Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 28:8

"And Saul disguised himself, and put on other raiment, and went, he and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night: and he said, Divine unto me, I pray thee, by the familiar spirit, and bring me up whomsoever I shall name unto thee." — 1 Samuel 28:8 (ASV)

And Saul disguised himself. — The disguise and the time chosen for the expedition served a double purpose. The king thought he would be unknown in the darkness and disguise when he came to the witch’s dwelling, and there was, too, a far greater probability of his escaping his Philistine foes, whose army lay between him and the village of En-dor.

Divine unto me by the familiar spirit. — Literally, divine unto me by the ôb.

Keil’s remark is interesting: “Prophesying by the ôb was probably performed by calling up a departed spirit from Sheol, and obtaining prophecies—that is, disclosures—concerning one’s own fate through the medium of such a spirit.”

No other commentator touches on the ôb here. Keil leaves it in doubt whether he considered the ôb to be some special spirit devoted to the service of the mistress of the ôb, or the spirit or soul of one already dead, who, through some occult power, was to be brought back again for a season to this earth.

As far as we can judge these old mysteries, the sorcerer or sorceress possessed, or was supposed to possess, a “familiar.” Through the aid of this “familiar,” the departed spirit was compelled or induced to revisit this world and to submit to certain questioning.

The Hebrew rendered “divine unto me” is of Syriac origin, like most of those words describing illicit vaticinations. — Speaker’s Commentary.

This miserable power, if it did exist, was one of the things the Israelites learned from the original inhabitants of Canaan. These “black” arts, as they have been called, have, in all ages and in every degree of civilisation, always held an extraordinary fascination for people.

It is well known that even in our own “cultured age” similar pretensions are put forth, and the dead are still invoked, summoned, and questioned, much as they were in the half-barbarous age when Saul and his companions, in their desperate situation, sought the witch of En-dor.

And bring me him up. — The popular idea has always been that Sheol, the place of departed spirits, is somewhere beneath the ground or earth on which we live, just as heaven, the abode of God and His holy angels, is in a region above the earth. St. Paul speaks in this popular language (Ephesians 4:9), where he refers to the lower parts of the earth as the abode of departed spirits.

Hence we have here, bring me him up. The Christian Church, Bishop Wordsworth reminds us, has adopted this language into her creeds, where she says that Christ in His human soul descended into hell (Hades). Keil remarks well on this human idea of what is “above” and “below”: “With our modes of thought, which are so bound up with time and space, it is impossible to represent to ourselves in any other way the difference and contrast between blessedness with God and shade-life in death.”