The LORD woke him three times as a boy. Saul woke him once as a dead man. In between sit some of the strangest scenes in Scripture — and I think we're allowed to laugh at them.
I find parts of the Bible genuinely funny, and I don't think that's a failure of reverence — I think it's a failure of reverence to pretend otherwise. The narrator of Samuel preserved these scenes with all their grit and absurdity intact, when a tidier editor would have smoothed them out. My bias: I read the comedy as deliberate, or at least as tolerated by the text, and I read it as one of the ways Scripture tells the truth about people. Where the humor and the horror sit in the same verse — and at Endor they do — I've tried to keep both.
There's a category of Bible story nobody warns you about. It isn't quoted in sermons, it isn't cross-stitched on anything, no later prophet circles back to explain it, and when you hit one cold you sit there for a second thinking: what did I just read? First Samuel is unusually dense with them. A national idol falls on its face twice. A plague of tumors is answered with golden mice. A king strips off his clothes and prophesies naked all day and night. And at the center of the book stands a prophet whose one consistent experience of the divine, from childhood to after his own death, is being woken up.a1e4
His name is Samuel. Let me make the case that his story is held together by interrupted sleep.b2c7
Samuel's first encounter with God is a comedy of errors the text plays completely straight. He's a boy, ministering under old Eli, sleeping in the temple where the ark is. The LORD calls him by name — and Samuel gets up and runs to Eli. "Here I am, for you called me." Eli didn't call him. Go back to bed. It happens again. Wrong bed again. It happens a third time before Eli — the priest, the professional — finally works out what's going on and tells the boy what to say (1 Sam 3:1–9). The narrator even supplies the excuse dryly: Samuel did not yet know the LORD.c3f0
So the inaugural word of the LORD to the last judge of Israel required three attempts, because the kid kept waking up the wrong person. When the connection finally goes through, Samuel's answer becomes one of the loveliest lines in Scripture:d4a2
Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
1 Samuel 3:10 · NRSVue
Hold that line. It's the first half of a bookend, and the second half is coming — a lifetime and one grave later.e5b9
What follows the beautiful line is less quoted: the message itself is a judgment against Eli's house so severe that Samuel lies awake until morning, afraid to deliver it, and Eli has to threaten him to get it out (3:15–17). First night on the job: woken three times, handed a doom oracle, and made to recite it to the man it dooms over breakfast. The career doesn't get easier from there. Samuel spends his life delivering messages to a nation with a listening problem — he warns them about kings, they demand a king; he warns them about Saul, they take Saul — dies with his record intact, right about everything and heeded about nothing, and is buried at Ramah. Finally, you'd think, the man gets some rest.f6d1
We'll come back to that.a7c3
Before Endor, the book has already trained you to expect the strange. Israel loses the ark to the Philistines, who park it in the temple of Dagon like a trophy — and the next morning Dagon is face-down on the floor in front of it. They set him back up. Morning two: face-down again, and this time his head and hands have come off on the threshold (1 Sam 5:1–4). The narrator does not say the LORD knocked him over. He doesn't have to. The scene is a silent-film gag with a theology inside it: set your god upright as many times as you like; he'll be on his face by morning.b8e5
Then it stops being funny for the Philistines — tumors, panic, the ark passed from city to city like a live grenade nobody wants to hold — until their priests propose the exit strategy: send it home with a guilt offering of five gold tumors and five gold mice (6:4–5). Golden images of their own affliction, as tribute. Nobody in the rest of Scripture ever mentions the gold mice again. I understand why, and I also think about them constantly.c9f7
And it isn't only the Philistines who get the treatment. When Saul later sends squads to arrest David, the Spirit of God intercepts each one and they prophesy instead of arresting anyone; Saul finally goes himself, and he prophesies, strips off his clothes, and lies naked all that day and night, so that people ask — for the second time in the book — "Is Saul also among the prophets?" (19:20–24). The narrator presents this as the explanation of a proverb. The proverb's explanation is that the king was involuntarily naked for twenty-four hours. This is the book we're in. Keep that calibration; you'll need it at Endor.d0a8
Here is the setup, and every clause makes it worse. Samuel is dead. The Philistines are massed at Shunem. Saul is afraid, and he inquires of the LORD — and the LORD does not answer him, "not by dreams or by Urim or by prophets" (28:6). Every official channel, dead air. And Saul, in his desperation, asks his servants to find him a medium.e1b0
Saul had expelled the mediums from the land (28:3). He banned the industry. Now he is its most desperate customer. He puts on a disguise — the king of Israel, incognito — travels by night, and asks a woman at Endor to bring someone up for him. She, sensibly, points out that this is illegal and possibly a sting. He swears no punishment will come to her. She asks who he wants.f2c2
"Bring up Samuel for me."a3d4
Even dead, the man is on call. Three times as a boy he was woken in the night; a lifetime as a prophet he was Israel's after-hours line to a God they otherwise ignored; and now death itself turns out to be less like retirement and more like a nap someone is about to interrupt. Up he comes — an old man, wrapped in a robe, unmistakable — and the first words spoken from beyond the grave in the whole Hebrew Bible are these:b4e6
Then Samuel said to Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?"
