I grew up in a fundamentalist Pentecostal tradition where deep questioning of the biblical text seemed heretical. The only legitimate interpretation involved the plain-sense reading of the text as it appeared in the King James Bible. During my first semester at Harvard Divinity School, stepping into Jon Levenson’s classroom dismantled this view. I was captivated by the rabbinic tradition, where no single interpretation could exhaust Scripture’s meaning because its source is an infinite God. I admired their genius and envied their playfulness with the text. For the rabbis, rigorous questioning was the opposite of heresy, it was holy work.

Levenson’s new book, Israel’s Day of Light and Joy, is a profound study of the Sabbath. Like much of his work, it is dense and written for an academic audience. The pastors and laity I serve through Scripture In Color (SIC) will miss out on this rich content because of its academic difficulty. My aim with the SIC project is to bring research like this to the Church, showing its value for our Christian walk. I am reading through his book chapter by chapter and will share my findings as I go. View these as devotional reflections: a way to honor my mentor by opening his insights to a wider audience.

What IS a Week?

Have you ever thought about where our seven-day week comes from? Levenson takes up this question in the first chapter of his book and argues that the week has two separate origins: one Hebrew and one Hellenistic.

The Hebrew Week: Climbing the Pinnacle

Most people recognize the Hebrew origin from the famous creation story in Genesis, where God rests on the seventh day. In this tradition, the entire week marches toward its pinnacle: the Sabbath. This last day is so important that the other six exist merely to count down toward it. This focus explains why the first six days remain nameless, serving simply as “day one” or “day two,” stepping stones toward the day that provides their purpose.

God Himself gives this seven-day week its authority. The Ten Commandments, recorded in both Exodus (20:8–11) and Deuteronomy (5:12–15), confirm this. While both versions require Sabbath rest, they emphasize different motives. The Exodus version links rest to creation, urging Israel to mimic God’s six-day work and seventh-day rest. The Deuteronomy version connects rest to deliverance, reminding Israel of their rescue from Egyptian bondage. This single commandment stands on two foundations: creation and deliverance. Ultimately, the Sabbath depends entirely on God’s historic deeds rather than the natural world.

The Hellenistic Week: Spinning the Wheel

The Hellenistic week, by contrast, came directly from the natural world. Invented in Alexandria, Egypt during the second century BCE, this system was built on the seven celestial bodies the ancients classified as planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Each day of the week took its name from one of them. Levenson makes an astute observation: the Hellenistic week was fundamentally a system of hours, not days (p. 8). The seven-day cycle emerged from a mathematical rotation of planetary hours, and had the inputs been different, the cycle would have produced a different number of days entirely (p. 14). No single day was more important than any other. The wheel just kept turning.

We still live inside this system. In the ancient world, each planet was a god, and each god was thought to govern the hours of its day. The very structure of our week was built on pagan deities claiming time as their own.

• Sunday, the sun god’s day

• Monday, the moon goddess’s day

• Tuesday, the day of Mars, god of war (mardi in French, martes in Spanish)

• Wednesday, the day of Mercury, god of messengers (mercredi, miércoles)

• Thursday, the day of Jupiter, king of the gods (jeudi, jueves)

• Friday, the day of Venus, goddess of love (vendredi, viernes)

• Saturday, the day of Saturn, god of agriculture and time

English hides these origins because it swapped the Roman gods for their Norse equivalents: Mars became Tiw, Mercury became Woden, Jupiter became Thor, and Venus became Frigg. So Tuesday is the god Tiw’s day, and so on. We say these names every week without knowing their origins. What we are left with, as Levenson describes it, is “an endlessly recurring set of seven days” with no destination (p. 15). Monday becomes Tuesday becomes Wednesday, and the week rolls forward and arrives nowhere.

The Hebrew week is a pinnacle, every day climbing toward the summit of Sabbath. The Hellenistic week is a wheel, turning and turning without destination. One originates in God, the other in celestial observation. The two eventually collided and influenced each other, but they understood the very idea of a week differently.

A Day Off Is Not a Sabbath

With the two origins of the week in view, Levenson compares the biblical week with other calendars to show what makes the Sabbath distinctive.

The Romans had an eight-day cycle ending in a market day they called the nundinae. On this day, schools closed, lawyers came to town, and people traded goods. It was the payoff for seven days of labor. The work dictated the purpose of the week, and the market day was its reward. Despite some similarities, the Sabbath differs from the Roman market day in a crucial way: while the nundinae was devoted to conducting business, the Sabbath forbids it. Levenson goes further and calls the Sabbath the very opposite of the workweek (p. 5). The Sabbath declared that God alone is ultimate and work is subordinate to him. Outsiders called it idleness, but for those who kept it then and keep it now, the Sabbath puts work in its proper place: all time belongs to God, and the Sabbath affirms it.

In 1929, the Soviet Union made its own claim on time by replacing the seven-day week with a five-day rotating calendar (p. 7). Workers rested every fifth day instead of every seventh, gaining roughly twenty additional days off per year. Though seemingly generous, the new system kept eighty percent of the workforce on the job every single day. But the change served a deeper purpose than productivity. For an officially atheist state, eliminating a shared day off meant eliminating a shared day of worship. Without common rest, people could not come together in prayer or fellowship. They still got time off, but time off is not the same thing as Sabbath. As Levenson puts it, they had “a day off but no Sabbath” (p. 7).

My Grandmother’s Sunday

That the Sabbath belongs to God was made evident in my grandmother’s house, where Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, was sacred. Early Christians moved their day of worship from the seventh day to the first day of the week in celebration of Christ’s resurrection (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2). My grandmother honored this tradition in her own orthodox way. There was work done on Sunday, but all of it was for God, whether driving to church or fixing Sunday dinner. She would wake you early on a Saturday morning to get your laundry done because you were not doing it on Sunday. But if you tried to do a load of laundry on Sunday?! Or tried to do some sort of housework, oh boy, that would be a big problem for her. Sunday existed for God and family.

My grandmother’s commitment to keeping the Sabbath day holy has influenced my adult life. I do not do work in general on Sunday. When I ran for local office several years ago, even during the busiest stretch of the campaign, I let people know that I was unavailable from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday. You will never see me mowing my lawn or doing yard work on Sunday. Still, I have much to improve in honoring the Sabbath in the spirit of my grandmother. Levenson’s discussion of the Roman and Soviet calendars, both built to serve work, has helped me see the difference between resting from work and resting in God.

When Sunday Became Just Another Day

I am old enough to remember when most of this country honored Sunday as a day set apart. You filled the gas tank on Saturday night and did your shopping ahead because Sunday was coming and the stores were closed. The day was protected, kept separate from the ordinary machinery of the week. Even those who did not attribute it to belonging to the Lord lived inside a culture built around the Christian Sabbath, so the week had to bend around the day. Now the relationship has flipped. Sunday is no longer a day of rest but a day of preparation for day one of the workweek. The grocery stores are full and the lawns are loud with mowers. The day now bends around the week, and Sunday has become just another day.

The biblical tradition offers a different vision entirely. God worked six days and rested on the seventh, and then he made us in his image. Jewish tradition preserves this orientation beautifully: the days of the week in Hebrew are still numbered, as they are in Genesis, yom rishon (day 1), yom sheni (day 2), every day a step toward Shabbat.

