet to be identified.
The point to be underscored: when belief, memory and external reality align, then belief and ontology strike a compelling degree of congruence. When belief and memory do not align with external reality, any one of those elements could take on contingent status. For example, belief or memory may be lost (e.g., a long lost friend may be forgotten), but the external reality persists (that friend lives on somewhere else), or one might imagine the inverse: belief and memory persist (the long lost friend is thought to be alive), but the external reality no longer does (that friend had died long ago but no one knew). The long lost friend’s ontological existence or non-existence equates with the ontological existence or non-existence of the dead whereas the belief in the long lost friend’s existence or non-existence equates with the living’s recall of the dead or the living’s failure to remember them. Yet the evidence indicates that the dead persisted in the netherworld regardless of whether they were memorialized by the living or not. In fact, the dead on occasion haunted the living for having forgotten them, which only serves to reaffirm the dead’s continued sentient persistence. To be sure, the dead’s “immortality,” or their remembered legacy while living, was contingent upon those who were alive either succeeding or failing to recall the dead since such recall or failure to remember had real time, practical consequences in the land of the living (e.g., regarding inheritance and property rights).
Regarding the dead’s prospective animated existence, one biblical passage in particular, 1 Samuel 28, has much to contribute to what we can know about the post-mortem fate and experience of the ancient Israelite. Several details from this well-known ritualizing narrative provide insight regarding beliefs current in the world shared by at least one Israelite author and his ancient audiences. In response to the performance of a mantic ritual, the dead prophet Samuel appears in some form or another as an ʾôb, first to a female Canaanite ritual specialist from Endor and then possibly to King Saul. Various terms and idioms in this passage provide clues as to those shared beliefs regarding what persisted of an individual following death.
The necromantic event described here presumes the efficacious contact and communication between the living and the dead. The encounter on this occasion involved two living humans both of whom could claim considerable ritual power—first and foremost, a renown, foreign, female ritualist, then an Israelite king who had previously exhibited on repeated occasions ecstatic prophetic abilities (cf. 1 Sam. 10:9–13; 19:20–24). It also invoked or provoked various supra-natural beings into action. Immediately following upon the arrival of various ascendant “gods” (ʾelōhîm `ōlîm), both the Endorian ritualist and king Saul communicated in varying ways with the “revenant” (Hebrew ʾôb) of the deceased prophet Samuel. Who or what was an ʾôb (vv. 7,8,9) and who or what exactly do the “gods” or ʾelōhîm represent in this passage (v.13)?
The evidence from across the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East suggests that it was necessary for a ritual expert to establish a ghost’s identity before proceeding with a ritual conjuration. Why? Making contact with the wrong ghost could result in disastrous effects for the living. In any given ritual instance, a so-called restless ghost in what was perceived as an act of retaliation for harm incurred while formerly alive might attempt to do injury to the living rather than offer assistance or provide information to the living from the “other side.” The retaliation or vengeance of the ghost or restless dead was widely held to be the reaction by one now deceased who had either suffered a premature death (owing to abandonment or murder, for example), the neglect of their cult by the living, or some other unresolved injustice that had been perpetrated against them (Schwemer 2018; Scurlock 2014).
To establish the identity of a ghost in necromancy was therefore undoubtedly a crucial ritual step. In the narrative progression of 1 Samuel 28, the desired revenant or ʾôb was eventually identified, but only following the emergence of an unspecified number of various other supra-natural beings or ʾelōhîm, and although possessing an identity (as the reader discovers subsequently), the particular revenant in view had yet to reveal his/her identity or have it confirmed by someone in attendance. In fact, the ghost’s identity was only confirmed by Saul in v.14b as the direct outcome of the query he had posed to the female necromancer in v.14a regarding the ghost’s description. Although mention of that particular revenant or ʾôb was initially made back in v.5, nine more verses of descriptive ritual passed before Saul confirmed that the revenant was that of the prophet Samuel in v.14b.The determining attributes were the ghost’s age (“an old man”) and his distinguishing attire (“a robe”). Once the ghost was identified, it uttered its first words in v.15a.
