For example, “Christian author Hank Hanegraaff argues that although it is impossible for humans to summon the dead, Samuel did appear before Saul and the witch by a sovereign act of God. Hanegraaff interprets the passage to mean that the witch was surprised by these events.”

Interesting that in the JST work, Joseph Smith was silent on this passage but edited several more mundane passages such as the last chapter of 2 Samuel.

The problem is when a witch presumably using diabolical powers can summon the spirit of a prophet to reluctantly appear and tell Saul to basically go to hell. This passage is one of many examples of “magic” in the Bible in contrast to exercising the power of God through the Priesthood or in other righteous ways.

I define righteous Priesthood power as doing the will of God to summon help from the metaphysical world that God is more than willing to provide.

I define magic as the attempt to control or manipulate forces for my own purposes from the metaphysical world and not in necessarily an appropriate way, the focus being on my will not Thine. That it is reported to actually work at times goes against my strong naturalistic tendencies.

That this evil power is described to have control over the spirit of seemingly a righteous and powerful prophet really blows my mind. Maybe it is just a story that was made up and put in the Bible, I am willing to allow for some pious fiction in the cannon, but what pious purpose this story serves is beyond me.

I suspect that Satan can pretty much predict the future. Yes we have free agency, and it is not as perfect as God could do, but it would be pretty much 99.9 % acurate. He know what has happened in the past, what each person involved strengths and weaknesses are. What they have done in simular situations, what they are most likely to do, weather patterns ,fears, stats stats, stats..etc etc etc etc etc etc etc . He cannot actually predict the future, he sees patterns. The same way that we can have free agency, but God can know exactly what will happen, and every person will do. But a far far less perfect version.

As our ability to access information gets better, we become better at doing this very same thing. If you ever do research on this type of thing, you will find many stories that tell of a demon/evil spirit etc telling someone the future, etc…..im sure many are bogus stories, but I suspect much might be true. Mothman comes to mind.

Small example..Satan knows someone cells are starting to form Cancer, he knows how long it will take based on past experiences etc to kill this person, he knows that the shock of the cancer and the person dieing is going to send the already unstable Mother to commit suciede, and cause the family dog to have to go to the Uncles house, where the little boy, who has been cruel to animals in the past will abuse and eventually kill it. He could tell you this and it would come true. He would have seemed to predicted/saw the future. He simply had access to more information, and was able to read the patterns to come to a 99.9% conclusion. It would seem impossible for him to know this without having SAW it in a vision or something, but with enough information, it was probably a pretty simple prediction. Mabye not the best example, but you get the idea.

We can question the voice of the text. Who exactly wrote this and who copied it? Ezra?

The reason this passage is so difficult is because it challenges the very basis of how we read the scriptures. Do we believe what the text says? When it doesn’t fit with what we think is right, what is our response? To change the meaning of the text and create dissonance between what we think it says and what it says?
Do we try and find some excuse to make it fit? Context or translation problem?

Phone rang, can’t finish this.

Prophecy seems to more take a different light to things:

1. Inspire hope of promises to come.

2. If there is doom, it’s usually with the caveat of failure to repent or to keep the commandments.

I don’t see the events with the Witch as being prophecy, because they don’t follow either of the two above criterion. I think Satan can entice and maybe Samuel came to forbode doom, but I don’t think we’ll find out for sure in this lifetime.

If it was Samuel then is Satan telling one of his 100 truths to get across a single lie?

This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy and a pretty nasty one too.

We have to consider the difficulty of actually knowing the future if people have real freedom any time we consider prophecy. I know that this problem is easily dismissed in most Sunday School discussions but it is a real problem.

If it wasn’t Samuel we have a problem with the scriptures being exactly wrong. It is hard for me to dismiss this one as a translation problem. The story dosen’t make sense. (It doesn’t makes sense the way it is written either). If you can make this a translation problem then rational discussion ceases because you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to say, including the opposite of what it says.

If it is a metaphor then it seems to be a rather obscure one. What is the point?

I like the idea of describing the witch as a “flim flam artist.” When you boil it all down, that is all Satan is, just another snake oil salesman.

Just another possibility.