Commentaria in I Regum (I Samuelis)
Chapter Twenty-eight. Synopsis of the Chapter
Saul, with battle at hand, inquires of God about its outcome; but God not answering, he consults a Pythoness, who raises Samuel for him, who, verse 16, foretells to Saul and his camp destruction and slaughter.
1. And it came to pass in those days that the Philistines gathered their troops to prepare for war against Israel; and Achis said to David: Know thou assuredly that thou shalt go out with me to the camp, thou and thy men. 2. And David said to Achis: Now thou shalt know what thy servant will do. And Achis said to David: And I will make thee keeper of my head all days.
3. Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him, and buried him in Ramatha his city. And Saul had put away the magicians and soothsayers out of the land. 4. And the Philistines gathered themselves together, and came and pitched in Sunam: and Saul gathered all Israel, and came to Gelboe. 5. And Saul saw the camp of the Philistines, and was afraid, and his heart was exceedingly dismayed. 6. And he consulted the Lord, and he answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by priests, nor by prophets. 7. And Saul said to his servants: Seek me a woman that hath a divining spirit, and I will go to her, and inquire by her. And his servants said to him: There is a woman at Endor that hath a divining spirit. 8. So he disguised himself, and put on other garments, and went, he and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night, and he said to her: Divine to me by thy divining spirit, and bring me up him whom I shall tell thee. 9. And the woman said to him: Behold thou knowest all that Saul hath done, and how he hath rooted out the magicians and soothsayers from the land: why then dost thou lay a snare for my life, to cause me to be put to death? 10. And Saul swore to her by the Lord, saying: As the Lord liveth, no evil shall happen to thee for this thing. 11. And the woman said to him: Whom shall I bring up to thee? And he said: Bring me up Samuel. 12. And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice, and said to Saul: Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul. 13. And the king said to her: Fear not; what hast thou seen? And the woman said to Saul: I saw gods ascending out of the earth. 14. And he said to her: What form is he of? And she said: An old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul understood that it was Samuel, and he bowed himself with his face to the ground, and adored. 15. And Samuel said to Saul: Why hast thou disturbed my rest, that I should be brought up? And Saul said: I am in great distress; for the Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me, and would not hear me, neither by the hand of prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest tell me what I shall do. 16. And Samuel said: Why askest thou me, seeing the Lord is departed from thee, and is gone over to thy rival? 17. For the Lord will do to thee as he spoke by my hand, and will rend thy kingdom out of thy hand, and will give it to thy neighbour David; 18. because thou didst not obey the voice of the Lord, nor execute his fierce wrath upon Amalec. Therefore hath the Lord done this to thee this day. 19. And the Lord will also deliver Israel with thee into the hands of the Philistines: and tomorrow thou and thy sons shall be with me; the Lord will also deliver the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines. 20. And forthwith Saul fell along to the ground; for he had feared the words of Samuel, and there was no strength in him, because he had eaten no bread all that day. 21. And the woman came in to Saul (for he was much troubled), and said to him: Behold, thy handmaid hath obeyed thy voice, and I have put my life in my hand, and have heard thy words which thou spokest to me. 22. Now therefore do thou also hearken to the voice of thy handmaid, and I will set before thee a morsel of bread, that eating thou mayest regain strength, and be able to go on thy way. 23. But he refused, and said: I will not eat. But his servants and the woman forced him, and at length, hearing their voice, he arose from the ground, and sat upon the bed. 24. Now the woman had a fatted calf in the house, and she made haste and killed it; and taking meal, she kneaded it, and baked unleavened bread, 25. and set it before Saul and before his servants. And when they had eaten, they rose up, and walked all that night.
2. NOW THOU SHALT KNOW WHAT THY SERVANT WILL DO,—David speaks ambiguously here, so as not to offend King Achis and bring himself into danger of life. For he did not intend (though Lyranus thinks so) to fight in truth with Achis against his own Israelites; for it would have been impious to fight against his country and God’s people; nor did he wish to avenge himself on Saul, as is plain from what precedes and follows; whence when Saul was slain he grieved greatly over his death. So Abulensis.