To safeguard that holy destination, rabbinic tradition draws uncompromising boundaries around what it actually means to rest, and I have witnessed it several times. One Saturday, when I lived across the street from an Orthodox Jewish family, I saw the mother angrily yelling at her son for working on the Sabbath. I was also summoned by her to open a freezer door one Shabbat so she could take an item out. She could not open the door herself because doing so would trigger the interior light. Exodus 35:3 prohibits kindling fire on the Sabbath, and completing any electrical circuit is considered work. Last, when I was in graduate school, an Orthodox Jew was lost and asked me for directions. I wrote down the directions on a piece of paper and gave it to him. He read it and then gave it back to me and said, “I don’t carry on Shabbat.”

As Christians, we may look at these practices as fastidious or rigid. But that Jewish man could put down a piece of paper for God, while our hands are lifted for work every day of a week we named after pagan gods: Sun’s day, Moon’s day, Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, Frigg’s day, and Saturn’s day.

Levenson, Jon D. Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath.University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2024.

Scripture Readings: Genesis 25:19–34; 27:1–45; 33:1–4; 35:29

Vivian L. Johnson, Ph.D.

In my last post, we explored how Rebecca truly loved both of her sons, noting how her fear of losing both in a single day (Gen. 27:45) revealed her deep affection for Esau. In this post, we examine the immense sacrifice Rebecca made to ensure the family line passed to the son who would honor it.

Even before giving birth, Rebecca sensed trouble through her agonizing pregnancy. The violent struggle inside her womb led her to seek God, who revealed that she would bear rival nations where the older son would serve the younger. The oracle proved true early when Esau traded his birthright for a single bowl of stew, “despising” (vayyivez [וַיִּבֶז]) his inheritance (Gen. 25:29–34), while Jacob demonstrated the shrewdness to secure it. The text leaves open whether Rebecca witnessed the birthright sale, but her subsequent actions show sharp awareness. She recognized that Jacob, who had already secured the birthright, deserved the paternal blessing to match. Isaac’s favoritism toward Esau, however, demanded exceptional ingenuity from Rebecca if she hoped to secure the blessing for Jacob.

And Rebecca’s ingenuity would face its deepest challenge in Isaac’s own traumatic history. You see, Isaac only narrowly escaped death at the hand of his father, Abraham (Gen. 22:1–19). Therefore, Isaac had a desperate need to write a different story with his own firstborn. Instead of putting him on an altar as a sacrifice, he had the inordinate need to give him the blessing that included “the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth” (Gen. 27:28–29).¹ He had a devotion toward Esau born out of his own unresolved trauma, a father’s overcorrection for the violence his own father had been willing to inflict.

Given Isaac’s high regard for Esau, Rebecca had to tread cautiously. Directly challenging her husband may have only solidified his resolve to bless Esau. And this outcome, in her estimation, would extinguish the very legacy the blessing was designed to protect. Rebecca faced a delicate predicament and chose calculated deception: undermining her husband’s wishes at the precise moment he attempted to fulfill them.

Jacob received his mother’s plan with consternation, fearing the ruse would backfire and afflict him with a curse rather than a blessing from his father (Gen. 27:11–12).² Rebecca responded without hesitation: “Let the curse fall on me. Just do what I say” (Gen. 27:13). She willingly took the possibility of that curse upon herself to secure her son’s future.

The plan succeeded and Jacob received his father’s blessing. But the cost was immediately damaging for both father and son, and in a rare display of emotion, the biblical text draws us into their raw and unbridled anguish.³ So catastrophic is this event that Isaac’s reaction is likened to the terrifying quaking (charad, חָרַד) of Mt. Sinai (Exod. 19:18). If the frightening seismic tremors of Sinai failed to demonstrate the gravity of the situation, the Hebrew adds a matching noun, adjective, and adverbial phrase. The text literally reads: “Isaac shook/trembled a violent shaking/trembling, up to an incalculable degree” (וַיֶּחֱרַד יִצְחָק חֲרָדָה גְּדֹלָה עַד־מְאֹד) [Gen. 27:33]. More idiomatically and loosely: “Isaac, shattered by betrayal, shook uncontrollably with the greatest ferocity his family had ever seen.”⁴ This visceral and tragic moment reveals only a portion of the price Rebecca paid for her family.

Esau too felt the reverberations of Rebecca’s deceit, and the text once again engages us fully in the aftermath. He exclaimed desperately: “Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father!” Then Esau wept bitterly (Gen. 27:38). The chasm Rebecca created between herself and the two men she loved most was devastating and seemingly irreparable. The direct consequence of her actions was potential fratricide as Esau vowed to kill his brother (Gen. 27:41). To prevent the murder of her beloved son, Jacob, she sent him away to her brother Laban.

Rebecca brings to mind species of mother spiders who lay their eggs and ultimately allow their offspring to consume them.⁵ Having secured the family line and protected both of her sons, she fades from the text. Scripture records no further words from her after Genesis 27, and her burial appears only in retrospect (Gen. 49:31).

The curse she offered to absorb in Genesis 27:13 may have found her after all. We can imagine her household was filled with remorse and sadness in the years that followed. She had to live with the victims of her betrayal: a husband who knew she had deceived him and a son who believed she loved his brother more than him. Added to this burden, she spent her remaining years in separation from Jacob. Her endurance through such isolation and heartache remains a mystery, as the text simply moves on without her, much like the arachnid mother devoured by her offspring.

Despite the silence that enveloped her remaining years, Rebecca had provided well for both sons. She directed each one toward the life he was suited for, and the text confirms it. Esau prospered and is the father of Edom, while Jacob became Israel and the ancestor through whom the lineage of Jesus would emerge. Her sacrifice was vindicated when the brothers reconcile, as Esau runs to meet Jacob, embraces him, falls on his neck, and kisses him, and the two of them weep together (Genesis 33:4). The tears that once signaled an irreparable fracture between the brothers now confirm their reconciliation. In their weeping, the family line Rebecca fought to preserve finds its vindication, the same line that would produce the twelve tribes of Israel and ultimately Jesus himself.

———

¹ Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg explores Isaac’s post-Aqedah psychology at length in The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995), arguing that the trauma of Moriah influenced Isaac’s subsequent behavior as a father.

² Blessings and curses in the ancient world had power to create the future, a reality Isaac later confirms when he tells Esau that what he already spoke over Jacob cannot be reversed (Genesis 27:33).

³ Jonathan Sacks, “The Other Face of Esau,” Covenant & Conversation: Genesis—The Book of Beginnings (New London: Maggid Books, 2009), 167–172. Sacks argues that the Old Testament enlists the reader’s sympathy for Esau through devices of literary style it rarely employs elsewhere.

⁴ The adverbial phrase עַד־מְאֹד (ad me’od) pushes the reaction to its absolute limit, a superlative construction that by definition exceeds any prior experience. The rendering “his family had ever seen” captures the force of this superlative in relational terms.

⁵ This phenomenon is known as matriphagy. The velvet spider (Stegodyphus lineatus), native to Israel’s Negev Desert, is among the best-documented examples. The mother feeds her young by regurgitating liquid food, and after approximately two weeks, her offspring consume her entirely, leaving only an empty exoskeleton. She makes no attempt to escape. See Mor Salomon et al., Journal of Arachnology; also National Geographic, “Watch Baby Spiders Eat Their Mothers Alive.”

