Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [80]
Back to the Witch of Endor
UNLIKE THE DEAD in Homer’s Hades, who know no more of the earth than humans and who depend on new arrivals for the news, the dead Samuel is still a prophet and knows the outcome of the forthcoming battle. Likely, all the revivable dead have prophetic powers because Saul uses the technical term “inquire” (dōrēš) before he names the particular ghost to be raised, as well as the general term “ask” (šō’ēl) for the activity, as do the ordinances forbidding all necromantic activity.
Samuel tells Saul the most horrible news possible. Saul had suspected the worst anyway, ever since he had stopped receiving prophetic dreams. God had truly abandoned him for reasons that are not entirely specified in this text. Arguably, the reasons are a matter of speculation in Israelite society, as Saul himself was killed in battle, and David was successful where Saul was not.
The answers that the text provides seem a little contrived, at least as far as the themes of sin and punishment are concerned. Saul previously angered God by sacrificing before Samuel arrives at his war camp, thus usurping the privileges of the Shilonite priesthood, a social blunder that the Bible reflects with great candor. We can see in this incident a power struggle between the traditional priesthood and the newly-appointed king. And now that Samuel is dead, it is he who tells Saul that God has left him.
It is the historical record of Saul’s defeat that the narrator must now explain. Saul’s sin, necromancy, is retrojected backwards by the court historians to explain his unsuccessful military campaign as divine punishment. In the Israelite epic, Saul becomes a kind of Macbeth, whose willingness to consult with witches for his private ambition presages his end. David manifestly has God’s favor because he succeeds where Saul failed and because he finally beats the Philistines to a standstill. Had Saul succeeded in battle we would never have had a story of the Witch of Endor and David would have remained a minor character in the narrative.
The entire Bible might have been edited so as to carefully keep out any reference to life after death, in line with its editorial biases. However it is a national literature, garnered from a variety of places under the scrutiny of an editor who evidently thought some traditions were too holy to leave out, even when they were scandalous. So we find many suggestions of a belief in ancestor cults as well as a life after death underneath the editorial suspicion of it. There were Israelites-a great many or there would not be such a polemic-who did precisely what the Bible warns them not to do. The Bible gives us sure evidence of a giant struggle against a religion like that practiced at Ugarit, a kind of “popular” debased religiosity in the eyes of the Bible. The creature that appears for our medium is not merely a ghost; it is a divine being (elohim). “Elohim” is a word which is very commonly used specifically for the God of the Hebrews. Israelites too, we now know, were consulting a god by necromancy, not Saul only. Or, to put it another way, some Israelites must have interpreted the term “elohim” to mean their own ancestors in the land; they may have prayed to them and thought they were worshiping their god.12
The marzeaḥ in the Mouth of the Prophets
IT DOES NOT seem possible that the story of the Witch of Endor was a marzeaḥ feast, rather a simpler, earlier ceremony of divination by necromancy. But there are two places where the preexilic prophets of the Bible explicitly mention the marzeaḥ, as well as a few more references that refer to them, both before and after the exile.13 The first is found in Amos:
[Woe to those] who lie upon beds of ivory,
and stretch themselves upon their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock,