**Day 7 - The Witch of Endor**

Are ghosts real? I have a friend who used to tweet this at corporations’ social media accounts to see if companies had official policies - or if their social media manager made up a decision on the fly. Discussions around that question surprised me - almost none of my friends believe in ghosts. I thought the crowd would be split

Technically I don’t believe in ghosts, the spooky wondering dead, as they don’t make any logical sense with Christianity or with science. The former says dead people’s souls are somewhere very other than your house and under your bed. The latter doesn’t have a model for the soul whatever.

There are, though, two ghosts in the Bible. One of them is the Holy Ghost, the very name of which seems to acknowledge the existence of other, non-holy ghosts. It’s probably more accurate to call it the Holy Spirit, and, fun fact, the word used in the original Greek texts of the New Testament is ‘pneuma’, because ‘spirit’ shares in the etymology of the word ‘pneumatic’, as in pneumatic pistons and tires. Spirit as gas, or air - in the same sense that when a spirit goes into you you are in-spired, and when your spirit finally leave you, you expire. It used to trouble me that one gospel says of the crucifixion ‘Jesus breathed his last’, but it rightly comes from ‘he expired’, his spirit went out.

So who’s the second ghost in the Bible. Let me tell you about the Witch of Endor. Star Wars fans’ ears prick up when they hear about her, as ‘Endor’ is both a place in the middle east and a planet whose moon supports Ewoks, and was orbited by the second Death-Star. This is probably no coincidence, as the witch of Endor appears in the most Star Wars part of the Bible.

So the prophet Samuel set out, with God’s guidance, to find the person who could lead the Israelites as king. He anointed young Saul as leader, the great hope of the nation, but over time Saul was corrupted by the dark side. Saul also had a great big helmet, if that’s not too tenuous a connection to Anakin Skywalker. A generation down the line, an aged Samuel sought out a new hope in young farm-boy named David, who he knew was the one to stand up against Samuel and lead the people out of the current age of evil.

There’s a long-ish lasting war for the kingdom between Saul and David. David is winning the war, both because God is on his side and because he’s plucky and adventurous. King Saul is on the back foot. He’s lost his battles, he hasn’t eaten for 24 hours, and God no longer gives him visions or prophecies. The one person who consistently brought him prophecies was Samuel, who he resisted and ignored for a long time, and Samuel is now dead. But what if, ponders Saul, I got a witch to summon Samuel’s ghost from the dead to talk to God for me. Delightfully devilish!

So Saul, who has not eaten for yonks and is a wreck in every way, dresses up in disguise and goes to Endor to see a witch, and ask if he can talk to Samuel’s ghost. The witch says ‘no, I won’t summon a ghost for you, cos King Saul has forbidden summoning ghosts - on pain of death!’, but Saul-in-disguise is insistent.

The shade of an old man appears from beyond the grave! It’s Samuel, and he’s angry to be disturbed - and doubly angry that Saul is consulting a medium rather than God - though it does seem to be working. While Samuel was alive he told Saul he would lose his kingdom. Now he’s dead, he repeats this, but adds that Saul will lose a battle, and that the very next day Saul and his entire family would join Samuel in death.

So Saul is very doomed. Despite his own law, Saul doesn’t kill the witch. She feels a lot of sympathy for him, so, despite his protestations she cooks him a big lunch, which is nice. I like it. It reminds me of Samuel’s mother Hannah, who went hungry, prayed greatly and wept, got good news and celebrated good news with a big, necessary meal - but more tragic. In either case, if you get big news from God, you should eat about it!

So was that an actual ghost? If ‘actual ghost’ is a thing onr can be? And where was Samuel summoned from? And to what extent would Saul ‘be with’ Samuel on some kind of other side? The text has nothing to say about any of those questions. My inclination is always that God sent Samuel, rather than this being all the Witch’s work — this is based on my general assumption that, while most spiritual mediums are performers and fakes, in it for the money, any who genuinely does summon a spirit probably gets something other than the person they seek. That is, if I tried to summon the ghost of Alec Guinness - to choose a random dead person - I’d be more likely to get a deathly deceiver pretending to be Alec Guinness than the real McCoy. I don’t believe in ghosts of the dead, but I believe in some spirits, demons or what-have-you that get their satisfaction posing as the dead, giving false hopes for their own purposes. A rarity, a distraction, a cause for obsession, and not to be trusted. But Samuel was the exception. Or he wasn’t — some theologians think this was a fake Samuel, cursing Saul to death and keeping him from reconciliation with God and a redemption arc. It’s really left ambiguous in the text. The Old Testament in particular is full of these things where it’s easy to make an assumption, and preach an assumption, and be rather taken aback when you find there are opposing takes. Whether the ghost was a real or deceptive ghost, a real Samuel or a fake Samuel, it spoke its doom and Saul accepted it.

And so the battle failed, and Saul fell by his own hand, as the ghost had predicted. And Han Solo comes in and declares ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all!’. But that’s two other stories.