Luke tells us in his gospel that the blessed Mother Mary “pondered” the things Jesus said and did after she found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers at age twelve (Luke 2:51). This story prompted me to think of the matriarch in the Old Testament, Rebecca, who surely pondered about her twins, Jacob and Esau.

That trouble loomed ahead with the two boys was intimated during their gestation. Indeed, Rebecca suffered such excruciating pains during her pregnancy that she appealed to God himself by crying out: “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” (Gen. 25:22). God responds by revealing the source of her agony: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23).

The battling brothers in her womb gave Rebecca much to ruminate upon even though the text does not explicitly state that she pondered about her children as Mary does in Luke. We have to imagine that the divine message was ever present in her mind and that she viewed all subsequent events through the lens of God’s oracle. Thus, when Esau trades his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew (Gen. 25:33–34), presumably Rebecca discovered this, reigniting the intensity of God’s message.

Armed with this understanding, she connived against both her husband and son to steal Esau’s blessing (Gen. 27:5–17). Rebecca’s scheme has left a deep imprint on the contemporary Jewish female imagination. One rabbi remarked that he has “never met a woman who didn’t judge Rebecca harshly.” He recalls a mother, troubled by her own uneven treatment of her children, who begged him, “Please tell me I’m no Rebecca!”¹ While Rebecca occupies a smaller space in the Christian imagination, a standard reading of Esau’s anguished response to her deception leaves us judging her severely and sympathizing with him (Gen. 27:34).

Esau’s anguish is so visceral it is worth quoting at length. When he discovers what has happened, he cries out with a great and bitter cry: “Bless me, even me also, O my father!” (Gen. 27:34). Isaac tells him the blessing has been given to Jacob, and Esau responds: “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright, and now he has taken away my blessing.” Then he pleads: “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” (Gen. 27:36). When Isaac explains the totality of what he has given Jacob, Esau asks one final time: “Have you only one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!” And Esau lifted up his voice and wept (Gen. 27:38). His own words confirm the meaning of his brother’s name, יַעֲקֹב (ya’aqov): “to grab by the heel, to supplant, or to overreach.” Standing in the shadow of this unmitigated grief, the reader naturally recoils from Rebecca. How could a mother orchestrate her own son’s undoing? In this poignant scene, Esau definitely commands our pity and outrage.

Not all Christian readers, however, sympathized with Esau. Saint John Henry Newman,² for instance, saw little room for pity, noting that Esau “showed no repentance for what he had done, no self-reproach.” Having relinquished his sacred birthright, Esau naively assumed he could reclaim it at will. To Newman, Esau’s weeping was the cry of a man mourning what he had lost rather than confronting what he had done. He stands as a cautionary figure for Christians who handle sacred things lightly and presume upon easy restoration, grieving only when the cost becomes apparent.³

Even if Esau’s tears deserve less sympathy than we instinctively give them, the text itself seems to confirm Rebecca’s partiality by stating that she loved Jacob (Gen. 25:28). The text also says that Isaac loved Esau. Here we have a case of parental favoritism, a perennial issue of the human condition. It was so pervasive in the ancient Near East that it required statutory regulation. The Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest known legal codes (§§170–171), restricted a father’s ability to disinherit a firstborn because of his favor of a preferred son from another wife. Deuteronomy addresses the same concern, forbidding a father from giving the firstborn’s inheritance to the son of a favored wife over the actual firstborn (Deut. 21:15–17). The Old Testament records the same dynamic on several occasions, from Isaac’s preference for Esau to Jacob’s decided favoritism toward Joseph (Gen. 25:28; 37:3–4). Favoring one child, however, does not mean that you love your other children less.

The depth of Rebecca’s maternal love for Esau comes through vividly when she learns of his plot to kill Jacob (Gen. 27:41). Upon learning of the murderous plan, she urges Jacob to flee to her brother, Laban, desperate to prevent a double tragedy: “Why should I lose both of you (גַּם־שְׁנֵיכֶם) in one day?” (Gen. 27:45). The Hebrew intensifies “both,” reading literally as “even the two of you,” a force that is lost in translation. Had her devotion belonged only to Jacob, she might have cried, “I would hate to lose my beloved son.” Instead, her words insist on holding both sons together in her grief.

But why would she lose “both” if she only stood to lose Jacob to murder? In the biblical world, fratricide carried a strict penalty of death (Gen. 9:6; Num. 35:19; Judg. 9:56). As she had the foresight to ensure the most responsible son would lead her family’s future, she also had the foresight to see that Esau’s rage would precipitate his own death. She stood to lose Jacob to violence and Esau to retribution. She used her ingenuity to send Jacob away and save both of her sons. Rebecca’s actions prove that beneath her favoritism toward Jacob lay an abiding love for Esau. Yes, Rebecca loved Esau too.

¹ Irwin Kula, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (NY: Hyperion, 2006), 63.

² John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was an Anglican clergyman and theologian who converted to Roman Catholicism and was later made a cardinal. He was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2019.

³ Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 6, Sermon 2.

About Dr. Vanessa Ward

Dr. Ward holds degrees from The College of Wooster, United Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. Her doctoral research examines the biblical figure known as the woman of Endor and her significance in biblical and theological studies.

Melting Cones and Coarse Hair

In graduate school, my archaeology professor presented a slide of an Egyptian tomb painting depicting women wearing small cones on top of their heads. These solid cones consisted of fat, resin, and myrrh designed to melt slowly from body heat and release scented oil down through the hair. During his explanation of the slide, he expressed his disbelief that anyone would want a cone of oil melting down through their hair. I sat uneasy in my seat because I could easily surmise why women with coarser hair would want that kind of treatment in the dry heat of the Egyptian sun. A device that delivers fragrance and moisture at the same time solves problems that remained entirely outside my professor’s understanding.

The role held by the woman of Endor also escaped the understanding of later interpreters who recast her in images known to them. Her title, ba’alat-’ob, tells us only that she is a master at communicating with the dead. Given that this practice had legislative texts condemning it, negative interpretations of her had staying power. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 prohibits inquiring of the dead and calls anyone who does so “an abomination to the LORD.” In using this passage, interpreters found an easy justification for maligning her within the Bible itself. Once the prohibition shaped how they read her, the compassionate woman in the narrative faded from view.

Recognition

One of the most compelling dimensions of Dr. Ward’s research is her engagement with a scholar who found the ba’alat ‘obto be a familiar, everyday figure. Ward points us to Dr. J. Kabamba Kiboko, a Sanga woman from the Disanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her particular African context gives us the woman of Endor with a vivid interpretation. In her book, Divining the Woman of Endor, Kiboko sees in the woman of Endor what I saw in those hair cones: a direct picture of something alive and relevant in her context. She grew up in a community where women who served as intermediaries between the living and the spirit world were honored for it. Her grandmother healed through guidance received in dreams. A neighbor communed with the spirits of her ancestors. When she looked at 1 Samuel 28, she saw a defined, honorable role within her community, a role she recognized because it looked like the women she had loved and respected in her own upbringing.

Kiboko joins centuries of translators who have brought their own worlds to this text. Just as the Greek translators interpreted the ba’alat ‘ob as a “belly-speaker” (eggastrimuthos),* Kiboko draws on her own heritage to translate the phrase as “woman-master of a spirit of the departed.” She highlights the word ‘eshet (אֵשֶׁת), meaning “woman,” which occurs in 1 Samuel 28:7, and sees it as key to identifying the role the woman of Endor practiced. And in her reading of the narrative, this woman speaks truthfully, harms no one, and serves both Saul and the word of God with competence and compassion.

Even though separated by centuries and continents, the affinity between her own culture and the world of 1 Samuel 28 made the text legible in ways it had never been for interpreters who lacked this connection. Her cultural context raised questions the interpretive traditions missed, and her scholarship in Hebrew and translation affirmed her lived experience.

A Legitimate Practitioner

When Kiboko strips away centuries of theological tradition to read 1 Samuel 28 on its own terms, she discovers a professional performing her craft with integrity. In the narrative, every character in the story respects her expertise and the sacred space she occupies. Saul trusts her expertise and swears a solemn oath to protect her, a vow he honors even after receiving a devastating prophecy from the spirit she summons. His servants treat her with absolute respect, working alongside her to persuade their broken, collapsed king to rise and eat. Once the ritual concludes, she offers compassionate hospitality, preparing a meal that grants these men strength for the battle ahead. The text and its narrator treat her as exactly what she is: a legitimate practitioner of her craft. Kiboko concludes that any application of the label “witch” to this woman is nothing short of slander.

Kiboko identifies three biases that obscured this favorable portrait: Christian opposition to divination, hostile rejection of indigenous practices by the dominating empire, and a gender double standard that honored male seers as prophets while mistrusting female ones. When Western missionaries projected these biases onto African communities, respected women who had long served as healers and counselors were rebranded as “witches” overnight.

This history is personal for Kiboko. As a child, she watched her aunt publicly accused of witchcraft. The same impulse that reshaped the woman of Endor eventually targeted the women Kiboko loved.

Seeing Her

Throughout this series we have watched the woman of Endor come back into view. We began in the Hebrew text itself, where we found a woman of courage and compassion. We then traced how interpreters from Josephus to the church fathers reshaped her portrait until one reading dominated, and how the translation chain turned her professional title, ba’alat-’ob, into the English word “witch.” In Blog 3, we noted how pop culture rehabilitated the Wicked Witch of the West by giving her a name and a backstory that revealed her humanity. This series has attempted to do the same for the woman of Endor. Dr. Ward and Dr. Kiboko add a vital contribution to this interpretive tradition, bringing cultural context that recognizes the honor inherent in a role like diviner.

The story of the woman of Endor resonates beyond the ancient world. As the gap between my archaeology professor and me illustrates, more can be understood when more voices and perspectives participate in the interpretation. Dr. Ward and Dr. Kiboko show us what opens up when new interpreters join the conversation. With the conversation broadened and our reading sharpened, we can begin to see the women in our own churches whose contributions have always been visible, even when the tradition has taught us to look past them.

*For more on the Greek translation of ba’alat ‘ob, see Blog 3, “A Problem of Translation.”

This concludes the She Has a Name series. Thank you for reading.

Further Reading:

J. Kabamba Kiboko, Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017).

About Dr. Vanessa Ward

Dr. Ward holds degrees from The College of Wooster, United Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. Her doctoral research examines the biblical figure known as the woman of Endor and her significance in biblical and theological studies.

Part 3 of 4

Dyeing the Text

The Old Testament comes to us primarily in Biblical Hebrew, a compact language in which one word can have many more meanings than an English word. In a course I offer for laity called “Unprocessed,” students experience the original Hebrew in its unprocessed form, witnessing how much nuance gets stripped away, or processed, in the smooth packaging of our Bibles.

Beyond stripping nutritional value from food, processing also injects artificial ingredients. Dyes like Red 40 or Yellow 5 make a product look like cherries or lemons, even when it contains no fruit at all. Something similar happened to the woman of Endor. The Hebrew describes her using a phrase of uncertain meaning. Faced with this uncertainty, interpreters “dyed” her with understandings from their own time until she looked like someone they recognized.

Master of Something

When Saul sends his servants to find the woman of Endor, they use a professional title, baʻalat-ʻob (בַּעֲלַת־אוֹב), built from two words (1 Samuel 28:7). The first, baʻalat (בַּעֲלַת), means “lord,” “owner,” or “master” in its feminine form, conveying her mastery of a skill, while the second, ʻob (אוֹב), proves much harder to define. Scholars still debate whether the term refers to the conjured spirit itself, to a ritual pit dug as a portal to the underworld, to a ceremonial leather vessel used in the rite, or to a revered forefather, ʻav (אָב), summoned by name.

While the exact meaning of ʻob remains uncertain, every interpretation confirms her mastery over something. The phrase identifies her craft, leaving her character open in the story that follows.

Greek Dye 150^[1]

The woman of Endor faced her first translation when the Hebrew Bible moved into Greek. Her narrative belongs to the historical books, which entered the Greek-speaking world around 150 BCE as the version we call the Septuagint expanded. This Greek version served a community that no longer spoke Hebrew, and the choice its translators made about her would set the course for every translation that followed.

In working through the uncertainty of the obscure phrase baʻalat-ʻob, the Greek translators chose to translate the phrase with the compound word eggastrimuthos (ἐγγαστρίμυθος), meaning “belly-speaker.” In their context, the woman of Endor’s professional title best fit the belly-speakers of their day, since these practitioners claimed to channel the dead from deep within their own bodies. Believers trusted them as legitimate spiritual vessels, who bridged the gap between the living and the lost. Skeptics, however, dismissed them as frauds. The word eggastrimuthos contained both reputations at once, giving the Greek reader a conflicted cultural figure. The translators took this contested category and applied it to the woman of Endor, coating an unknown Hebrew phrase in “Greek Dye 150,” the vivid color of the belly-speaker.

The Greek translation stripped away the freedom of the ambiguous phrase in the Hebrew text. Where baʻalat-ʻob leaves ample room for the reader to wonder, eggastrimuthos fills the page with a ready-made and problematic figure. The Hebrew invites us to observe her actions and learn who she is, while the Greek imposes a stereotype long before she steps into the narrative.

Guilt by Translation

The Hebrew preserves a careful distinction between the woman and her craft. The Bible places her story in narrative and the prohibitions against consulting the dead in legal texts, two different genres of biblical literature with different purposes.

The narrative of 1 Samuel 28 introduces her with the professional title baʻalat-ʻob and lets her character unfold through her actions. The legal material, gathered in Leviticus 19:31, 20:6, 20:27, and Deuteronomy 18:11, restricts the practice of consulting an ʻob and assigns penalties to those who do so. Within the world of the story, Saul had already enforced this prohibition by expelling the mediums from the land (1 Samuel 28:3). Even so, the Hebrew narrative keeps the woman and the practice in separate compartments.

The Greek translators, however, collapsed these compartments by using a single word, eggastrimuthos, in both narrative and legal texts. They applied this word to the woman of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 and to the practitioner condemned to death for such practice (Leviticus 20:27). The shared word brought the legal penalty into her story, transferring a capital charge onto her. The story itself leaves her unjudged, but the translation supplies the condemnation.

