Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 15:23

"For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because thou hast rejected the word of Jehovah, he hath also rejected thee from being king." — 1 Samuel 15:23 (ASV)

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. —Witchcraft, more literally soothsaying or divination, was a sin constantly condemned in the Old Testament. It was the greatest of all the dangers to which Israel was exposed, and was in fact a tampering with the idol-worship of the surrounding nations. Impurity, and an utter lack of all the loftier principles of morality which the one true God and His chosen servants sought to impress upon the peoples of the East, characterized the various systems of idol-worship then current in Syria and the adjacent countries.

And Samuel here, in this solemn inspired saying, briefly gives the reasons for the Lord’s rejection of His Anointed: “Rebellion,” or conscious disobedience to the express commands of the Eternal, in the case of Saul, God’s chosen king, was nothing less than the deadly sin of idol-worship, because it set aside the true Master of Israel and virtually acknowledged another.

The next sentence still more emphatically expresses the same thought: “Stubbornness,” or “intractableness,” is in the eyes of the pure God the same thing as worshipping idols and teraphim. The Hebrew word aven, translated as iniquity, literally means “nothingness;” it is a word used in the later prophets for an idol (Hosea 10:8; Isaiah 66:3). The word in the original translated in the English Version as “idolatry,” is teraphim. Teraphim were apparently small household gods or idols, venerated as the arbiters of good and evil fortune.

In Roman life, we find similar idols under the name of “Lares.” Teraphim is derived from an unused root, taraph, meaning “to live comfortably;” Arabic, tarafa: compare the Sanskrit trip, and the Greek τρέΦειν. These idols appear to have been small human figures of various sizes. The image in 1 Samuel 19:13 was probably nearly life-size. These teraphim were generally made of silver or wood. It has been suggested that the teraphim Rachel stole were images of her ancestors. (See Note on Genesis 31:19, and Mr. Whitelaw’s comment on that verse in the Pulpit Commentary.)