Witchcraft

Witchcraft is the umbrella English term for a cluster of forbidden practices in ancient Israel — sorcery, divination, and above all consulting the dead — rather than a translation of any single Hebrew word. The underlying vocabulary distinguishes at least three things: kashaph, the practice of sorcery (Exodus 22:18, where the offender named is a woman, a sorceress); ’ov, usually rendered "medium" or "one who has a familiar spirit"; and yidde’oni, "wizard" (Leviticus 19:31; 20:27). Linguistically, ’ov is connected with a pit or with the spirit of a dead person that a practitioner claims to call up, and the Greek Old Testament renders it engastrimythos, "one who speaks from the belly." As Scripture uses the term, it denotes attempted access to knowledge and power outside the channels God gives — the very channels Saul names as closed to him: prophets and dreams (1 Samuel 28:15).

The legal texts frame the matter as covenant loyalty, not merely private morality. Leviticus 19:31 forbids turning to mediums and wizards because doing so defiles a person, and grounds the command in God's own identity: "I am Yahweh your God." Leviticus 20:6 calls the same act prostitution — "to play the prostitute after them" — and warns of being cut off from the people, while Leviticus 20:27 prescribes stoning for a medium or a wizard. Exodus 22:18 gives the shortest form: "You shall not allow a sorceress to live." The text locates the offense in the turning and seeking itself (Leviticus 20:6), which is why the prohibition reaches the client as well as the practitioner.

The narrative in 1 Samuel 28 puts that law under pressure. Saul had earlier "sent away those who have familiar spirits and the wizards out of the land" (28:3); with God silent and the Philistines gathering, he asks his servants to find such a woman (28:7), disguises himself, and goes to her by night (28:8), swearing an oath when she fears a trap (28:9–10). The text then reports that Samuel himself speaks, rebuking Saul and announcing that he and his sons will be "with me" the next day (28:15–19). Scripture does not explain the mechanism, and readers have disputed for centuries whether a real appearance occurred, whether another power impersonated Samuel, or whether the woman's craft was illusion. What the narrative states plainly is the outcome: the man who purged the practice from Israel died while seeking it.

Christian traditions differ over both the nature of the practices and the standing of these laws. Patristic, Catholic, and Orthodox writers have generally treated occult practice as genuinely dangerous and demonically mediated, while distinguishing condemned divination from the church's sacraments and sacramentals; many Protestant writers read the capital statutes as Israel's civil code rather than a mandate for later states, though others argue their moral equity remains binding. Pentecostal and charismatic teaching typically affirms real spiritual power in such practices while forbidding them absolutely, whereas some modern critical and rationalist readings treat 1 Samuel 28 as a story of deception or of God overriding the medium. It is also a matter of established usage that "witchcraft" today most often names a contemporary neopagan religion with no direct continuity to the biblical terms, and that English versions differ in rendering the Greek pharmakeia of Galatians 5:20 as "witchcraft" or "sorcery," a translation choice that shapes how the word is heard.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.