From the Margins and Between the Lines: A Queer Reading of The Woman of Endor
Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch's abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor!
—Rudyard Kipling, The Road to Endor, 1919
If a broad definition of queer involves playfulness, wholeness of self, and challenging tight, traditional expectations then the woman of Endor is one of the queerest characters of the Hebrew Bible. Coming to life in the pages of 1 Samuel chapter 28 she presents a complete character who has captivated biblical interpreters, commentators, even poets, for centuries despite going unnamed and unreferenced anywhere else in scripture. For twenty-three verses she holds our attention, veritably casting a spell on readers as she conjures the spirit of Samuel for King Saul through her powers of divination. For this reader in particular, the woman at Endor is especially compelling. Her differences from my own social location are part of the allure. She is a non-Israelite woman, a minority; I am a white woman in North America where Whiteness is still the predominant culture. She is unattached to a man or institution in a heteropatriarchal society; I am married in a heterosexual partnership and a clergy member in a mainline religious denomination. The woman at Endor lives on the outskirts of Israelite society, outside any city and certainly outside the courts of the King; I live in “the heart of the Empire,” in New York City. I bring a decidedly “heteronormative” orientation to this delightfully queer character, yet I am convinced that orientation can be complicated, taught to read, and see more queerly by going down “the craziest road of all”: the Road to Endor.
To trod “The Road to Endor” I propose engaging several methods. Beyond a close reading of the text, I examine how this passage can be in dialogue with other traditions and fields of study including gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. The aim of such a playful and multilayered reading is to see what message and techniques for occupying a space of precarity the woman at Endor offers readers today and how King Saul might serve to teach those with more “assigned power” to operate more queerly. Indeed, as the medium at Endor becomes a queer guide to help Saul engage parts of the world that he had previously been unable or unwilling to engage, Saul then serves as a guide for readers who do not find themselves low and outside to learn to see with more a queer perspective. In the passage we see how the characters operate out of a sense of urgency, must change their physical and social location, and practice new ways of listening, all building to an important and queer reading of the text. A queer identity, at least in part, can be learned—and not just through reading as a practice of empathy, but through embodied acts of listening and locating which productively blur the line between text and sex, genre and gender. Sean Burke, an author writing with a queer hermeneutic posits, “identity is not a fixed, unitary, stable, and natural essence, but rather it is a contingent, fluid, and unstable social construction. Identity itself is an effect of discourse, although this is not to deny that identity in turn produces profound material effects for real bodies.”[i] By being in relationship with the woman of Endor, Saul’s identity begins to change; by being in relationship with both of them, ours might too.
Part of what makes both the woman and Saul characters that operate in queer ways is their sense of urgency. Both characters find themselves living out of a heightened sense of importance, of life or death, of risk. This, while perhaps an undesirable element of queer life, is consistent with those who identify as queer. Life is less hypothetical, less predictable, and less safe. bell hooks underscores the danger and risk inherent in such a stance: “Back in those spaces where we come from, we kill ourselves in despair, drowning in nihilism, caught in poverty, in addiction, in every postmodern dying that can be named.”[ii] Stakes are higher and both the woman and Saul exemplify this. For the woman, she is persona non grata. As a medium, a practitioner of divination, she has been exiled from Israelite culture—King Saul “had expelled the mediums and the wizards from the land” v.3. She lives outside the structure and support of the community. Then, in verse 12 when she realizes that the very person who has cast her out due to her gifts and identity has descended upon her, the woman’s fear and urgency is heightened: “she cried out with a loud voice… and the woman said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!.’” Later in their encounter when she revives Saul with rest and food, many biblical interpreters credit the woman with a gift of hospitality. Pamela Reis disagrees, seeing instead an urgent drive to survive: “I find her motivation to be self-preservation, not hospitality.”[iii] She continues on, remarking, “It is more true to life for a frightened, hunted, and condemned person to try to outwit and outmaneuver her adversary to save her own life than to try to feed him to save and fortify his.”[iv] And yet the woman does fortify Saul, but not by allowing him to retain and reaffirm his powerful subject position. In something like a combination of hospitality and self-preservation, she outwits Saul—or perhaps more accurately, “re”wits Saul—by offering him an invitation into her (literal and existential) position. In this way, we see the woman guiding Saul in how to engage the world from a queer perspective, one fueled by urgency and bent on survival.
Indeed, Saul comes to mirror this sense of urgency and drive to survive. Moving beyond a lust for power that he demonstrated earlier in his biblical story, now we see the King looking to simply survive in the waning days of his rule. 1 Samuel 28 begins by setting a threatening scene for Saul—the Philistines are mounting for an attack, having “gathered their forces for war” v.1. Behind this specific historical narrative passage is a long saga of fighting and power dealing. 1 Samuel is part of the Deuteronomistic History, a span of texts ranging from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings, which puts stories and names to the history of the people Israel from the times of their arrival in the land they had been promised to the experience of the Babylonian exile after the temple is destroyed. The comingled stories of Saul and David are central to 1 Samuel—their convoluted relationships with God, each other, and the people of Israel. Now David’s reign is on the rise as Saul’s is sunsetting. Saul who had previously had God’s ear and preference now feels cut off, alone, and desperate. King Saul, once high and mighty, must now operate out of a place of fear and urgency, of risk and threat—he must adopt a stance of queerness.
