Abigail, En-dor, and the End of Saul

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Abigail,” “Nabal,” “Caleb,” “Maon,” “Carmel (Place),” “Ziklag,” “Achish,” “Gath,” “Philistines,” “Endor,” “Beth-shean,” “Gilboa,” “Jabesh-gilead,” “Necromancy,” “Magic (OT),” “Urim and Thummim,” “Anointing,” “Amalek.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “Samuel, Books of,” “David,” “Saul,” “Philistines,” “Divination and Magic,” “Death and Afterlife,” “Women,” “Warfare,” “Text and Textual Criticism.” The last of those is not optional in this book.
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — יָד (yāḏ, hand), שָׁאַל (šāʾal, ask), נָבָל (nāḇāl, fool), טַעַם (ṭaʿam, discernment), מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ, anointed), אוֹב (ʾōḇ, medium), חָזַק (ḥāzaq, be strong), כְּלִי (kəlî, vessel/gear).
• On the Greek — Bernard A. Taylor, “1 Reigns: To the Reader,” in NETS, on the character of Greek 1 Kingdoms; and Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, whose chapters on Samuel are where the divergences catalogued in the codex note above are set in order.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard text-critical commentary on this book, and the one to have open when the columns disagree; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT), which defends the Masoretic Text more often than McCarter does and should be read beside him.
• Robert Alter, The David Story (translation and commentary on 1 and 2 Samuel); Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation); Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); V. Philips Long on the historical questions.
• J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, vol. 2 — the fullest close reading of these chapters in English. (Alter and Fokkelman read these texts as literature and do not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics.)

Sheep-shearing was a feast, and a feast is when you ask. Shearing gathered the flocks, the hired hands and the surplus in one place; it is a harvest festival with wool instead of grain (compare Judah at Timnah, Genesis 38:12–13, and Absalom’s shearing party in 2 Samuel 13:23–29). David’s claim is not extortion in the modern sense and not quite wages either: his four hundred men had in fact stood between Nabal’s shepherds and the raiders of the Negeb, and Nabal’s own servant says so unprompted — “they were a wall to us both by night and by day” (25:16). The narrator lets the servant establish the facts so that the reader is not left guessing. What David then proposes to do about it is a different question, and the narrator does not defend that either.

The Philistines were newcomers with better cities and better iron. They are the Sea Peoples of the Egyptian records: Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscriptions name the Peleset among the peoples who came by land and sea and were fought off in the eighth year of his reign (the relevant Egyptian historical texts are collected in ANET, section III). They settled the coastal plain in five city-states — Gath, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron — each under a seren, a title the Bible uses only of them (29:2, 6, 7). Achish of Gath is a real political figure in a real system, and David’s sixteen months as his vassal (27:7) are exactly the kind of arrangement the Amarna-era archives show around Canaan: a landless armed band hires itself to a city king and raids on his behalf.

And consulting the dead was normal everywhere except in Israel’s law. Mesopotamian ritual texts prescribe procedures for calling up and questioning a ghost (eṭemmu), and the great literary descent-texts — the Descent of Ishtar (ANET 106–109) and the appendix to the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Enkidu’s spirit comes up to report what the underworld is like (ANET 97–99) — show how ordinary the traffic between the living and the dead was assumed to be. That is the background against which Deuteronomy 18:10–11 is startling: Israel is forbidden the one comfort every neighbouring culture allowed itself. Saul is not doing something unheard of. He is doing the ordinary thing, which for Israel was the forbidden thing.