So the question arises, did the generally anonymous and the yet-to-be-identified ghosts potentially include the ghosts of those who had been forgotten and/or their cult neglected? Such forgotten ghosts would have qualified as an appropriate subset of the restless, wandering ghosts for they no longer received the commemorative rituals and cultic care that family members were obliged to offer. These ghosts therefore became restless too, wandering about the worlds of humans and gods. Although they had no regularized contact with their living family, the restless, forgotten dead gave expression to the hope that any and all adverse afterlife conditions might be resolved by the living and equanimity restored. Such instances confirm the ancient belief that a substantive aspect of the human being either survived death or emerged therefrom in spite of family neglect or animus resulting in the obliteration of their memory and the eradication of all material evidence expressive of their remembrance by the living. All this raises the related question: could the disregarded dead, if queried, recall their own names thereby assisting the otherwise negligent or unknowing living in restoring them to the family cult? Perhaps there were rituals designed to make contact with the forgotten dead in order to retrieve their identity and to restore their cult.
Saul was able to identify Samuel’s “revenant” not as a result of his own verbal inquiry aimed directly at Samuel’s ʾôb. Instead, the author clearly places the initiation and the outcome of the ritual solely in the hands of the female necromancer that Saul had consulted. This is made unequivocal in v.8 and again in v.11 in her response to Saul’s (disingenuous or rash) promise of YHWH’s protection should she begin the ritual. Here, the necromancer serves as subject of the active transitive verb leaving no doubt as to the identity of the human agent involved: “whom shall I bring up for you?” (Hi. causative of `ālâ) while the dead Samuel (or technically speaking, his ʾôb) is the direct object of that verbal action.
The term translated revenant here, Hebrew ʾôb, is directly repeated and also indirectly referenced throughout the plot as the intended supra-natural recipient or object of the ritual performance (see vv. 3, 5, 7, 8, 9). The term ʾôb has been translated in a variety of ways, but the simplest, least complicated translation is “revenant” (see also the Arabic cognate). Proposals that the term as a stand-alone—and its oft-recurring complement yiddĕōnî “a ghost of a relative” or “a familiar ghost” or “a knowing one”—refers to human ritual experts simply fail to consider adequately the wider context of 1 Samuel 28 in which the ritual expert—here a Canaanite woman from Endor—is the only such expert actually mentioned. Her technical title employed in v.7 is, “a woman who has mastery over a revenant” (Hebrew ʾēšet ba`ālat ʾôb). Thus, this designation not only highlights her singular role as the human agent who possessed the specialized skills needed to conjure up a revenant, but it also confirms that when ʾôb stands alone as it does here, it refers to a specific type of supra-natural entity conjured up by the ritual expert.
In v.8 the author also employs the verbal form qāsam “to conjure, divine” with ʾôb serving as the object, “(please) conjure for me (by?) the revenant (bā’ôb) and bring up the one whom I mention to you.” When ʾôb serves as the object of an active, transitive verb, it clearly refers to the ghost or revenant and not to the living ritual expert who possessed mastery over the ghost. If one imagines momentarily that ʾôb alone in v.8 refers to a living human ritual expert or necromancer, then Saul would be directly asking the necromancer to conjure up for him “the necromancer” or “by the necromancer.” But in context, both renditions are redundant and nonsensical. This in turn confirms our interpretation that v.3 has in view Saul’s former directive to ritually expel revenants and the ghosts of dead relatives, not the banishment of living ritual experts.
In v.14 Saul was able to confirm Samuel’s identity based on the necromancer’s description of Samuel’s ʾôb. Moreover, it would seem Saul’s two questions—one following immediately on the other in vv.13a and 14a—directed at the woman as to what she was visually witnessing indicate that Saul himself could not “peer fully into the abyss” like the necromancer. Rather, he was dependent on her special abilities to discern what was emerging from the netherworld. It is only after having first seen (rā’â) various “supra-natural beings coming up” (ʾelōhîm ʿōlîm) from below in v.13b, that the necromancer was able to visually locate and describe for Saul a single entity in v.14b that subsequently came into focus, namely Samuel’s ʾôb. In direct response to Saul’s second request for details in v.14a, “what is its (= the event’s) appearance?” she responded, “I see an old man coming up and he is wearing a robe.”
