The trap of chapter 27 closes. Achish, who believes David has made Israel abhor him (27:12), tells him thou shalt go out with me to battle (v. 1) — against Saul, Jonathan and the people David is anointed to rule. David's answer is a masterpiece of saying nothing: thou shalt know what thy servant can do. Achish hears a promise; the reader can hear a threat; David perhaps means to keep both possible. He is made keeper of mine head — the royal bodyguard — on the strength of it.

The narrator does not tell us what David intended to do when the lines met, and the study will not guess. What is clear is that he had no good way out of his own making; chapter 29 gives him one he did not make. The two verses stand here, before Endor, so that both kings are seen on the eve of Gilboa: one marching in the wrong army, the other going by night to a forbidden door. Neither is asking the LORD, and only one of them will be answered by mercy.

Samuel's death is repeated from 25:1 for a reason: the reader must know he is in the grave before Saul tries to call him from it. The second notice is new: Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards — the practitioners the Law forbade on pain of death (Leviticus 20:27; Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Saul had enforced the Law. The chapter will show the man who purged the land of that art seeking it out himself, under cover of night, in disguise.

The KJV's familiar spirit renders the Hebrew term for the spirit such a person claimed to consult, and wizard its companion term for one who claims knowledge from the dead; the study keeps the KJV's words and describes the woman simply as one who practised that forbidden art. 1 Chronicles 10:13-14 names this visit as one of the causes of Saul's death: for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit... and enquired not of the LORD. Scripture itself reads the chapter as his final step away.

Before Endor there is this: Saul enquired of the LORD, and the LORD answered him not. The three channels Israel knew are named — dreams; Urim, the sacred lot of the ephod (Exodus 28:30), now with David's priest (23:6); prophets — Samuel is dead and Saul has no other. Heaven is silent. The reader has seen this silence once before, in 14:37, and knows it is not caprice: because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee (15:23). God's silence is the long echo of a man's own refusal to hear.

And yet the silence drives Saul not to repentance but to a medium. That is the tragedy of the verse. A man who cannot get an answer from God may wait, as David did till I know what God will do for me (22:3); or he may go and find another voice. 1 Chronicles 10:14 says Saul enquired not of the LORD, which readers reconcile with this verse by taking it as not enquiring in earnest, or as seeking elsewhere when the first answer did not come. The study leaves the two side by side.

Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit. His servants know where one is, which says something about how thorough the purge of verse 3 had been. Endor lay north of the Philistine camp at Shunem, which means Saul had to slip past or round the enemy by night to reach it — a measure of his desperation. He disguised himself (v. 8), the king hiding from a woman he himself had outlawed, and swears by the LORD (v. 10) that she will not be punished for breaking the LORD's law. The oath is grotesque, and the narrator lets it stand.

The woman's fear (v. 9) is realistic and her account of Saul's policy accurate; she is a lawbreaker in hiding, not a person of standing. The study uses the KJV's own terms and no others. What she did, how she did it, and what she expected, the text does not describe; readers should not import later or foreign ideas about the practice into a passage that gives none. All the chapter says is that she saw something and cried with a loud voice — and that what she saw frightened her.

The decisive and most debated verse. The woman asks whom to bring up; Saul says Samuel; and when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice — and in the same breath recognises her client: thou art Saul. Her cry is the narrator's clue that something happened she did not expect. The text names what she saw Samuel without qualification (vv. 12, 14, 15, 16, 20), and Samuel's words come true (31:6). That is what the passage says. What it does not say is how.

Readings divide, and the study presents them. Many, ancient and modern, hold that God permitted the real Samuel to appear — not by the woman's power but to her alarm — to pronounce Saul's sentence; the plain wording and the fulfilled word support this. Others hold that it was a deceiving spirit or the woman's performance, since God's law forbade the practice and the dead do not come at a human call (Luke 16:26-31). Some leave it open. No doctrine of the afterlife or of contact with the dead should be built on this verse; it is a narrative of judgment, told as it happened to Saul, and that is its use.

An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. The mantle is the prophet's robe — the one Saul tore at Gilgal when the kingdom was torn from him (15:27-28). Saul does not see the figure himself; the woman describes it, and Saul perceived that it was Samuel and bows to the ground. Whether he saw anything is not stated. Her earlier word, gods ascending out of the earth (v. 13), renders a Hebrew word that is generally taken here to mean a spirit or supernatural figure rather than God; the KJV is literal, and she means an apparition, not deity.

The bow is bitter. Saul last stood before Samuel's word when it was still open to him to obey; now he bows to the shade of the man he would not listen to while he lived (15:35, Samuel came no more to see Saul). The old prophet's final meeting with the king is at a medium's house, by night, with the king's face in the dust. Scripture does not stage the scene for effect; it records it, and the horror is in the plainness.

Samuel's word is the sentence of chapter 15 restated, with nothing new added — the LORD hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand (15:28; v. 17), given it to thy neighbour, even to David, because thou obeyedst not the voice of the LORD, nor executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek. Saul had come to hear what he should do (v. 15); he is told what he did. The dead prophet says exactly what the living one said. There was never a second message, and that is the point of the visit: the silence of verse 6 was not God withholding guidance but God having already given it.

Verse 16 is the hardest line in the chapter: the LORD is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy. The verb departed is the one used in 16:14 — the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul — and Saul himself uses it in verse 15: God is departed from me. He knows. He has known since the day David's harp first quieted him. The visit to Endor is not a search for information; it is a man who has lost God trying to reach the last person who spoke for Him.

To morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me. The sentence is specific and it is fulfilled in 31:6 — Saul, Jonathan, Abinadab, Melchishua. With me has been read as simply dead, in the grave as Samuel is; some have drawn from it conclusions about Saul's eternal state, in either direction, and the text does not support any of them. Jonathan, the most faithful man in the book, is included in the same with me as his father. The phrase speaks of death, and the study says no more.

What is also stated is that Israel will fall with its king: the LORD will also deliver Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines. A king's sin is never only his own; the people who asked for a king like all the nations (8:5, 20) will see the nations do to them what Samuel warned. Verse 20 shows Saul all along on the earth, without strength, without food — the picture of a man whose last hope has been answered with his first sentence.

The chapter ends not with a thunderclap but with a meal. The woman — a lawbreaker, an outcast, the one person in the chapter the Law condemned to death — sees the king sore troubled and presses him to eat, risking what she has already risked (I have put my life in my hand, v. 21). She kills her fat calf, bakes unleavened bread (v. 24), and serves the man who had purged her kind from the land. He refuses; his servants and she compelled him (v. 23); and he eats and goes out into the night that ends on Gilboa.

Readers have long noticed the kindness, and the study notes it without turning her into a saint: the text neither praises nor condemns her hospitality. It is simply what happened. The last food Saul eats is given by a woman he had outlawed, in a house he should not have entered, on the night before a battle whose end he has just been told. There is a mercy in the morsel, even here, and a sorrow: the king of Israel sits on a medium's bed and is fed like a guest, and goes to die.