The Dye Sets

Over time, the positive side of the Greek term faded, leaving only its polemical edge. Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, solidified this restrictive reading at the close of the fourth century. By substituting her title with a term associated with pagan priestesses, he ensured the Western tradition would inherit a caricature rather than the portrait drawn by the original text.

In 1611, the King James translators actually produced a remarkably careful translation, describing her neutrally as “a woman that hath a familiar spirit.” The problem arose when the text went to press. The publishers added summary headers at the top of the pages that labeled her a “witch,” an artificial tag that spread through the pulpits, popular pamphlets, and the aggressive witch-hunting literature of the seventeenth century. Just as Red 40 lends a product the impression of cherry, these headers give her the impression of a witch, which endures today in the title Witch of Endor.

The Witch of Endor After Wicked

Having seen the musical Wicked twice now, I loved every minute of how it completely flips the script on the green-skinned villain of our childhoods. Instead of a one-dimensional witch, we meet a gifted young woman cast as a villain by a corrupt regime. The story shows how those in power can distort a person into a scapegoat. The parallel to the woman of Endor is striking. Both stories center on a woman the world has labeled a witch. The difference is that Wicked had to invent a backstory to humanize Elphaba, while the woman of Endor’s full portrait already stands in the original Hebrew, waiting for readers willing to see her.

The highly processed overlay of “witch” on the woman of Endor has obscured the caring and capable person underneath. She responds to a crisis with empathy, discerning Saul’s despair and feeding him when he cannot feed himself. Her hospitality anticipates the work of New Testament women who sustained their communities by welcoming, feeding, and serving. The translation supplied an artificial condemnation, while the unprocessed Hebrew preserves her humanity.

We are charged to examine Scripture along with the rich traditions handed down to us and ask what the text says today. Our own cultural context always shapes how we read, just as it shaped every interpreter who came before. They questioned the stories they inherited and retold them, and we take our turn now. In the final post of this series, Old Testament scholar Dr. J. Kabamba Kiboko reads her from the original Hebrew and her own Congolese heritage, affirming without apology the dignity the narrative grants her.

About Dr. Vanessa Ward

Dr. Ward holds degrees from The College of Wooster, United Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. Her doctoral research examines the biblical figure known as the woman of Endor and her significance in biblical and theological studies.

^[1]The “150” refers the approximate date in which the historical books entered the Greek Septuagint.

Further Reading

Greer, Rowan A., and Margaret M. Mitchell. The “Belly-Myther” of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 16. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.

Hamori, Esther J. Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Kiboko, J. Kabamba. Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017.

Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 73 (1997): 3–23.

About Dr. Vanessa Ward

Dr. Ward holds degrees from The College of Wooster, United Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. Her doctoral research examines the biblical figure known as the woman of Endor and her significance in biblical and theological studies.

Part 2 of 4

1 Samuel 28:3–25

The Pomegranate and the Prostitute

Have you ever imagined the fruit Adam and Eve ate as a pomegranate? Most of us instinctively see an apple, even though the original text of Genesis never specifies the type of fruit. The Hebrew only uses the word peri (פְּרִי), meaning “fruit.” The pomegranate, however, fits the agricultural world of the ancient Near East far better than an apple does. We imagine an apple because of a translation twist handed down to us through Christian tradition.*

The same dynamic alters our view of Mary Magdalene. Just as we project an apple onto the unnamed fruit of Genesis, most of us picture Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute, even though the Gospels themselves never describe her this way. The source of her identification as a prostitute lay in a homily preached by Pope Gregory the Great on Easter Sunday (591 CE). He fused Mary Magdalene with two entirely distinct biblical figures: Mary of Bethany and the anonymous sinful woman in Luke 7. Pope Gregory himself never explicitly applied the word “prostitute” to Mary Magdalene, but his decision to collapse these three identities into one allowed the portrait of the penitent prostitute to take root in the Western imagination. This recasting rippled across centuries of Christian art and preaching, displacing what the Gospels preserve: Mary Magdalene was a close disciple of Jesus and the very first witness to the resurrection.

The images we see and conclusions we often draw come down to us through the work of early interpreters. For two thousand years, Jewish and Christian interpreters have written commentaries, preached sermons, reimagined biblical narratives, and debated each other. Their interpretations became our inheritance, often without our knowing.

This type of interpretive activity has shaped our imagination of the woman of Endor. We view her, if we consider her at all, through interpreters who rewrote her story for their own times. While the dominant Christian tradition handed down a portrait of her painted in harsh judgment, alternative perspectives have always existed alongside it. After spending our first post sitting with 1 Samuel 28 for ourselves, we now turn to the interpreters who read her long before us.

The Invitation of Silence

In 1 Samuel 28, the narrator simply records the actions of the woman of Endor, capturing her speech and watching her work through the night, without any condemnation. The first post in this series read this silence as an invitation, an opening where the narrator gives the reader room to feel something, to sit with her at her own table and watch her hands work.

Later interpreters filled the silence of 1 Samuel 28 with portraits of their own, some sympathetic and some severe, each shaped to the needs of a particular community. The earliest surviving interpretations come from two Jewish writers in the first century who drew her in opposite directions. Centuries later, the Christian church fathers would construct a rigid portrait that fixed the Western imagination on a single view.

Two Early Portraits

The earliest interpreters of the woman of Endor produced drastically different portraits, despite working just decades apart.

The Jewish interpreter Pseudo-Philo (c. 70 CE) tailors this narrative for a community strictly barred from necromancy, sorcery, and divination. To make this warning immediate and unyielding, he gives the anonymous woman of Endor a name, Sedecla. He makes her the daughter of a Midianite, charged with deceiving Israel through sorcery (LAB 64.3). Her ritual appears to invoke Samuel, but Pseudo-Philo dismisses this possibility. Instead, he has Samuel himself rebuke both king and woman for their pride in presuming they could raise a divine prophet. Through his rewriting of the episode, Pseudo-Philo drives home a single point: God’s rule and power are supreme. Indeed, God had already foretold this very appearance to Samuel before it ever came to pass (LAB 64.7).

The Jewish historian Josephus (c. 90 CE) drew a sharply contrasting portrait. For Greek and Roman audiences who prized hospitality and kindness to strangers, he minimized her practice of necromancy and amplified her compassion. Her nobility came through most in the calf she killed, her sole possession, to feed a king who had outlawed her craft. She offered the animal knowing Saul would die by morning, a kindness that expected nothing in return. Josephus held her up as a model worth imitating.

Two Jewish writers, active during the same century, engaged the very same text. One saw a foreign woman whose sorcery deceived Israel, while the other saw a paragon of hospitality whose kindness was worthy of emulation. Both took seriously that the Bible was relevant, a living text that actively addressed the concerns of their communities.

Rabbinic Portraits

Centuries after Josephus, some rabbinic interpreters continued to see the woman of Endor with dignity. They shared Pseudo-Philo’s interest in ancestry, but tied her to royalty rather than sorcery. In this strand of interpretation, she was identified as the mother of Abner, the future commander of King Saul’s army, and placed within the royal house of Saul (PRE 34).