Such a progression of requests followed by their resultant proceedings suggests a two–phase necromantic episode. In the first phase of the conjuring and in direct response to Saul’s initial request for her perspicacity, the necromancer conjures up and detects a variety of supra-natural beings actively ascending in v.13. In the next phase of the same incident in v.14 and in direct response to Saul’s second request for further discernment, she was able to identify Samuel’s ʾôb. As confirmation of the antiquity and originality of this two-phase progression of events, the translators of the Septuagint (LXX) and Latin Vulgate (LV) preserve the very same ritualizing progression. These renditions accurately reflect the readings preserved in the parent texts or Hebrew Vorlagen underlying the LXX and LV, which in both cases also agree with that of the MT (see later discussion).
Returning to v.3, Saul “drove out” that is, he “ritually expelled” (hēsîr, Hi. swr), “the revenants” and “the familiar ghosts” (hā’ōbôt and hayyiddĕ’ōnîm), not the human practitioners. The author alludes to Saul’s instructions to his ritual experts to perform ghost expulsion rites as the practical means of realizing his stated prohibition against invoking such ghosts. In using this language, Saul demanded that his ritual experts expel all ghosts and cease from including them from that point forward in their ritual repertoire at Israelite ritual sites. This finds confirmation in v.9, where the governing verb is hikrît (Hi. krt) “cut off” in the sense of “prohibit, “ban” or “deny access to” and again, the objects of those actions are the revenants and family ghosts, not the practitioners themselves.
By directing Saul’s ban at the ghosts, the author eliminated all practices associated with communicating with such ghosts. The outcome is clear: those Israelite ritual experts who were thus capable had to cease and desist from performing all forms of ghost ritual (save those aimed at their expulsion!). In a desperate attempt to circumvent his own prohibition, Saul was ultimately forced to seek a capable ritual expert outside the conventional religious channels of Israelite practitioners. Saul shockingly pursued the counsel of the quintessential Other—a renown ritual expert who was not only a female, but also of “Canaanite” origin. Furthermore, Saul’s actions highlight the profound irony that emerges from the ever-intensifying ambivalence embedded in the narrative account: who actually enabled the ritual’s success, who or what actually appeared to Saul from the supra-natural world, and what does the account convey regarding the author’s own religious beliefs and literary skills?
As the plot transitioned from day to night, from Israelite Gilboa to Canaanite Endor, ancient readers no doubt anticipated the necromancer to make appeal to a Canaanite god like Motu as the presiding deity over the ritual. After all, YHWH had already rejected Saul (vv.6, 16; cf. I Sam 15). Yet YHWH quite unexpectedly intervened with Samuel’s ghost serving as his conduit. So Saul’s motivation to visit the necromancer at Endor was not driven by the numerical sparseness of qualified experts following some supposed purge of ritualists he had initiated. It was instead prompted by Saul’s own need to access avenues to the divine other than those under YHWH’s purview. By shutting down all avenues of access in Israel to the divine world via ghostly assistance in v.3, was Saul anticipating the need to (re-)gain exclusive, yet secretive access to the divine world by pursuing a Canaanite alternative? Saul could not only thereby skirt YHWH’s prior rejection of him, but at the same time avoid violating his own dictate aimed at putting a stop to all such ghost conjuration by Israelite ritual specialists.
The view that the ʾelōhîm ʿōlîm in v.13 is a plural construction representing multiple gods in the netherworld does not stand or fall on the assumption that those gods whom the Endorian ritual expert sees must be viewed as assisting in bringing up the dead. Such a scenario has been proposed elsewhere by this author (Schmidt 1996, 2000–2001) and it is still held to be a very likely one (see later discussion). Those gods that the necromancer envisions might simply have been ascending from the netherworld independently, yet to the extent that the necromancer could see them. In other words, she was capable of ‘fully peering into the abyss’ and seeing supra-natural beings who were teeming about below, some perhaps even approaching the living earth, i.e. “coming up”(v.13b; and perhaps including the restless dead?), then at a subsequent moment (v.14) she was able to make out an old man in a robe (v.15).
