What Does 1 Samuel 28:13 Mean?
And the king said to her, Do not be afraid. What did you see? And the woman said to Saul, I saw gods coming up out of the earth.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.THE KEY
Here the earth opens upward: what is named as divine rises from below rather than descending from heaven.
THE MEANING
The verse holds fear and vision together: Saul asks what the woman sees, and she describes divine beings rising from the earth. The next verse identifies the figure as Samuel, leaving the sight poised between a plural divine designation and one named human presence. What lies beneath becomes visible through an upward movement.
THE ROOT
עֹלִים
ʿolim
GROWS FROM
עלה
ʿalah
rise, ascend, go up
“coming up” in this verse is ʿolim. The verb shares its root with the ascent offering, whose smoke rises. The vision moves upward from the earth, and this same root later describes being brought up from the grave; the word carries movement from below into view.
ALSO GROWS
ʿolah: Ascent offering, commonly rendered burnt offering.
עֹלָה
Its name carries the same upward movement as the figure rising from the earth.
ʿaliyah: Ascent or going up.
עֲלִיָּה
It makes the shared root’s movement upward explicit.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures ascent as movement across a boundary between hidden depths and visible encounter.
And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder standing on the earth, and its head reached to the heavens; and behold, messengers of God were climbing up and coming down on it.You who show me many narrow places and evils, you turn me and make me live again; from the depths of the earth you turn and lift me up.No one has gone up into the heavens but the one who came down out of the heavens, the Son of Man, who is in the heavens.THE THREAD
The LORD kills, and makes alive; he brings down to the grave, and brings up.The same Hebrew root for ascending appears in the promise that the LORD brings a person up from the grave. The woman’s vision rises from the earth; Hannah’s song gives that upward movement a place in the larger scriptural image of rising from the domain below.
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