Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 28:11

"Then said the woman, Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he said, Bring me up Samuel." — 1 Samuel 28:11 (ASV)

Bring me up Samuel. — A remarkable passage in the Babylonian Talmud evidently shows that, in any case, in the Rabbinical Schools of a very early date, the bringing up of Samuel was attributed to the witch’s power.

“A Sadducee once said to Rabbi Abhu, ‘You say that the souls of the righteous are treasured up under the throne of glory; how then did the witch of En-dor have power to bring up the prophet Samuel by necromancy?’ The Rabbi replied, ‘Because that occurred within twelve months after his death; for we are taught that during twelve months after death the body is preserved, and the soul soars up and down, but that after twelve months the body is destroyed, and the soul goes up, never to return.’”—Treatise Shabbath, folio 88,Colossians 2:0.

Another Rabbinical tradition, however, seems to limit this near presence of the departed spirit to the body to four days: “It is a tradition of Ben Kaphra’s. The very height of mourning is not until the third day. For three days the spirit wanders about the tomb, hoping it might return into the body. But when it sees that the form or aspect of the face is changed [on the fourth day], then it no longer hovers, but leaves the body to itself. After three days (it is said elsewhere), the countenance is changed.”—From the Bereshith R., p. 1143: quoted by Lightfoot, referred to by Canon Westcott in his commentary on John 11:39.

Saul’s state of mind on this, almost the eve of his last fatal fight at Gilboa, affords a curious study. He felt himself forsaken by God, and yet, in his deep despair, his mind turns to the friend and guide of his youth, from whom—long before that friend’s death—he had been so hopelessly estranged.

There must have been a terrible struggle in the proud king’s heart before he could have brought himself to stoop to ask for assistance from one of that loathed and proscribed class of women who professed to have dealings with familiar spirits and demons. “There is,” once wrote Archbishop Trench, “something unutterably pathetic in the yearning of the dis-anointed king, now in his utter desolation, to exchange words once more with the friend and counselor of his youth; and if he must hear his doom, to hear it from no other lips but his.”