As for the reference to numerous supra-natural beings ascending, we know of course about the solar circuit in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in which a major deity like the sun god, whether Utu or Ra(-Osiris) could participate in the ascent and descent of the dead just as they do when the living die. The Mesopotamian netherworld was populated with Arallu and the Annunaki and the dead journeyed through the various regions and stages of entering the netherworld accompanied by Silushi/Silulim or Khumut-tabal, and were admitted through the seven gates of the netherworld city with the permission of the gatekeeper, Bidu. The Egyptian netherworld or Duat was full of gods, “demons,” and spirits who in fact the dead encountered at various stages of their journey. If anything, it seems that Duat was over-populated.
Furthermore, in Mesopotamia Utu (also known as Šamaš) is described as bringing up and carrying down the dead. The Neo-Babylonian tablet (K 2779) presents an incantation in which Šamaš controls the passage of ghosts or the dead from the underworld to the world of the living, “Foremost One of the Anunnaki! . . . O Šamaš, the Judge. You carry those from above down below, those from below up to above.” (Finkel 1983–1984, 11). In the context of this incantation, the expression, “(you carry. . .) those from below up to above” includes at least minimally—perhaps as one subset from among a larger set of supra-natural beings who ascend or descend—the dead in the netherworld whom Utu was otherwise known to bring up to the land of the living (Koch 2015).
Likewise, many view the Ugaritic solar goddess Šapšu as playing the important role of psychopompe, the one capable of bringing the spirit of the dead up from or down to the netherworld. In the text describing the funeral of King Niqmaddu (KTU 1.161), many interpreters aver that she went down to the underworld with the newly dead king. In the Ba’al Myth, she helped Anatu bury the dead Ba’lu, she looked for him in the netherworld, and restored him to his throne from the realm of the god of death, Motu (KTU 1.6). On the one hand, there is compelling evidence that the dead summoned in necromancy might be accompanied—for a variety of purposes—by other divine beings. On the other hand, such beings might have been provoked in response to the necromancer’s conjuration, but were then kept at bay by the ritualist and returned to the netherworld.
It must be acknowledged that apart from 1 Samuel 28 there is no single comparative example of a specific necromantic ritual that describes the dead as accompanied by a collective of divine beings. Yet to conclude that ʾelōhîm could not possibly refer to a host of supra-natural beings whether they are assisting Samuel’s ʾôb or attempting to haunt him or the ritualist, one would have to entirely ignore Šamaš’ title and role, totally marginalize the ancient Near Eastern solar circuit as unimportant, dismiss the Ugaritic data, and disregard the actions, roles, and names of the many gods of the ancient Near Eastern netherworlds. Alternatively, one might ask, had the woman called upon those ʾelōhîm in particular in their role as protective spirits on behalf of Samuel’s revenant? In Mesopotamian exorcistic rituals, such apparitions were often former demons and monsters who had been transformed into apotropaic entities and who, along with ghosts of varying sorts, symbolically and ritualistically escorted witches and warlocks to the netherworld in order to counteract their harmful magic (Schwemer 2015, 42–43; 2018). Perhaps, the ʾelōhîm in 1 Sam 28:13 simply represent those various supra-natural beings one would expect to see when given the opportunity to peer fully into the abyss.
In what sense then, if at all, can this ritual be labeled a “Yahwistic” ritual? At the surface level of the text, Saul goes to a Canaanite necromancer in Canaanite territory, at night, under cover, and in disguise. Surely the author is highlighting Saul’s covert efforts to circumvent YHWH’s judgment as expressed by YHWH’s silence (v.6). To be sure, in v.10 Saul offers the woman reassurance from YHWH, but the mention of YHWH here is expressive of an ironic and clearly rash, perhaps even disingenuous, offer of divine assurance from a king whom YHWH had already rejected (ch. 15) and who was desperately seeking a different judgment from an alternative divine source. In other words, Saul offered such assurance only to convince the woman to perform the ritual he so urgently sought. That Saul had grown so despairing as to go to such great lengths to seek an alternative avenue to discern his future belies his intentions. Saul neither had access to YHWH (vv.6–7) nor could he genuinely offer YHWH’s assurances to the necromancer (vv. 9–10), for he had been rejected long before.
Thus, it is not mere coincidence that the Endorian necromancer neither invokes the name of YHWH in the ritual performance nor does she allude to YHWH anywhere in her speech. The author masterfully invites readers to entertain the prospect that the Endorian ritual expert had indeed invoked those Canaanite gods most familiar to her own ritual traditions (are such gods alluded to in the mention of the ʾelōhîm `ōlîm?). After all and in spite of Saul’s earlier prohibitions against the very specific kind of ritual she was capable of performing that involved both the ʾôb and yiddĕ’ōnî (v.3), she had already established a prior reputation as a renown Canaanite necromancer (v.7). So unless one were to believe that the author presumes she was invoking YHWH all along—which is highly unlikely in any scenario and especially given that YHWH had already rejected Saul (1 Sam 15) and that YHWH thereafter had refused to answer Saul’s inquiries (vv. 6,16–19)—then one can only conclude that YHWH had no place in her formal ritual repertoire. That is to say, in calling on Samuel, Saul desperately hoped that the necromancer’s own Canaanite gods would convey Samuel’s ʾôb to the inquest she was asked to commence.
In short, Saul pursues a radical alternative avenue. The standard preferred Yahwistic rituals had failed to provide him what he wanted (vv.6–7), so he took the desperate step to go elsewhere to avoid violating his own previous injunction (vv.6, 9). While YHWH’s silence in v.5 might at first glance be misunderstood by modern readers as simply a neutral, “silence,” the divine silence must be understood as fully aligning with the author’s prior determination of Saul’s fate; he had already been rejected by YHWH in ch.15. Thus, that silence was not a silence to which an answer was yet to be conveyed from YHWH; it was a silence expressive of Saul’s prior rejection, a divine fait accompli.
In the final analysis, the passage’s major, and purposeful, irony lies in the fact that when Samuel’s ghost does appear, it delivers a doom oracle not from one of the Endorian ritualist’s Canaanite gods, but directly from YHWH. For that Saul was entirely unprepared. It was a blind-siding revelation that traumatized him, even causing him to collapse in utter futility and exhaustion (v.20). Yet the essence of the oracle proclaimed by Samuel’s ʾôb was nothing less than final confirmation of Saul’s prior rejection by YHWH back in ch. 15 (and 28: 5–6,16–19).
Yet in spite of Saul’s turn to Canaanite alternatives, the author only heightens the ironic within the plot by having Samuel’s ghost repeat the name of YHWH seven times in the four-verse oracle of vv.16–19. And to every reader’s astonishment, it is Samuel’s revenant that delivers that damning oracle. Furthermore, in the immediately prior v.15, Saul himself entirely avoids the mention of YHWH’s name as he speaks directly to Samuel’s ʾôb (and the same goes for the necromancer). Saul invokes instead the more generic and grammatically indefinite—and therefore, rhetorically abstruse—’elōhîm, “God” or “a god”(?). Yet Samuel’s immediate, almost verbatim retort in v.16, replaces Saul’s ’elōhîm with YHWH (see later discussion). In fact, ’elōhîm is used only here and in v.13 in the entire story of 1 Samuel 28. The reader will recall that in v.13, it refers to the collective of supra-natural beings coming up from the Earth or ancestral abode that might have also included Samuel’s ʾôb (and note again, the plural modifier ʿōlîm, “ascending gods”). In other words, the author attributes to Saul in v.15 a marked ambivalence regarding which of the gods had gone silent on him back in v.5 and which god was driving the necromantic performance that was unfolding. This literary ambiguity was designed to reflect Saul’s self-denial or ambivalence.
Simply put, YHWH is nowhere mentioned in the ritual itself as the deity invoked to preside over the conjuring. Neither the necromancer nor Saul (nor the author in his narrative frame) mention or call on YHWH to bring up Samuel’s ʾôb at any point in the ritual spanning vv. 12–15. Saul was surely hoping for an outcome other than that depicted in v.5 (and again note ch. 15) and so he selected an alternative—a Canaanite—avenue, but to his utter dismay, Samuel’s revenant abruptly closes the door on that possibility, In the oracle preserved in vv.16–19, Samuel’s ghost makes a sevenfold assertion that YHWH is the one reiterating Saul’s impending doom. Saul’s hope for a different verdict from another deity invoked by the Endorian necromancer was dashed to pieces. Thus, one can only conclude that in the world of our author—whether in his cosmological world or his literary world or both—even an otherwise forbidden means of divination might have an unexpected and, in this case, ironic outcome. When a deity possessing sufficient powers sought to intervene or supersede conventional ritual protocols just as YHWH did here, there was nothing humanly possible that could stop it. To everyone’s amazement, YHWH appointed himself the uninvited guest of honor at the clandestine gathering at Endor.
