Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
Tomorrow You Will Be With Me
1 Samuel 28:15-25
15 Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me, to bring me up?” Saul answered, “I am very distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God has departed from me, and answers me no more, by prophets, or by dreams. Therefore I have called you, that you may make known to me what I shall do.” · WEB
The sentence already passed is read back to Saul with a date on it — and what the chapter does and does not establish about the dead.
"Why then do you ask me, since Yahweh has departed from you and has become your adversary?" 1 Samuel 28:16.
The message contains no new revelation. Every clause of it had been said publicly, years earlier, by the living Samuel: the kingdom torn away and given to a neighbor, the cause named as Amalek and disobedience 1 Samuel 15:26–28 1 Samuel 28:17–18. Only one thing is added — the timing: tomorrow you and your sons will be with me 1 Samuel 28:19. And the pastoral effect is nothing but despair: Saul falls his full length on the ground and cannot rise.
What the night actually involved is a question honest readers have long divided over, and the account itself is careful in a way that is easy to miss. It reports what the woman said she saw — a god coming up out of the earth, an old man in a robe 1 Samuel 28:13–14 — and then says Saul perceived that it was Samuel. The identification belongs to the medium's description and the king's conclusion; the narrative afterward speaks of Samuel the way it speaks of what the characters believe they are dealing with.
The weight falls elsewhere. Two things in Scripture stand firm around this chapter. The first is that the dead are asleep and know nothing — the psalm says a man's thoughts perish on the day he returns to the earth Psalms 146:4, the preacher says the dead know nothing at all Ecclesiastes 9:5–6, and Jesus called a four-day corpse a sleeper he was going to wake John 11:11–14. Samuel, buried at Ramah, was not available for consultation, and the message's own words assume it — why have you disturbed me? is language for rest broken, and with me means the grave, where Saul and his sons would lie by nightfall the next day. The second is that God does not answer through channels he forbids on pain of death. He had just refused Saul by three lawful means; that he would then speak through the fourth, and reward the disguise, is the one reading the chapter's own logic will not carry.
The book's summary of Saul's death names this night as part of the charge: he died for his unfaithfulness, and also because he asked counsel of one who had a familiar spirit 1 Chronicles 10:13. Whatever the apparition was, consulting it was the sin, not the remedy.
"Let me set a morsel of bread before you. Eat, that you may have strength" 1 Samuel 28:22.
And the chapter's last kindness comes from the woman he had outlawed. She kills her fattened calf, bakes bread through the night, and feeds a broken man who has not eaten in a day — asking nothing, knowing exactly who he is. Saul walks out into the dark with a full stomach and a sentence, toward a mountain.
held with reason What this mark means