Physical and social location play into how the woman and King Saul serve as queer guides. Where one is located, in the center or on the margins, factors into a queer identity. Those who identify as queer or want to engage in queer readings must learn to put themselves in new locations, must operate from low and outside as directed by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott: “I have had to learn to read the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures from low and outside.”[v] Mollenkott finds herself at this particular positioning for two reasons, low because of her gender, outside because of her queer sexual orientation giving her a new vantage point to access and engage scripture. We are reminded that this stance can be learned though may have to be intentionally sought if status puts you high and inside. 1 Samuel 28 plays with location for all characters involved. For the woman we know she has already been moved to the margins. Bradley Crowell gets right to her location digging into the overlapping and interconnected factors of marginalization:
[S]he can be considered a triply marginalized character. First, she is marginalized by gender, as a woman in a predominantly patriarchal society. Second, she is a necromancer in a territory that is at least partially controlled by Israel, which, according to the Deuteronomists, has religious and legal regulations that threaten her with the penalty of death for practicing her craft. Third, she lives in an interstitial space, Endor, which has been variously identified by historical geographers but textually represented as existing in the borderlands between the territories controlled by Israel and those controlled by the Philistines.[vi]
Thus, the woman’s literal (or geographical) position tropes her biological, social, and vocational positions, all of which must also occupy a textual space: her identities must take the form of particular textual representations which are nevertheless uncertain and therefore suggestive in their implications. In other words, her textual position is also proverbially and hermeneutically “between-the-lines.” And bell hooks reminds us that the margins, while places of repression, can also be places of resistance because margins can offer “a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”[vii] Textual margins as well offer space for inclusive and shifting intersections of identities between reader, text, author, and idea—annotations, underlines, notes in the margin all attest to an unstable but energetic interplay of perspectives: the embodied and ephemeral engagements in the interstitial textual spaces out of which spring “new worlds.” This is what we get at—and how we get to—Endor.
Saul has to move himself to the margins. Guided by his search he goes to where the woman is: he sought her out “and went there” v.8. He must even go in disguise—a closeted King, putting on clothes of the “other” v.8 (cross-dressing?), a form of trickery Saul deems necessary to access a new location. Once at Endor Saul’s location is even further complicated, by verse 20 is fully prostrate on the ground and in verse 23 is physically lower than her “on the bed.” The embodied location of the characters parallels the way they socially find themselves low and outside, moved to the margins yet centered in this story.
Author J. Kabamaba Kiboko intensifies this mingling of geographic and narrative margins by bringing a postcolonial reading to this text, focusing on the location and language of the story. From her own experience in the Congo she plays with and reinterprets 1 Samuel 28 both on the grounds of geography and language. Locating herself and the woman of Endor at a “Disanga” or a “crossroads of a place of gathering”[viii] she sees the intersection of culture and experience unfolding in the story. For Kiboko a richness emerges at this crossing—an existential crossroads for the medium crossing over the disanga from life to death and one too for Saul crossing boundaries he never considered he’d approach. The inability to find stability for the name and title for the woman further complicates her location. To describe her in verse 7 the NRSV, ESV and NIV use “medium,” the KJV uses “woman who hath a familiar spirit,” and the CEB uses “woman who communicates with ghosts.” Biblical commentaries add to the variety of names, the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary calls her a “woman of ancestral spirits,”[ix] in his commentary Graeme Auld uses the term “bottle-mistress,”[x] and the Anchor Bible Commentary uses “ghostwife.”[xi] The multitude of terms and phrases adds to her amorphousness within the narrative: she is hard to pin down linguistically, geographically, socially, and religiously. Kiboko, struggling with her own postcolonial African identity underscores the way language, especially around personal names and pronouns can flatten or enhance queerness. Of her native culture and language she writes, “The Sanga understanding of gender transcends the binary opposition of male and female; Kisanga has no gender markings and no gender in personal pronouns. The French language, on the other hand, carries gender markers and binary opposition in terms of gender relations… In my Sanga gender-neutral language, I was a male-daughter, which was entirely natural. If I were to translate literally a third-person singular pronoun from Kisanga into English, it would read she-he/he-she (elle-il/il-elle, in French). This he-she in itself is an intersection where the male and daughter are one.”[xii] That the woman herself is not just a container for or holder of the linguistic inadequacies that have tried to place her, but also is herself a medium or translator across realms further underscores how significantly she poses not just the problems, but more significantly, the possibilities of geographic and linguistic fluidity. At places of intersection and crossing—the Endors of life—one’s seemingly fixed location and language of identity are playfully on the move.