As noted previously, the LXX and the LV indicate that there is more going on in 1 Samuel 28 than meets the eye. That is, if one were to accept recent attempts by some modern translators of the MT who render ʾelōhîm in v.13b as a singular form, “God/god.” But before taking up the readings in those two major versions, it is worth highlighting here that the plural rendering, “gods” in v.13b finds added confirmation in the very immediate context of the MT.
In v.15, where the same term ʾelōhîm occurs again, it serves as the subject of a singular finite verb sār and so it conveys a singular entity, “God (ʾelōhîm) has turned away from me.” Now this verse refers back to v.6 where Saul explicitly appeals to YHWH—a single divine entity—who had refused to answer him. As further confirmation of ʾelōhîm’s singular force in v.15, Samuel in v.16 repeats Saul’s comment almost verbatim with one key alteration. The narrator replaces ʾelōhîm with the singular YHWH here to serve as the subject of the identical singular verb sār “…for YHWH has turned away (sār) from you….”
The alternate name is undoubtedly employed in order to make more explicit and specific, the name of the deity that had rejected Saul since the preceding plural use of ʾelōhîm in v.13 had infused the context with a purposeful degree of ambiguity regarding to which of the “god(s)” Saul referred in v.15. When YHWH’s mention in v.16 is coupled with the mention of YHWH in v.6 as the deity who refused to answer Saul’s inquiries, the repetition of YHWH unequivocally confirms ʾelōhîm’s singular function in v.15 as “God.” With this example of syntactic agreement from the immediate context in mind, if a single entity had been intended by the MT author in v.13b, a singular participle would have been the expected modifier of ʾelōhîm (i.e., ʾelōhîm ʿôlê—“a god ascending”). But it is the plural participle ʿōlîm that is preserved in v.13b.. Thus the term ʾelōhîm in v.13b most likely refers to plural entities, “gods . . . ascending” (ʾelōhîm . . . ʿōlîm).
Both the LXX and the LV provide clear confirmation of the plural rendering of the Hebrew ʾelōhîm ʿōlîm or “gods ascending” in MT’s v.13b. One should also keep in mind that the Qumran manuscripts demonstrate the LXX and the LV translators typically rendered their Hebrew parent texts with a high degree of accuracy. Therefore, as a general stratagem, one can no longer simply dismiss the ancient versions as having misunderstood or misinterpreted their Hebrew Vorlagen. In the case at hand, one can therefore expect the LXX and the LV translators in rendering their Hebrew Vorlagen into Greek and Latin, to preserve the corresponding plural forms reflected in their parent texts. The Greek reads: Θεοὺς ἑόρακα ἀναβαίνοντας “I have seen gods coming up…,” and the Latin: deos vidi ascendentes, “I saw gods ascending….” One can readily conclude that their parent Hebrew texts closely agreed with that of the MT’s ʾelōhîm rā’îtî ʿōlîm, “I saw gods ascending.” All three agree grammatically and semantically on the reading of v.13b.
With the phrase in v.14a, “What is its appearance?” (mah-to’ōrô), the author of the MT employs a singular suffixed pronoun to refer back to the entire preceding necromantic episode rehearsed in v.13b as its intended singular antecedent—a ritualized event involving multiple supra-natural beings ascending from the netherworld. Following the mention of the ascension of the multiple gods, “I saw gods coming up from the ground,” the LXX reads in the next half verse, “he said to her, ‘what did you perceive?’ (καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ Τί ἔγνως).” The LXX author constructs the question in v.14a without the suffixed pronoun found in the MT (and therefore without mention of the corresponding event as antecedent in v.13b). The LXX nevertheless similarly renders the phrase in a manner that clearly refers back to the entire necromantic event that had transpired up to this point including the appearance of multiple divine entities.
And finally, in the case of the LV which otherwise agrees with the MT at v. 14a, “what is his form?”(qualis est forma eius), the LV retains the plural entities in v. 13b, “gods ascending …”, thereby creating a slightly more compressed transition between v.13b and v.14a. Yet should one offer an alternative analysis of the construction in v.14a by translating the Latin term eius as the neutral genitive pronoun, “what is its form?” another equally viable rendering presents itself that aligns more closely with the MT. The antecedent to “it” here would encompass the entire preceding event just as it does in the MT: “What does it [the event] look like?”
