Samuel

Before a futile battle, King Saul orders a miracle worker to summon the soul of Samuel, his long-dead teacher.

Context

• Reference: 1 Samuel 28:7

• When the tribes needed to officially band together to fight a common enemy, they asked the prophet Samuel to name a king.

• Guided by God, he chose Saul.

• Saul immediately disobeyed God, who then chose David to be the next king.

• After that disobedience, Saul never saw Samuel again.

• Saul banned all who consulted spirits.

• Facing certain defeat by his enemies, Saul disguised himself and asked a wonder-worker to summon the spirit of Samuel.

Aftermath

• Saul and most of his sons were killed in battle the next day.

Notes

The story of the Witch of Endor has long been one of my favorites in the Bible. It's quite spooky, feeling in some ways more like an event from Greek mythology than a biblicat tale. It's also one of the few stories that involves any sense of life after death, of which Judaism has several seemingly contradictory views.

In writing this, about a quarter of the way into the writing of The Book of Voices, I found myself laying out the concept of death and the passage of souls that runs throughout the book. This idea, of souls merging into a general loam of soul-stuff then recombining with fragments of other souls to form new ones, is not a traditional Jewish concept. But I've run with it in telling these tales. (Perhaps if enough people read them and talk about them, it will become a traditional Jewish concept, in the way that many other ideas have done so over time.)