Chapter SIXTY-EIGHT

Endor

While Davin was being turned away from a battle he could not fight honestly, Saul crossed into a darker night and asked for a word after refusing the God who alone could give one.

The Philistines assembled and came and encamped at Shunem.

Saul gathered all Yisrael, and they encamped at Gilboa.

When Saul saw the army of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly.

Fear in ordinary men shakes the limbs first.

Fear in kings goes for meaning.

By now Saul had spent years training himself to live against truth. That labor had not produced peace. It had only hollowed out the inward chambers where courage once had better places to stand. So when he saw the hosts spread under Philistine order across the plain, with memory of Elah behind him and present weakness before him, terror found no resistance worth naming.

He inquired of the LORD.

The LORD did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets.

That silence did not come suddenly.

It had been prepared.

Men are not abandoned by God in a single theatrical instant. They spend years stepping away from the voices they were given, killing the priests who carry lawful inquiry, bargaining with envy, feeding distrust, and then at last calling the resulting silence abandonment when it is largely judgment ripened.

Saul knew enough theology to feel the difference.

That made the silence worse.

He had formerly put the mediums and the necromancers out of the land.

That, too, now mocked him.

The earlier reform had not been hypocrisy when first done. There had been a season when Saul still knew the shape of obedience well enough to despise false mediation rightly. But righteousness not kept becomes memory, and memory, if not repented into, becomes one more witness against the man who once enacted it.

So Saul said to his servants, "Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her."

The servants answered, "Behold, there is a medium at Endor."

He disguised himself and put on other garments and went, he and two men with him. They came to the woman by night.

Night suited the errand.

Saul asked her to divine for him by a spirit and bring up for him whomever he should name.

The woman hesitated with professional caution.

"Surely you know what Saul has done," she said, "how he has cut off the mediums and the necromancers from the land. Why then are you laying a trap for my life to bring about my death?"

The irony passed over them like cold water and found no laughter in anyone.

Saul swore to her by the LORD.

That was the ugliest part.

Not that he sinned.

That he borrowed the Name he had resisted in order to authorize the transgression he hoped would circumvent the silence of that very God.

"As the LORD lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing."

The oath held the shape of blasphemy more than reassurance.

"Whom shall I bring up for you?" the woman asked.

"Bring up Samuel for me."

The room changed when the old prophet came.

Not like a Breach. Not like Hollow intrusion. Not like the counterfeit pressures Davin had learned to feel in enemy ground and broken kingship.

This was colder, cleaner, and far more dreadful.

The woman saw Samuel and cried out with a loud voice.

At once she knew the man before her.

"Why have you deceived me? You are Saul."

The king said, "Do not be afraid. What do you see?"

She answered in the language human fear reaches for when holiness or judgment enters a room too quickly:

"I see a god coming up out of the earth."

"What is his appearance?"

"An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped in a robe."

Saul knew then that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and paid homage.

Samuel said to Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?"

Saul answered in broken honesty.

"I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets or by dreams. Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do."

Samuel's answer came without comfort.

"Why then do you ask me, since the LORD has turned from you and become your enemy? The LORD has done to you as he spoke by me, for the LORD has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, Davin. Because you did not obey the voice of the LORD and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek, therefore the LORD has done this thing to you this day."

Amalek.

The unfinished obedience of years earlier had matured into tonight's terror. Judgment is patient enough to connect the chapters men desperately want treated as separate.

Samuel went on.

"Moreover, the LORD will give Yisrael also with you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me. The LORD will give the army of Yisrael also into the hand of the Philistines."

Tomorrow.

That was the word that broke what still stood in Saul.

He fell at once full length on the ground, filled with fear because of the words of Samuel.

There was no strength in him, for he had eaten nothing all day and all night.

The woman of Endor, who had traded in forbidden mediations and expected perhaps money, secrecy, and the ordinary tremors of desperate men, found instead a king collapsed under true judgment in her house. Even she pitied him.

She urged him to eat. His servants urged him. At last he rose from the earth and sat on the bed.

The woman had a fattened calf in the house, and she hurried and killed it, and she took flour and kneaded it and baked unleavened bread.

Saul ate.

Then he and his servants rose and went away that night.

No revelation remained to seek. No better word waited around the bend.

Only morning.

Only battle.

Only the last consequence of a kingship that had spent too many years mistaking divine patience for permission.

In Ziklag, Davin was riding toward smoke he did not yet understand.

On Gilboa, Saul was riding toward the end he had at last been forced to hear aloud.

The house of Yisrael had become a valley with fire at both ends.