Recent research suggests that nepheš most likely constitutes “life” rather than “soul” with all the latter’s immortality attachments that scholars have imputed to the notion. But if that is the case, why is nepheš not mentioned in 1 Samuel 28 with reference to Samuel’s appearance? This intriguing story offers only the terms ʿôb and yiddĕ’ōnî as unequivocal, explicit descriptors of the animate, sentient dead (vv.3, 7–8, 9, etc.). Neither nepheš, rûach or šĕʾôl are mentioned anywhere in the passage. The necromancer and the narrator do mention Earth as the place from where the revenants, the related ghosts, and the supra-natural beings (ʾelōhîm) all ascended in response to the necromancer’s conjuring. In v.13b, she exclaims, “I see gods ascending from the Earth,” (ʾelōhîm rā’îtî ` ōlîm min-hā’āreṣ) and in v.14a, where she detects a second phase in the event, she describes Samuel’s revenant or ʾôb as, “an old man ascending . . . ” (’îš zāqēn `ōlîm). And one should also keep in mind the reference to the “revenants and family ghosts” (ʾōbôt and yiddĕ’ōnîm) in v.3 as originating, “from the Earth” (min-hā’āreṣ). Beyond these descriptors, and rather surprisingly, the narrator offers no further information on the netherworld’s geography or on the anthropology of the dead. Surely, the lack of mention of nepheš, rûach, or šĕʾôl is of no small significance.
If the thesis proposed here is correct, namely that šĕʾôl was understood in its multi-valence as both the metaphorical locus and existential experience of the dying as one initially encountered death’s arrival, then the lack of šĕʾôl’s mention here confirms that what takes place in 1 Samuel 28 transpired long after Samuel’s death (contra šĕʾôl’s dire descriptors) and following his immediate entry into that new existence (contra šĕʾôl’s spatial and typically negative overtones). Thus, it seems that the term hā’āreṣ or Earth could on occasion (as it does here in 1 Samuel 28), refer to the perpetual domicile of the dead that followed upon their ritualized transformation to ancestral status. It was from this Earth or ancestral abode that Samuel’s ʾôb had been conjured (vv. 9,13) long after his death mentioned in 1 Sam 25:1.
The fact that neither term nepheš nor rûach is mentioned in this exceptional account indicates and confirms that in ancient times, neither was considered a viable animate aspect of the Israelite dead in the afterlife. They ceased to exist as such along with the full physical aspect of the human being. Yet following death nepheš could be employed to connote the material, concrete facsimile, or constructed image of the deceased, but like rûach, it no longer embodied a surviving, sentient, immaterial aspect of the individual. This same issue has re-emerged in discussions concerning the two occurrences of nepheš in the recently discovered Aramaic inscription from Zincirli (Bauks 2016; Pardee 2013; Steiner 2015 and the Panamuwa inscription). Hawkins (2014) makes a sober, compelling case for translating the references to nepheš in the Zincirli inscription as the material, concrete “image” (i.e. a statue or pillar) of the dead and nothing more.
As regards the post-mortem aspect of Samuel that does appear in the ritual, namely his ʾôb, one might consider the following added observations. The absence in 1 Samuel 28 of those other aspects known to connote the human being while still alive such as nepheš and rûach, coupled with the fact that ʾôb never appears in relation to the living or that the ʾôb had survived death, strongly suggests that it signifies an exclusively post-mortem attribute or feature of the human being. In any event, one must reckon with the fact that in v.15 the author rather surprisingly informs his readers that Samuel’s ʾôb can speak, hear, express emotion, even take on human form and wear human garb (recall the necromancer describes Samuel’s ʾb as “an old man wearing a robe”). So it would appear that the ʾôb was something other—a phantom or a wraith or some shadowy replication of the deceased (was it an avatar?) which had supplanted Samuel’s former physicality and immateriality while alive. By employing the seemingly obscure ʾôb as well as attributing to it familiar human traits and behaviors, the author may well have intended to convey to his ancient audience conventional attributes of an animate, sentient, but long dead human being in early Israelite religion. Notwithstanding future discoveries, the details otherwise will most likely remain forever enigmatic to us as modern readers.