By elevating her lineage, the rabbis set up a sharp contrast between her nobility and Saul’s hypocrisy. They seized on a tension the biblical narrative already records: Saul had expelled the mediums from the land (1 Sam 28:3), only to find himself desperately seeking one (1 Sam 28:7). They exposed this inconsistency with biting humor, comparing Saul to a king who enters a province and orders every rooster slaughtered. Later, realizing he must depart at dawn and needed the crowing of a rooster—an ancient alarm clock—to be awakened, the king is forced to ask whether a single one survived his own decree (LR 26.7). The rabbis portray Saul as betrayed by the very decree he issued, a leader unraveling in the face of his own desperation.

Against Saul, the woman of Endor retains a distinct dignity in rabbinic tradition. The rabbis treat her as a compassionate figure of noble character, whose hospitality to a doomed king earns her an honored place in midrashic commentary. The church fathers who followed, by contrast, would take a much harder line.

Early Christian Portraits

Like their Jewish counterparts, the early church fathers held contrasting portraits of the woman of Endor. The earliest took the narrative literally. Around 160 CE, the first Christian writer to discuss her, Justin Martyr, accepted the encounter without skepticism, pointing to her summoning of Samuel as concrete evidence of life after death (Dialogue with Trypho 105).

A half century later, Tertullian conceded that the woman of Endor had indeed conjured something, but he asserted that it was not Samuel. He reasoned that righteous souls, like Samuel, rest with God and no medium could summon them back to earth. For Tertullian, the apparition was a demon impersonating Samuel (On the Soul 57). His portrait of the woman as a participant in demonic deception would shape Christian interpretation for centuries.

A generation later, Origen offered a fierce dissent. He defended the literal sense of the text, maintaining that if Scripture states Samuel appeared, it must be taken as fact. This commitment to the literal reading set him sharply against Tertullian. Origen treated the woman as a conduit for God’s message to Saul, boldly comparing her actions to Christ raising Lazarus (Homily 5 on 1 Kingdoms).

Nearly two centuries later, Augustine definitively sealed the interpretation for the Western church. He condemned the woman as a sorceress whose craft was bound up with evil. His authority closed off other interpretations, leaving us with a static and vilified portrait of the woman of Endor (On the Care of the Dead 15).

A Closing Invitation

Augustine sealed the interpretation of the woman of Endor, but seals can be reopened. Inherited interpretations have been revisited before. The Catholic Church itself revised its position on Mary Magdalene in 1969, distinguishing her from the women she had been merged with for fourteen centuries. In 2016, the church went further, raising her feast to the same rank held by the apostles and affirming her ancient title, Apostle to the Apostles. If a reading this old can be reconsidered, so can the portrait of the woman of Endor.

We are witnessing this same recovery in our wider culture. Wicked retells The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the green-skinned Witch of the West, presenting her as a woman miscast by those who told her story. Maleficent retells Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the dark fairy who curses Aurora, recasting her as a wounded protector rather than a villain. These retellings follow the same instinct as the interpreters who recast old stories for their own times. Let’s pick up the work of the interpreters and reconsider the woman of Endor for our own cultural context. How would you portray her on the silver screen?

This series continues next week with Part 3, The Woman of Endor: A Problem of Translation.

Note

* The apple entered through the Latin Bible (the Vulgate), which served Western Christianity for over a thousand years. In Latin, two nearly identical words appear: mālum, meaning “apple,” and mălum, meaning “evil.” Because “evil” (mălum) appeared in the name of the tree (Gen 2:17), early interpreters identified the unnamed fruit of that tree as an apple (mālum). Christian art and teaching kept this clever pun alive in our imaginations, which is why we picture an apple instead of a pomegranate.

Further Reading

Secondary Scholarship

Bronner, Leila L. From Eve to Esther: Rabbinic Reconstructions of Biblical Women. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.

Brown, Cheryl Anne. No Longer Be Silent: First Century Jewish Portraits of Biblical Women. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

Greer, Rowan A., and Margaret M. Mitchell. The “Belly-Myther” of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.

Primary Texts and Abbreviations

Augustine. On the Care to Be Had for the Dead (De cura pro mortuis gerenda). Translated by H. Browne. In A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series 1, vol. 3, edited by Philip Schaff. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1887.

Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930 to 1965. Also available in the Whiston translation at https://www.sefaria.org/The_Antiquities_of_the_Jews.

Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0128.htm.

LR: Leviticus Rabbah, or Vayikra Rabbah. Translated by Joshua Schreier. The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah. Sefaria, 2022. https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah. A homiletic rabbinic commentary on the book of Leviticus, compiled around the fifth or early sixth century CE.

Origen. Homily 5 on 1 Kingdoms. Translated by John Clark Smith. In Homilies on Jeremiah; Homily on 1 Kings 28(Fathers of the Church, vol. 97). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998.

PRE: Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer. Translated by Gerald Friedlander. 1916. Sefaria. https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_DeRabbi_Eliezer. A rabbinic narrative work attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, compiled around the eighth or ninth century CE.

Pseudo-Philo. Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (LAB). In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, edited by James H. Charlesworth. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

Tertullian. On the Soul (De Anima). Translated by Peter Holmes. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885. https://www.tertullian.org/works/de_anima.htm.

About Dr. Vanessa Ward

Dr. Ward holds degrees from The College of Wooster, United Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. Her doctoral research examines the biblical figure known as the woman of Endor and her significance in biblical and theological studies.

Part 1 of 4

1 Samuel 28:3–25

THE SCENE

She is called the Woman of Endor and engages in a profession her own society has outlawed. She consults the dead, a practice known as necromancy, and lives in a village called Endor. This forbidden craft of necromancy courts the harshest legal retributions: stoning (Leviticus 20:27), excommunication (Leviticus 20:6), and severe religious condemnation (Deuteronomy 18:10–12). One night a man, King Saul in disguise, arrives at her door asking her to summon the dead. Alert and calculating the risks, she responds cautiously: “Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the spiritists from the land. Why then are you laying a snare for my life to bring about my death?” (1 Samuel 28:9).

Saul is the stranger who crosses enemy lines in desperation. Samuel has died (1 Samuel 25:1), and with him, Saul has lost the one voice that reliably mediated between him and God. Samuel had anointed him king and stood beside him through the defining moments of his reign, and his absence now leaves Saul utterly alone. Into this void, the Philistines come, gathering their forces at the nearby town of Shunem (1 Samuel 28:4). Worried about his future, Saul sought a word from God through dreams, Urim (a form of sacred lots), and prophets (1 Samuel 28:6). No answer however came. With God silent and Samuel gone, he does the unthinkable and violates the very law he enforced. He deliberately sought out the one practice punishable by death under Israelite law (Leviticus 20:27; 1 Samuel 28:3).

THE RECOGNITION

In the dark of night, disguised, Saul travels to the woman of Endor with his two servants (1 Samuel 28:8). The men accompanying him become unwitting accomplices in the very act their king outlawed and punished with death (1 Samuel 28:3). Selfishly, he draws others into his desperate deceit, and they follow.

At her door, he makes a demand: “Consult a spirit for me, and bring up for me the one I name” (1 Samuel 28:8). She demurs identifying the risk instantly. Saul swears her safety by the Lord (1 Samuel 28:10), and she then proceeds, summoning Samuel. His spirit rises from the ground, prompting her to recognize Saul immediately (1 Samuel 28:12).