• Josephus, Antiquities 6.13–14 (Whiston’s numbering) (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — he retells all of this as plain history. On chapter 28 he takes the apparition as genuinely Samuel’s soul, “called out of Hades.” Then he does something no other ancient retelling does: at 6.14.4 he stops the history to praise the woman — she had “no other possession but that one calf,” she killed it for a man who had outlawed her trade, she knew he would be dead by morning and could repay nothing, and Josephus concludes, “It would be well therefore to imitate the example, and to do kindnesses to all such as are in want.” He also praises Saul’s courage in going out to a battle he had been told he would lose. Josephus regularly follows a Greek text of Samuel, so where his details differ from the Masoretic Text that is itself evidence, not carelessness.
• Sirach 46:13–20 (Second-Temple — non-canonical; the Apocrypha and Deuterocanon are read here as witnesses, never levelled with Scripture) — the praise of Samuel in the Hymn of the Fathers, and its last verse is about this chapter: καὶ μετὰ τὸ ὑπνῶσαι αὐτὸν προεφήτευσεν καὶ ὑπέδειξεν βασιλεῖ τὴν τελευτὴν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνύψωσεν ἐκ γῆς τὴν φωνὴν αὐτοῦ ἐν προφητείᾳ — “and after he fell asleep he prophesied, and showed the king his end, and lifted up his voice out of the earth in prophecy” (Rahlfs). That is a Second-Temple reader taking 1 Samuel 28 as real prophecy, two centuries before any Christian wrote about it, and it is why the question was live long before the church took it up.
• Tertullian, On the Soul 57 (early Christian — a witness, not Scripture) — the other ancient answer, and he states it flatly: it was “permitted to the Pythonic spirit… to represent the soul of Samuel,” and “God forbid… that we should suppose that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet, can be dragged out of its resting-place by a demon.” His argument is 2 Corinthians 11:14 — Satan disguises himself.
• Origen, Homily on 1 Kingdoms 28 (De engastrimytho), and Eustathius of Antioch, De engastrimytho contra Origenem (early Christian — witnesses, not Scripture) — the fourth-century argument, and it is worth knowing that the title of both treatises is the Septuagint’s word, ἐγγαστρίμυθος, “belly-speaker,” which is the word in 28:7–9 above and in the Greek of Deuteronomy 18:11. Origen argued that the text says Samuel and means Samuel; Eustathius wrote a book against him arguing it was a phantasm. Both texts, with six other early writers, are translated in Rowan A. Greer and Margaret M. Mitchell, The “Belly-Myther” of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church (SBL, 2007).
• The Egyptian Sea Peoples records and Mesopotamian necromantic and descent texts in ANET — Ramses III on the Peleset (section III, Egyptian historical texts); the Descent of Ishtar (ANET 106–109); Enkidu’s spirit brought up from the underworld, Gilgamesh XII (ANET 97–99). Ancient witnesses to the world these chapters happen in, cited as parallels and not as Scripture.

• Seven ketiv/qere pairs in seven chapters. At 25:3 the consonants written are כלבו and the reading tradition says כָּלִבִּי, “a Calebite”; at 25:18 Abigail’s name is written one way and read another, and so is “prepared”; and there are further pairs at 25:34, 26:22, 27:4, 27:8 and 28:8. The Masoretes could have chosen and erased. They wrote down both. That is the same discipline this page is trying to keep, and it is worth saying to anyone who has been told that preserving variants is a modern loss of nerve: the men who gave us the Hebrew Bible did it on every page.
• Two places where the Hebrew is hard and everybody knows it. At 30:20 the ESV footnotes the clause outright — “the meaning of the Hebrew clause is uncertain” — and the Greek reads it differently. At 27:8 the phrase the ESV renders “from of old” is rendered by something else entirely in Greek (ἀπὸ ἀνηκόντων), the second people in the list carries a ketiv/qere, and the Greek has no second people at all. Neither of these bears on anything the page teaches, and that is exactly why they are printed: a reader should be able to see the difficult places from someone who is not selling anything.