Upon joining the ancestors following their own inevitable death (or as reconstructed earlier, “experiencing šĕʾôl”), and having received the customary funerary and mourning rites, the living anticipated the same rites of commemoration as their ancestors, even perhaps in special cases, enhanced commemoration when performed by their own living survivors (see Cradic 2017 on the prospective anepigraphic material evidence suggestive of veneration). That existence did not presume, however, the belief that the dead had an “enlivened” or “lively” experiential existence in the afterlife. Rather, it entailed that the living should engage in the recall and retelling of the exemplary biographies that those now deceased had left behind as their legacy while still alive. Such memorialization or commemoration of the lives of deceased ancestors simply did not presuppose a belief in an invigorated ontological afterlife that the dead experienced.
In fact, various descriptors of the dead point in the direction of what one might consider—ontologically speaking—at worst, a ghostly or shadowy life-after-death for the ancestors, and at best, one partly convergent with a somewhat enigmatic semi-autonomy or contingent co-existence as recipients of rites enacted by the living. Yet on rare occasion and with divine intervention as in 1 Samuel 28, the dead might undertake extraordinary exchange with the living. Such descriptors include the dead’s perpetual weakened condition (except perhaps when provoked to haunt the living or serve as conduit for the divine in necromancy), their constant need for nourishment, and especially their characterization as sleeping, in state of slumber, or at rest. On the last point, it is worth noting again the pointed complaint of Samuel’s ʾôb or revenant—as having been “disturbed” (Hi. rāgaz) from just such a state of sleep or rest.
Therefore, while the actions, speech, expressions of emotion, and the donning of conventional human form and attire (a robe), all depicted as characteristics of Samuel’s revenant as it/he participated in the necromantic rite, necromancy itself was most likely a rather exceptional experience for an individual ghost. This is especially so in light of Samuel’s complaint that he had been disturbed. Such responsiveness on the part of the dead was unusual and necessitated by the special circumstances surrounding a ritual performance like necromancy. It was not the typical state or experience of a ghost in the early Israelite version of the afterlife. That said, such does not, however, lead to the reductionist conclusion that the Israelite dead were not sentient beings. They certainly could express sentience as Samuel’s ʾôb exemplifies. In fact, it was in all likelihood that specific character trait which served as the crucial factor compelling ritualists to consult the “revenants” (ʾōbôt) and the, “familiar, family ghosts”(or “knowing ones,” yiddĕ`ōnîm).
One might counter that a necromantic account like that in 1 Samuel 28 should not be given serious consideration when exploring ancient Israelite afterlife beliefs as preserved in texts and material culture pertaining to the commemorative ancestor cult. After all (and “ritualistically speaking”) necromancy—technically a form of divination—hardly constituted a performative component of the commemorative cult. While the case for such a distinction might be plausible at the formal level of ritual taxonomy, there is simply no justification for separating the afterlife portrayed in 1 Samuel 28 from the afterlife described in texts or rituals pertaining to the ancestors. To be sure, Samuel was not Saul’s ancestor, yet he was someone’s ancestor. He would therefore have been resting (sleeping?) undisturbed as an ʾôb in the ancestral domain of the netherworld referred to here as the Earth (hā’āreṣ; see v.13, and vv.3, 14). Earth was not fully interchangeable with Sheol (šĕʾôl). Although their respective realms or powers overlapped significantly, Sheol primarily signified the experience of an individual or collective during the transition from one status—that of the living—to another—that of the dead. Its completion signaled the deceased’s arrival in the ancestral abode (or Earth) whereupon the dead became one with the ancestors. So while the dead’s memory and identity could be obliterated or forgotten by the living with genuine repercussions for both the living (e.g., not realizing the tangible benefits of the legacy and legitimation left behind by the dead) and for the dead (e.g., regarding their care and commemoration), the dead persisted in their ontological existence in the form of an ʾôb regardless, even if in an anonymous, shadowy state (whether temporarily or perpetually). It would be fair to say that 1 Samuel 28 preserves some of the most intriguing details regarding the ontological existence of the early Israelite dead.