Undoubtedly fearful, she confronts his deception head on: “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!” (1 Samuel 28:12). The man standing before her banned her practice and holds the power to have her killed. Saul cajoles her, and she continues with her eyes wide open, taking the calculated risk.

THE WORD

The wraith of Samuel appears with a word that condemns, speaking what God’s silence had already quietly declared: the Lord has departed from Saul, the kingdom has been torn from his hand and given to David, and the battle tomorrow will end in defeat (1 Samuel 28:16–19). Saul sought a word from God, hoping for mercy, and instead received a confirmation of everything he feared, as Samuel declares:

“The Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, to David… Moreover the Lord will also deliver Israel along with you into the hands of the Philistines. Therefore tomorrow you and your sons will be with me.” (1 Samuel 28:17, 19)

Samuel indicts Saul and pronounces a deadly verdict. Israel will fall to the Philistines, and Saul and his sons will die by the following day (1 Samuel 28:19). Sadly for Saul, his kingdom will pass and his line will end. The kingdom he spent his reign protecting, the legacy he crossed enemy lines to save, is sealed now in a word from the dead, arriving with the force of a final blow.

Unable to bear the heaviness of this foreboding news, Saul collapses, falling full length on the ground (1 Samuel 28:20). The posture is familiar in Scripture, but its meaning here is inverted. Saul bows down to his own desires, prostrating himself before the life he envisioned and grieving what God had decided a long time ago (1 Samuel 15:28).

THE MEAL

Astute and intuitive, the woman of Endor takes note of Saul’s dire predicament. He knows he will die, and she meets him in his grief by preparing him food, stating the reason explicitly: “that you may eat and have strength when you go on your way” (1 Samuel 28:22).

The woman of Endor makes Saul a kind of “defiance dinner,” a meal prepared in full knowledge of the fate ahead, insisting that this man’s life is still worth the effort of dignity. She honors him as he walks toward death, refusing to let the verdict be the last word about his humanity. She gives him strength not to escape what is coming but to actually live his last moments, so that he can “rise and go” (1 Samuel 28:25).

Why does she do it? Scholars have suggested several possibilities. The ancient codes of hospitality, once a guest crossed your threshold, carried an obligation that transcended personal grievance, and Saul had given her every reason for grievance. Others have read the meal as a prophetic act in its own right, a fitting marker of the end of Saul’s reign, the woman of Endor functioning here not merely as hostess but as an unwitting prophet sealing what Samuel declared. And then there is the possibility that she simply saw a broken human being on her floor and responded to that before anything else. The text does not say. It gives us the meal and leaves the motivation in our hands.

The narrative slows here and supplies every detail of the menu and her preparing it. She slaughters a fatted calf, takes flour, kneads it, bakes unleavened bread, and sets it all before Saul and his servants (1 Samuel 28:24–25). Meat in general, and beef in particular, was a rarity in the ancient Israelite diet, reserved for major festivals, celebrations, and the honoring of distinguished guests. A fatted calf was not an everyday provision. It was the meal Abraham set before his divine visitors in Genesis 18, the highest expression of hospitality the ancient world could offer, and she gives it to the man who outlawed her.

The woman of Endor had every reason for resentment, but she chose compassion instead. Her hands work diligently through the night not because the outcome will change but because the person in front of her still matters. She is the first but not the last woman in Scripture to show up at the moment of death bearing something costly in her hands. The women at the cross stayed when the disciples had scattered (Mark 15:40–41), and the women at the tomb came to tend Jesus’ body when there was nothing left to gain (Mark 16:1–3). Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus for burial before he ever arrived at the cross (John 12:1–8), and Jesus himself said her act would be remembered wherever the gospel is preached (John 12:7). There is a pattern in Scripture of women doing the embodied, costly work of care at the threshold of death, giving from their own hands when everyone around them has fled or fallen. The woman of Endor stands early in that line, feeding a dying king from her own table, asking nothing in return, and then disappearing from the text as quietly as she entered it.

THE SILENCE

The Bible does not condemn her for any of this: neither for summoning the spirit (1 Samuel 28:11–14), nor for the meal she prepared (1 Samuel 28:24–25). The narrator offers no judgment of her actions. Through this silence, the narrator opens space for the reader to feel something about what she has done, to sit with her at her own table, to watch her hands work through the night. The text simply lets her story stand.

THE QUESTION

And yet she has been remembered as a villain for centuries.

While the text leaves interpretation and judgment to the reader, later interpreters filled in the blanks with heavy dark ink. She has been called a fraud, a demon, and a witch, defined almost entirely by the prohibition against consulting the dead that she represents, rather than the woman the text actually shows us. Her actions move the narrative forward, and her role in shaping Israel’s succession story is undeniable. Yet she has been pushed to the margins of interpretation.

Limiting her to a simple prohibition obscures the figure the text originally created. This series aims to restore her to view. We will examine how interpreters recast her, how the work of translation molded her identity, and how a contemporary scholar of the Old Testament uncovered a reading latent in the text from the beginning.

What do you know of the woman of Endor?

This series continues next week with Part 2, The Woman of Endor: Recast by the Tradition.

FURTHER READING

Bird, Phyllis A. Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Schmidt, Brian B. Israel’s Beneficent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994.

INTRODUCTION

Many of us have known this story since we were children. We learned resurrection songs before we understood what they meant, singing “He Lives” and “Up From the Grave He Arose” every Easter Sunday, year after year, until the words became cliché.

This familiarity is precisely the problem. The story of the resurrection has become so familiar that it loses its edge, and many have grown desensitized to the shocking, strange story upon which our faith depends.

This story is monumental and too immense for us to reduce to new and shiny Easter attire. Indeed, and hallelujah, Easter is a claim about a corpse. Our God was violently executed, his body sealed inside a tomb, with Roman guards posted at its entrance (Matthew 27:62–66), and three days later, he arose from the dead.

If the resurrection did not happen, there are no Christians, no priests, no ministers, no Wednesday night Bible studies. Paul made this crystal clear: our preaching is in vain, and so is your faith (1 Corinthians 15:14). Everything rides on what happened to this corpse.

And this corpse demands something of us. It requires us to move so that it can meet us, restore us, and send us out.

1. Resurrection Meets the Expectant

Movement is the difference between life and death. Plants turn toward light to survive, blood circulates to deliver life to every cell, and a joint that stops moving loses its range. The resurrection, which is life, offers its gifts to the expectant, to those who move toward it.

Let’s look at how Matthew shows us what this movement looks like. The text reads: “The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them” (Matthew 28:16). Notice the number: eleven. Matthew is the only Gospel writer who gives us this specific number in this scene, and he does so because he wants you to count. Twelve minus one. Everyone on this mountain knows who is missing, and everyone knows why.

They know what they did. One of them sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15), the rest ran when he was arrested (Matthew 26:56), and Peter denied ever knowing him three times (Matthew 26:69–75). They were confused, they hid, and undoubtedly now, after their Lord is risen, ashamed.

But they moved. They moved because Jesus told them to come (Matthew 28:10), and even after everything, they went. Their grief was still fresh, their guilt heavy, and their shame deafening. Moving, however, kept their grief from hardening into a tomb of its own. And the whole message of this text is that the tomb is empty. Jesus walked out of his, and the eleven began to trudge out of theirs.