1 Samuel 28:15 · NRSVue
There it is. The second bookend. The boy answered the night call with "Speak, for your servant is listening." The dead man answers it with a noise complaint. In between lies the whole career that turned the one into the other — a life of speaking for a God nobody heeded, capped by a death that couldn't even guarantee him the sleep. I don't think the narrator built that symmetry by accident, and if he did, he built better than he knew.c5f8
Notice, too, the detail that convinces me the scene isn't the witch's theater: when Samuel actually appears, she screams (28:12). Whatever this woman was selling on ordinary nights, this wasn't it. Her own séance frightened her. And in the same breath she suddenly knows her disguised client is Saul — the text never explains how; seeing the real Samuel somehow unmasked the fake commoner. It's one of those seams the narrator leaves showing.d6a0
What does Samuel say, once he's up? Nothing new. That's the desolate joke of it. The LORD has torn the kingdom away and given it to your neighbor David, as he said through me — you didn't obey concerning Amalek, therefore this (28:16–18). It's the same report Samuel filed while alive, re-delivered by the same prophet, now dead, to the same king, still not listening. Saul raided the afterlife for a word from God and got a rerun. And then, having recited the file, the dead man adds the one piece of new information — casually, at the end, the prophetic equivalent of oh, before I forget:e7b2
"...tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me."
1 Samuel 28:19 · NRSVue
With me. The politest death sentence in Scripture. No thunder, no scythe, nothing brandished — just a dead man penciling you into his side of the ledger. Saul falls full length on the ground, and Samuel, presumably, sinks back down thinking finally — only to remember he has company arriving tomorrow.f8c4
The scene should end there, and it doesn't, and the coda is my favorite part. Saul is on the floor — terrified, and weak, because he has eaten nothing all day and night. And the medium — the outlawed practitioner, the woman this man's own decree drove underground — comes to him and talks him into eating. He refuses; she and his servants press him; she kills the fatted calf, bakes unleavened bread, and serves the king of Israel his last supper (28:20–25).a9d6
Sit with the picture: the anointed king, condemned by a dead prophet, being fed by a witch, in the middle of the night, the evening before he dies. Nobody in the scene is where they're supposed to be. And the only mercy in it — the only human warmth in the whole terrible chapter — comes from the one person the law said shouldn't exist. The narrator reports it without comment, the way he reports the gold mice and the naked king, and moves on. What did I just read? I've read it twenty times and I still ask.b0e8
One honesty note, because the premise of this piece is that these stories go unreferenced: Endor very nearly does, but not quite. Chronicles gives it one grim line — Saul died for his unfaithfulness, and also for consulting a medium instead of the LORD (1 Chr 10:13–14). One verse, verdict only, no scene. The scene itself — the scream, the robe, the complaint, the meal — nobody in Scripture ever touches again.c1f9
The old question: was that really Samuel? Readers have taken every exit. (1) Really Samuel — the plain reading; the narrator calls him Samuel without hedging, the prophecy comes true on schedule, and Chronicles seems to take the consultation as real enough to condemn. (2) A deceiving spirit — a strand of the tradition that can't accept necromancy working balks here, and reads an impersonation. The text gives it little to stand on, but the discomfort is honest: this is the one place Scripture depicts the practice apparently succeeding, inside a book that outlaws it. (3) God's own doing — the reading I lean toward: the witch screams because she didn't do this; God, who refused Saul by every lawful channel, answered him once more through the unlawful one, and the answer was the sentence. The LORD's silence, it turns out, was not absence. I lean, I don't insist. The text does what it does everywhere in these chapters — shows you the scene and declines to explain it.
I started this piece claiming we're allowed to laugh, so let me end by saying what the laughing is for. The comedy in Samuel is never decoration; it's the humanity left in on purpose. A boy who can't tell God's voice from his boss's. An idol that can't stay standing. A king who can't stay dressed. A prophet who can't stay asleep — not as a child, not in his calling, not in his grave. If you polish these stories, you lose the people in them, and the people are the point: Scripture's God works through men who wake up in the wrong bed and kings who fall on the floor. The strangeness isn't a bug in the text. It's the texture of the truth it's telling — that the word of the LORD arrives in the middle of the night, whether or not anyone involved is ready, dressed, or alive.d2a1
Samuel answered the first call with "Speak, for your servant is listening," and the last with "Why have you disturbed me?" — and I have come to think both answers were faithful. He complained, and then he prophesied anyway. Woken from death itself, the man still delivered the message. That might be the most honest picture of a servant of God in the whole book: exhausted, exasperated, and on the job.e3b4
This is Marginalia: my own reading, held to the Author's Corner honesty checklist rather than the Studies' reasoning-logic grade. What that check confirms:
Published 2026 · Marginalia (labeled opinion) · Scripture: NRSVue