• Deuteronomy 18:9–14; Leviticus 19:31; Leviticus 20:6, 27 — the law behind chapter 28, and it is not vague. Deuteronomy forbids by name “a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead,” using both of the verbs the story uses. Leviticus attaches the death penalty. Saul had enforced this law himself (28:3, 9), which is why the woman is frightened of him and why he has to go in disguise, at night, to a place outside his own lines. The same chapter of Deuteronomy that forbids the medium promises a prophet instead (Deut 18:15–19) — and Saul has just been told there is no answer “by prophets” either.
• 1 Samuel 2:35 → 1 Samuel 25:28 → 2 Samuel 7:16 — follow “a sure house” (בַּיִת נֶאֱמָן) through the book. It is spoken against Eli’s house at the start, it is put in Abigail’s mouth in the middle — “the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house” — and it becomes the covenant with David at the end. A woman on a hillside says the covenant sentence before God says it. The book gives that line to her.
• 1 Samuel 24 beside 1 Samuel 26 — the two sparings, and the standing question. Are these two accounts of one event, or two events? Commentators divide, and the case for each is real: the settings, the Ziphite informers and the speeches echo closely, and yet the differences are specific and the second is not a retelling that improves the first. We name the debate and do not adjudicate. What is not in doubt is the arrangement: chapter 25 was put between them, and Abigail’s argument — leave the vengeance to God, do not carry it yourself — is exactly what David then says to Abishai in 26:10.
• Exodus 17:8–16; Deuteronomy 25:17–19; 1 Samuel 15 — Amalek, and the shape of the ending. Saul lost the kingdom over Amalek; and while Saul is dying, David is off recovering his families from an Amalekite raiding party (ch. 30). 2 Samuel 1 will then bring an Amalekite to David claiming to have finished Saul off. The narrator does not comment. He does not have to. (On the hard command of chapter 15 and how this church handles it, see that page: it is reported plainly, located precisely, and fenced — it licenses no violence, coercion or ethnic hostility today, and it has in fact been misused.)
• Judges 21:8–14 → 1 Samuel 11:1–11 → 1 Samuel 31:11–13 — the thread this book ends on. Jabesh-gilead is the town Israel devastated at the end of Judges. It is the town Nahash the Ammonite besieged and threatened to blind, and the town a young farmer from Gibeah saved by marching all night (11:11). And it is the town whose valiant men now march all night the other way, to take a mutilated body off a Philistine wall and bury it at home. The first thing Saul ever did as king is the reason anybody comes for his body at the last. The book does not say that out loud. It just puts the two night marches at the two ends and lets you find them.
• Deuteronomy 17:14–20 and Judges 21:25 — the two texts the whole book is standing between. Judges ends “there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Deuteronomy had already legislated for a king, and said what he must be. 1 Samuel closes with the first king dead on a mountain and the second not yet crowned, and the reader is meant to be holding both texts at once.
• 1 Samuel 31 beside 1 Chronicles 10 — the same battle told twice inside the Hebrew Bible, and the differences are instructive and not hidden: Chronicles buries them under an oak rather than a tamarisk, does not mention the burning, adds that Saul’s head was fastened in the temple of Dagon, and then supplies the theological verdict 1 Samuel withholds (1 Chron 10:13–14). Scripture itself gives us two tellings. That is worth remembering the next time someone is alarmed that the Greek and the Hebrew differ.
• Psalms with these chapters in their superscriptions — Psalm 54 (“when the Ziphites went and told Saul…”, cf. 26:1) and Psalm 63 (“in the wilderness of Judah”). The superscriptions are part of the received text and are read here as ancient tradition about setting, not as narrative from the historian. Read them alongside and hear the same weeks from inside.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard text-critical treatment; he reconstructs freely from the Greek and Qumran, which is exactly why he should be read with a second opinion open beside him.
• David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT) — the fullest recent defence of the Masoretic Text’s readings on linguistic grounds; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC), between the two.
• Robert Alter, The David Story; J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, vol. 2 — for the literary architecture used in the structure block above. Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation).
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus — on why Samuel is the standard example in this field, and on Josephus as a witness to a Greek text of Samuel. The official edition of the scrolls is DJD 17 (Cross, Parry, Saley, Ulrich, 2005).
• Rowan A. Greer and Margaret M. Mitchell, The “Belly-Myther” of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church (SBL, 2007) — Origen, Eustathius and six others in Greek and English. The place to go before saying anything confident about chapter 28.
• Robert P. Gordon, “David’s Rise and Saul’s Demise: Narrative Analogy in 1 Samuel 24–26,” Tyndale Bulletin 31 (1980): 37–64; David G. Firth, “The Accession Narrative (1 Samuel 27–2 Samuel 1),” Tyndale Bulletin.