The eleven brought all their broken pieces to the mountain and show us that God welcomes those who move expecting him to be there.

2. Resurrection Restores Your Original Design

An immediate result of their movement up the mountain in Galilee is that they see the risen Christ and worship him. Matthew, however, disrupts the scene with a peculiar detail. He tells us that after they worshiped him, “some doubted” (Matthew 28:17).

Matthew includes this detail because he wants us to slow down. He wants us to see that worship and doubt can exist simultaneously and that Jesus accepts both. We can praise our risen Savior while our brokenness is still fresh and consuming. It may even be better that we come broken, because it is through our brokenness that Jesus does his deepest work of restoring us to our original design. To understand what this design is, we have to go back to the beginning, to Genesis, where God first spoke us into existence.

THE TSÉLEM

When God spoke us into existence, he said, “Let us make mankind in our image” (Genesis 1:26). The word “image” is translated from the Hebrew word tsélem. In the Old Testament, tsélem refers most often to three-dimensional statues, including the carved representations of gods placed in temples throughout the ancient Near East. In the ancient world, a tsélem was a physical statue of a king, erected in the distant reaches of his territory to assert his authority and control. You would encounter it in a province far from the palace, and you would know without question: the king rules here.

When God says “Let us make mankind in our image,” he is placing his physical representation throughout his territory, the world. But unlike other kings with their stone statues, God breathes life into his image and sends us out. We are living, breathing declarations that the King of Heaven rules here, wherever we go, and because we are alive, we can do what no stone statue ever could: we can multiply (Genesis 1:28).

The Hebrew grammar of Genesis 1:26 is more precise than most English translations suggest. The Hebrew reads “let us make mankind in our image, so that they may rule” (Genesis 1:26).¹ The resultative nature of the grammar means that our purpose is commission. We are made in the image in order to go and represent the King throughout his territory. The tsélem describes who we are, and it also includes the assignment. God makes us in his image and deploys us as representatives of his rule. So immediately after creating us, God commissions us to be fruitful and fill the earth with his image, his tsélem.

God placed us, his living image-bearers, in a garden of breathtaking provision where everything we needed was abundantly supplied, and then he affirmed this abundance before he gave any prohibition. He says, “From all of the trees of the garden, you may surely eat” (Genesis 2:16). God’s first words to the first human overflowed with, “Yes!”

Yes, everything here is yours. And only after establishing all of this abundance does he say, you must not eat from this one tree. When the King you represent has given you everything before asking anything of you, his image shines through you effortlessly. You eagerly want to share the news of your loving and generous King.

The serpent, however, takes those same words and strategically rearranges them. “Did God really say you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1). With one question, he inflates the one restriction, making it seem like total deprivation, and shifts your focus from everything God has given to the one thing God has withheld. Instantly, the divine abundance disappears from view, and all you can see is the one thing off limits. All you can proclaim now is the news of a parsimonious King who does not care about you.

This, the first lie ever told, was a lie about you. You were created in the image of a God of extravagant generosity. When you believe this to be your image, you embody that generosity with confidence. You move through the world expecting there to be enough, because the God you represent provides overwhelmingly in abundance for you.

This was the divine original design: a world filled with image-bearing witnesses to God’s generous and loving presence in every corner of creation. The serpent replaced this design with another: a world full of people with a scarcity mindset, who deceive, grab, and hoard because there is never enough.

God commissions us to be fruitful and multiply, and when we do, we do so with a distorted image of God. Every time we multiply, we set up another cracked tsélem, another misrepresentation of the King, and the lies spread further.

Matthew shows us in real time what these broken tsélem look like when they meet the risen Christ. Both the guards and the eleven disciples witness the resurrection as broken divine image bearers. The guards, however, claim the identity and design crafted by the serpent. They take money to spread a fabricated story, telling people that the disciples stole the body while they slept (Matthew 28:13). Like the serpent before them, the guards choose deception, and just as the serpent’s lie distorted the tsélem by misrepresenting the character of God, the guards’ lie attempts to distort the resurrection by misrepresenting what happened at the tomb. The pattern is the same: distort the truth, and you distort the image.

Deception, however, exacts a price. Every time you engage in behavior that does not align with God’s image and his true character, whether by deceit, envy, greed, or something else entirely, there is a tug. You sense that something is off. This is because you are in conflict with your true identity, the image originally designed by God.

You are created to be the tsélem, the living replica of the King, which means the truth about the King and the truth about you are inseparable. Distort one and you distort the other.

THE RESTORED TSÉLEM

Unlike the guards, the eleven chose a different path. They chose to move their fractured selves to the risen Jesus, and he welcomes them. He comes close to their brokenness and begins to heal when he declares boldly: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18).

This authoritative declaration overrides every lie that had previously distorted the true tsélem. When a king speaks with full authority, every competing voice is silenced. This is what Jesus does. He restores the tsélem by affirming who holds all authority on earth, the generous and loving God from creation.

Even after Jesus speaks and restores the tsélem, doubt and confusion indubitably linger, because we are still human. Matthew already told us that some doubted on this mountain (Matthew 28:17), and the false report of the guards still circulates, spreading “among the Jews to this day” (Matthew 28:15). The loudest lie says Jesus is still dead. And every time we grow complacent with the resurrection, we tacitly acknowledge the lie that the tomb still holds a corpse. We have to move and show the world that Jesus is indeed alive.

3. Resurrection Sends You From This Place

The risen Christ speaks to us as he did in the beginning. His first words to us in the Garden overflowed with, “Yes!” and established abundance before asking anything of us. On this mountain, again we find overflowing provision when Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). And from this place of abundance, he sends us: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

The “therefore” in this verse is Jesus wiping the slate clean with his authority. The lie that held us back and distorted our image, with all of its deleterious effects, the grabbing, the deceiving, the hoarding, all of it abrogated by his word. We can now, “therefore,” go and do what we were originally created to do: fill the world with the news of a generous God abounding in love and care. Only this time, the news is even greater, because we know a God who watched us walk away and came back for us anyway. We cracked the tsélem, and he conquered death to restore it. We “therefore” go and make disciples because he did all of this. For us.

The commission to go was always in us, and now we are sent as what we were always made to be: the replica, the living tsélem. The tsélem was meant for everywhere from the very beginning, and the risen Christ sends us to finish what God started at creation.

Therefore go, because this corpse is alive. Therefore go, because the image cracked in a garden has been made whole at an empty tomb. Therefore go, because God said “Let us make mankind in our image” (Genesis 1:26). Therefore go, because the lie has been exposed and the tsélem is whole.

We go even when we doubt, with our brokenness and our insecurities still present, the same way the eleven trudged to this mountain with guilt and grief and confusion. We go because we, like they, trusted that the risen Christ on this mountain was worth moving toward.

And God does not send us alone. “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

We do not go because we have it all together. We go in his power, accompanied by the one who keeps reminding us who we are because of whose we are. We go as the restored tsélem, a living declaration that the King of Heaven rules here, in this place, in this moment, wherever our feet land.

We are his. We have always been his. Now go.

For Further Reading

J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005).

¹ Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), §107(c), pp. 118–119; Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §§108d–e, 109f–g, 110i, pp. 318–324.