Finally, this passage provides examples of new ways of listening and hearing for both the woman and Saul. Listening to new voices is an essential task in queering, to truly hear the voices of those who have been silenced, “our challenge then” writes Mollenkott, “is to use whatever means necessary to recover our voices within the biblical text.”[xiii] In 1 Samuel 28 the woman at Endor finds her voice and asserts her authority, “Your servant has listened to you; I have taken my life in my hand, and have listened to what you have said to me. Now therefore, you also listen to your servant” vv.21-22. Moved now to the center of the story and the narrative action she is demonstrative and has agency. By guiding Saul into a place of new listening she offers him comfort and hospitality, soothing him in his final hours. In listening well—“he listened to their words” v.23—in a new, queer way, Saul is changed from the domineering, paranoid man we meet the beginning of the text to a calmed figure, one ready to finish his life with dignity. But in guiding Saul, the woman also instructs and affirms us in new ways of reading from and within the margins, carving out new spaces within old places.
Major movement in constructing and deconstructing identity are at work in 1 Samuel 28. Citing Jose Quiroga in his own queer work Sean Burke writes, “it is just such a paradoxical move that creates the possibility of destabilizing identity categories for the sake of what he calls lateral identifications, which are new forms of relating across cultures, races, genders, sexualities, and so on.”[xiv] These lateral identifications are at work at Endor and are the ways all people ought to be relating to and learning from one another. Queer reading, listening, learning, and interacting makes such lateral identifications possible. While a reading of 1 Samuel 28 that sees the woman at Endor as a queer guide for Saul and Saul as a queer guide for modern readers seeking to queer their perspective seems to open to anyone it has its limits. For one, it is purposed by a reader who is an ally to the queer community but not truly of or within it; there is a level of well-intentioned appropriation at work. Furthermore, it presumes a meaningful transformation has occurred in Saul which is hard to determine since by chapter 31 he will be dead. That said, any attempt to play with texts that have too long been seen as static and even closed-off to certain readings and interpretations is positive. It allows for a blending, an intersectional crossroads stance, one inhabited and advocated by J. Kabamba Kiboko who finally claims in her own voice: “I have my mother’s gift, after all. I am the il-elle of my parents, standing in the disanga of male and female, of Africa and the West, of theory and praxis, of the church and the academy, of the past, present, and future, and of the Bible and divination.”[xv] Rereading Kipling, perhaps the road to Endor is not straight at all, but rather inherently and necessarily queer,[xvi] reteaching us all how to seek greater nuance, understanding, and complexity.
Works Cited:
Auld, Graeme A. I & II Samuel: a commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press, 2011.
Burke, Sean D. Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013.
Crowell, Bradley L. “Good Girl, Bad Girl: Foreign Women of the Deuteronomistic History in Postcolonial Perspective” in Biblical Interpretation Vol. 21, Issue 1 Pages 1-18, 2013.
Hamori, Esther J. “The Prophet and the Necromancer: Women’s Divination for Kings” from The Journal of Biblical Literature Vol 132, Issue 4, Pages 827-843, 2013.
Kiboko, J. Kabamba. Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider. New York, NY: Ten Speed Press, 1984.
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey. “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters” in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible. Editors Robert E. Gross and Mona West. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2000.
The New Interpreters Bible: Volume I. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.
Peterson, Eugene H. First and Second Samuel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999.
Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor” in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Vol. 33, Issue 73, Pages 3-23, 1997.
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[i] Burke, Sean D. Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013, 63.
[ii] hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990, 148.
[iii] Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor” in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Vol. 33, Issue 73, Pages 3-23, 1997, 4.
[iv] Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor,” 14.
[v] Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey. “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters” in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible. Editors Robert E. Gross and Mona West. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2000, 13.
[vi] Crowell, Bradley L. “Good Girl, Bad Girl: Foreign Women of the Deuteronomistic History in Postcolonial Perspective” in Biblical Interpretation Vol. 21, Issue 1 Pages 1-18, 2013, 10.
[vii] hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin,” 149-150.
[viii] Kiboko, J. Kabamba. Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017, xii.
[ix] The New Interpreters Bible: Volume I. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994. (Research on her name came from work done for Gender and Old Testament Narratives including the following two footnotes)
[x] Auld, Graeme A. I & II Samuel: a commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press, 2011, 321.
[xi] McCarter, Kyle P. 1 Samuel: a new translation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.
[xii] Kiboko, J. Kabamba. Divining the Woman of Endor, xxii-xxiii.
[xiii] Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey. “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside,” 21.
[xiv] Burke, Sean D. Queering the Ethiopian Eunuc:, 64.
[xv] Kiboko, J. Kabamba, 232.
[xvi] And indeed the “margins” of Kipling’s own text further attest that it’s “the craziest road of all,” creating a tension between the lines consistent with the woman’s queer presence itself.