3. AND SAUL HAD PUT AWAY THE MAGICIANS,—because God had commanded it, Leviticus 19 and 20. Saul did this at the beginning of his reign, says Abulensis, though Serarius will have it that he did it after his sin.
6. AND HE ANSWERED HIM NOT, NEITHER BY DREAMS, NOR BY PRIESTS.—In Hebrew, nor by Urim, that is by the pontiff clothed with the Rational in which were the Urim, that is, illuminations, by which God answered his inquiries and foretold the future things about which he was consulted. See what I said on Exodus 28:30. For although Abiathar had fled to David with the Ephod, when Saul killed his father Achimelech for giving David loaves, chapter 22, verse 20; yet there was another pontiff with the Ephod in the tabernacle with Saul, through whom he consulted God; otherwise the Hebrews would have been without a pontiff and sacred rites; for David with the pontiff Abiathar, for fear of Saul, had fled out of Judea into Philistia to Achis king of Geth. God would not answer Saul on account of his disobedience and impiety, in that he had killed the priests and persecuted David. Wherefore Saul, seeing himself spurned by God, fled to the Python, that is to the devil, according to the saying of the atheist:
If I cannot move the gods above, I will move Acheron.
Oedipus in Seneca imitated Saul; who, having vainly tried other oracles, at last tried necromancy.
7. AND SAUL SAID TO HIS SERVANTS: SEEK ME A WOMAN THAT HATH A DIVINING SPIRIT (python),—that is a familiar demon, whom the Septuagint call engastrimython, that is ventriloquist, who spoke from the woman’s belly as from a bottle (for this the Hebrew ob signifies; whence the Latin obba) and gave oracles about the future when consulted on them. Hence Apollo was called Pythius, because he delivered oracles, and his ministers, men and women, were called Pythians and Pythonesses. Hence again all magicians and diviners were called Pythians, and so Python signifies any kind of divination, whether done by necromancy and the raising of the dead, as was done here by the raising of Samuel, or by sortilege, or by incantations, or in any other way. See what I said on Isaias 8:19, and Acts 16:16.
THE WOMAN.—The Rabbis, R. Eliezer, R. Kimchi and others, fable that this woman was the mother of Abner, whom Saul spared on account of kinship. But they err: for Abner’s mother dwelt in her own tribe of Benjamin, but this woman at Endor, which was in the tribe of Issachar. Again, Abner’s mother was a noble matron, but this a poor working woman, says Josephus.
You will say: Saul consulted a Pythoness, that is a magician; why then, verse 3, did he kill such? Justin Martyr, Question 57 to the Orthodox: “He put away the diviners,” he says, “because by this deed he hoped to appease God so as to repeal his sentence, which deprived him of the kingdom: not because he hated the crime of diviners, but because he loved the kingdom.” This reason is true and agrees with Saul’s ambition. But that is more fitting to the matter at hand which the Hebrews have handed down in Lyranus. “Saul,” they say, “put away the soothsayers for this cause, that they foretold that his family would be overthrown and the kingdom transferred to David.”
11. BRING ME UP SAMUEL.—You will ask, was it the true Samuel whom the Pythoness raised? Many deny it, and think it was a demon, or a phantom, a mask and shade of Samuel fashioned by a demon. So Procopius, Theodoret, Rupert, Tertullian, Cyril, Bede and others. More and better authorities affirm the contrary, because what follows clearly indicates it, and Ecclesiasticus more clearly, chapter 46, verse 23, where among Samuel’s praises he assigns this, that he prophesied after death: “He lifted up his voice from the earth in prophecy, to blot out the wickedness of the people.” I proved this at greater length there, and solved the arguments to the contrary. And this is the opinion of Abulensis, Lyranus, Cajetan, Dionysius, Serarius here, and of St. Augustine, book On Care for the Dead, chapter 15, no. 18; Basil, epistle 80; Nazianzen, oration 3; Josephus, book 6 of the Antiquities chapter 15; Justin, dialogue Against Trypho; St. Ambrose on Luke chapter 1; St. Jerome on Isaias chapter 7; St. Thomas, part 1, Question 89, article 8, reply 2. Suarez, part 3, vol. 2, disputation 43, section 2; Bellarmine, book 2 On Purgatory chapter 6.