• Chapter 28 is genuinely debated, and this page lays out the readings without choosing. The three ancient answers are set out in Stage 2 with their sources. What should be said here is what the text does and does not do. It does not describe a technique. It does not say where Samuel was. It does not say whether God permitted it, compelled it, or overruled it. It reports that the woman screamed, that Saul recognised him, that from v. 15 the narrator writes “Samuel,” and that the message was judgment which came true the next day. Anyone who tells you the passage settles the question of the state of the dead is reading past it. And the plain warning stands whichever reading is right: Israel was forbidden this door, Saul had shut it himself, and opening it got him a word he could not survive.
• Chapter 27 is not held up for imitation, and the narrator does not pretend otherwise. David lies to Achish about whom he is raiding, and kills the survivors so the lie cannot be checked (27:9–12). Commentators divide on how far he is being quietly criticised — the absence of any inquiry of the Lord in 27:1 is often read as the signal, and the sixteen months in Philistia are the one stretch of his exile with no psalm and no prophet in it. The discipline is the one this library uses everywhere: report what the text approves, report what it merely reports, and do not supply a verdict the narrator withheld. The text reports this.
• Are chapters 24 and 26 two events or one? A real question with real arguments on both sides, and it does not move anything doctrinal. Those who see one event in two tellings point to the Ziphites, the cave/camp setting, the “my son David” exchange and Saul’s confession in both. Those who see two point to the specific and non-duplicated details, and to the fact that Saul’s confession the first time is exactly what makes the second time a tragedy rather than a repetition. We name the positions and do not adjudicate.
• The share-the-spoil ruling (30:21–25) is law, and it entered Israel’s law from a bad day. Two hundred men were too exhausted to cross a brook; the fighters wanted them cut out; David’s ruling is that what was recovered was given and therefore not the fighters’ to withhold, and that the man at the baggage shares alike. The narrator says it “became a statute and a rule for Israel from that day forward” (30:25). It is the one piece of legislation in the book, it comes from a man with no throne yet, and it is about the people who could not keep up.
• Josephus is a textual witness, not just a retelling. He follows a Greek text of Samuel closely enough that where his details differ from the Masoretic Text, the difference is evidence about the state of the text in the first century — which is Ulrich’s whole argument. Two examples from these chapters: he harmonises Saul’s death with the Amalekite’s report in 2 Samuel 1, and (like 1 Chronicles 10:12) he says nothing about the bodies being burned.
• And a word about how this page reads the differences at all. The Hebrew and the Greek of Samuel are not two competing bids for a prize. They are two ancient forms of a text that was carried by real communities in real languages, and 4QSam^a shows that the Greek translator often had a Hebrew text in front of him that really did read that way. No article of the Christian faith in this passage rests on a disputed reading. David’s restraint, Abigail’s wisdom, Saul’s fall and the kindness of Jabesh-gilead are in every witness we have. See the texts we print.

• Abigail stopped a massacre with a speech, and the man she stopped said she was right. Eight verses, no threat, no flattery, no appeal to Nabal’s merits — just the truth about her husband, the truth about David’s future, and the weight he would have had to carry. “Blessed be your discretion” (25:33). Wisdom in this book is not a mood. It is a woman on a road doing something difficult, quickly, before anyone can stop her.
• The argument that worked was about the killer. She did not tell David that Nabal deserved to live. She told him he would have to live with it: “no cause of grief or pangs of conscience” (25:31). If you have someone to talk down this week, that is the door.
• David’s discipline was about his hand. Twenty times in seven chapters, and three times in one chapter he says it: I will not put out my hand. He had been anointed. He had the man asleep in front of him. He took the spear and the jar of water and walked away and shouted across a valley instead. Restraint is not passivity. It is the hardest thing anyone does in this book.
• Chapter 27 is in the Bible too. Sixteen months of raids and a lie, told without a word of praise. Scripture is not embarrassed to report its heroes at their worst, and a church that can only preach the good chapters is not preaching this book.
• Chapter 28 is a warning and not a wonder. Saul had shut that door himself and then went to it at night in disguise, because silence was more than he could bear. There is no technique here to learn and nothing to be curious about. What there is: a man who could get no answer, and who went looking for one anywhere. The remedy Deuteronomy 18 offers is not a better medium; it is a prophet, and finally the Prophet.
• And do not miss the bread. The last kindness anybody does Saul in this book is done by a woman he had outlawed. She had no reason, no reward and no future in it — she knew he would be dead by morning — and she killed the only animal she had and baked and put it in front of him and made him eat. Josephus stopped his whole history to say so.
• “David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.” Everything gone, the town burned, his own men talking about stoning him. One clause — and then he sends for the ephod and asks. That is what the strengthening was for.
• The last word of the book is Jabesh-gilead. Saul’s first act as king was to march all night to save that town (11:11). At the end, its valiant men march all night to bring his body off a wall, and burn and bury and fast for him. The one good thing he ever did came back for him when there was nothing left to gain by it. The book will not gloat over Saul, and neither will we.

A word about typology, clearly labelled: David is the Lord’s anointed refusing to seize what he has been promised, and Christians have long heard something of Christ in that restraint. Hold it carefully and label it for what it is — a devotional analogy, not a claim the text makes. The New Testament does not read 1 Samuel 26 that way. What the New Testament does do is call Jesus χριστός, the same word the Greek of these chapters uses of Saul, and set him in David’s line. That is the canon’s own move, and it is enough to stand on. This passage, for its part, is not about us. It is about two men, one of whom would not touch the other.

Step in response: two things this week. First, find the conversation you have been rehearsing in anger and go and have it the way Abigail did — taking the blame you can carry, telling the truth without exaggeration, and speaking to the person’s future rather than their fault. Second, do one kindness with no possible return in it. The woman at En-dor is in the Bible partly so that we know God notices those.