The story of how King Saul visits a medium who conjures up the spirit of the prophet Samuel is very crucial in how it connects with several major Biblical teachings (1 Samuel 28). One of these is the very fact that the witch of Endor is not called a fraud who only pretends to summon the spirit, something that exemplifies how the capital punishment laws against the likes of sorcery (Exodus 22:18) are not about penalizing people who just falsely believe themselves to be sorcerers/sorceresses or who only pretend to be such a thing. No, the story is presented as if she really did bring up Samuel, which is itself significant in that the Bible does not frequently mention a conscious afterlife for the dead across all of human history as some might think. In fact, 1 Samuel 28 does not even have to be a story of a demon impersonating a dead human, as some erroneously assume it must be (though all assumptions are epistemological errors even if the thing assumed can indeed be known), in order to be wholy consistent with the concept of soul sleep.
Desperation and terror lead Saul to resort to search for a medium or spiritist even though he had purged many of them from the land as Yahweh wills (1 Samuel 28:1, 4-5). After hearing of one in Endor, he embarks at night to have her bring the spirit of Samuel to him, as God did not answer him by any method (28:5). The witch describes the spirit she calls up as resembling an old man in a robe, which the text says Saul recognized as Samuel (28:13-15). Saul is not seeing the spirit himself, and even then, just as even seeing another person in ordinary life does not mean they are anything more than a hallucination, he would not have been able to know if it really was Samuel just by appearances; this epistemological issue aside, the words of 1 Samuel 28 all but totally confirm it was really the spirit of the prophet Samuel, as Saul hoped for. Samuel asks why he has been disturbed with this summoning (28:15), and in the ensuing conversation between the corrupt king of Israel and the dead prophet, the servant of God alludes to predictions he made while alive and makes a new one: "'The Lord will hand over both Israel and you to the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons will be with me'" (28:19).
Several other parts of the Bible are important or at least relevant to how this consultation of the dead relates to the often very clear Biblical details about the afterlife facing people after the final judgment--and the seeming lack of an afterlife before the resurrection. Jesus says in John 3:13, a mere three verses before one of the most renowned and misunderstood Bible verses (misunderstood in that to perish is not to have eternal life in hell), that no person but he himself had gone to heaven by the time of his words, so the idiotic idea that the Bible teaches that every righteous or saved person were immediately in heaven as others outlived them is easy to refute. Had no one ever noticed this verse, there are the many others that teach or at least imply a very different state between death and the resurrection than many Christians posit.
Though it might have been a person speculating without any sort of divine revelation, with the real afterlife or lack of it epistemologically locked away, Ecclesiastes 9:5-10 is not subtle at all in saying that the dead do not experience or do anything. This is not as explicitly clear as prophets or apostles or Jesus speaking on behalf of Yahweh when they talk of the wicked being removed from existence in hell (Ezekiel 18:4, for instance) or the righteous enjoying eternal bliss (Revelation 21-22, for example). Job makes similar statements about death being a release and a "rest" from earthly suffering for the righteous and wicked alike (Job 3:1-19), while Daniel (Daniel 12:2), Jesus (Mark 5:35-40, John 11:11-13), and Paul (1 Corinthians 15:20, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16) all refer to death as a sleep of sorts, which is consistent with the unconscious existence (if they exist, they are in a dreamless sleep in a sense) or nonexistence of the dead prior to the resurrection other passages speak of.
With these much more direct, numerous verses relevant to the intermediate state of the dead in view, it can be discovered how nothing about even the spirit of Samuel truly rising up to meet the witch of Endor and King Saul contradicts them. When Samuel asks why he has been disturbed, it in no way logically follows that he must have been abruptly pulled away from a gathering of righteous spirits in "Sheol" while the wicked are in torment before their bodily resurrection, as some evangelicals might suppose; his comment would be just as appropriate if his spirit was revived before his resurrection by an evil means (Deuteronomy 18:9-12), a thing that deserves execution (Leviticus 20:27). Additionally, Samuel says that Saul and his sons would soon join him, and this could not be true in the strictest manner if the common evangelical conception of Sheol is the case, with the righteous being in comfort in an underworld and the wicked being in agony. Saul would be among the righteous dead even though it was God withdrawing his guidance because of Saul's sin that made him consider finding a medium (1 Samuel 28:3-7), or all of the dead would be conscious, but seemingly together without torment. Another possibility that does not conflict with the doctrine of any Bible verse is Saul and his sons dying and being with Samuel in the sense that they are among the collective an unconscious dead (which Samuel would return to after the witch of Endor was finished with him).
In either case, the notion that there is a "pre-hell" of torture for the wicked/unsaved and was a "pre-heaven" of comfort for the righteous/saved, its inhabitants relocated to New Jerusalem or yet another pre-heaven after Jesus resurrected according to some (what many people believe about this is assumed, random, and/or extremely vague), is not in any way apparent in 1 Samuel 28 or anywhere else in the Bible. The absence of a conscious afterlife for a time is instead what the Bible teaches, followed by the definitively clear destinies of an eternal life of peace or consumption by the flames of hell until a person is no longer alive (Matthew 10:28). Out of all the stories and philosophical doctrines of the Bible, the narrative of the witch of Endor is atypical in part precisely because there are not regular depictions of the dead as presently conscious. The final condition of eternal life or eternal nonexistence is more overtly affirmed than anything regarding soul sleep and the intermediate state, and this is the more important Biblical issue because of the finality and existential weight involved. The spirit of Samuel having a conversation with the living in no way contradicts any of these ideas, not even soul sleep.
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