Moreover, not by dreams, priests and prophets, but by Samuel, God answered Saul, that he might be the more moved and struck, say Cyril and Abulensis, when he who had despised his precepts, and had hitherto made little of his predictions about losing the kingdom, heard him now threatening the last things.
12. AND WHEN THE WOMAN SAW SAMUEL.—God came swiftly, uncalled by the incantations of the Pythoness, which are wont to be long, lest Samuel seem raised by their force: at once therefore, at Saul’s asking, he set Samuel there, who should punish him both for other crimes and for this magic, by announcing the slaughter that was to follow. So Abulensis, Cajetan and others. For this cause the woman, troubled, “cried out,” as follows. You ask, why she did so? First, the Rabbis: because, they say, other dead evoked by magic and necromancy used to ascend with feet raised toward heaven: but Samuel ascended with his head raised toward heaven; but these are their fictions. I say then that she cried out, troubled, because she saw that Samuel had forestalled her incantations, and presented himself though not yet called: for by his venerable and august appearance he struck the Pythoness; Saul, however, thought she cried out because she recognised that he was Saul, and feared for her life from him on account of her magic: whence he bade her lay aside this fear.
FOR THOU ART SAUL.—By what sign the Pythoness knew this is uncertain. Abulensis thinks Samuel indicated it to her.
13. I SAW GODS ASCENDING OUT OF THE EARTH.—“Gods,” that is “God”. For in Hebrew it is Elohim, that is God, that is, a certain divine man, namely Samuel: for him only she saw, as is plain from what follows. R. Kimchi fables, therefore, when he says she saw two (namely Moses and Samuel; so also other Rabbis teach that with Samuel Moses ascended, who was shut up in the same prison; whence in the book Yalkut it is said: “I saw gods ascending from the earth. Hence it is held that it was not Samuel alone who ascended, but two, one Samuel, the other Moses, to whom Samuel said: Perhaps I am called to judgment; come then with me, to testify that there is no word written in the law which I have not kept.”) But this is Judaism. For already at his death Samuel, like other men, had been judged and had received his sentence, and was certain of his happiness, as also the other Fathers who were with him in limbo. Again in the book Midrash Samuel it is said: “Many just men ascended with him.”
why wast thou not the cause, but the occasion, of my being raised? for the proper and efficacious cause of Samuel’s raising was God. Samuel, however, says that he was disturbed by Saul, because he was moved and angered at the unworthiness of the manner in which Saul was trying to raise him by magic.
19. AND TOMORROW THOU AND THY SONS SHALL BE WITH ME,—in the other world and life, namely in the underworld, but not in the same part and place of the underworld, as though to say: Thou and thy sons shall die and be added to the dead, and shall be with me in the place and state of the dead, namely in the underworld, but with unequal lot and abode: for I am in limbo, thou shalt descend to hell: “For Saul the wicked is not where Jonathan the good deserved to be received,” says Bede. And St. Augustine, in the place cited, says Simplicius: “‘With me,’ he says, ‘shalt thou be’ is to be referred not to equality of happiness, but to like condition of death, because both were men, and both could die, and he, already dead, was foretelling death to the living.”
21. AND THE WOMAN CAME IN TO SAUL.—Hence Abulensis probably holds that the Pythoness was not present in the place and at the time when Saul spoke with Samuel, because Saul would not have anyone hear him speaking with him: for he wished to deal with him in secret, and to communicate his secrets with him alone. Samuel departing, therefore, and his conversation with Saul ended, the Pythoness came in to the place where Saul was.
AND I HAVE PUT MY LIFE IN MY HAND,—that is, I have exposed myself to the danger of death, as a magician by raising Samuel: for I knew that Saul had killed all the magicians.