Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and inquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.
Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, х 'eeshet (H802) ba`ªlat (H1172) 'owb (H178)] - a woman, a mistress of 'Owb (H178); i:e., in whom is a divining spirit. 'Owb (H178) signifies properly a leather bottle, and is applied in several passages of Scripture to magicians, because, being possessed with an evil spirit, and swollen by the inhalation of some gaseous substances, which made them pant and heave, they spoke with a soft hollow voice, as out of a bottle. [The Septuagint has engastrimuthon, a ventriloquist.] They were called ventriloquists because the voice seemed to proceed out of their belly (see Goodwin, 'Moses and Aaron,' lib. 4:, p. 193). He specifies a woman, not a man. The wizards, or male practitioners, being well known, had probably been searched out and extirpated. But women were more in privacy; and as they were addicted to magical and necromantic arts, some of these might be still surviving, and in a clandestine manner pursuing their unlawful and nefarious trade.
Necromancy (the holding intercourse with spirits, which was considered a science, 'falsely so called,' and extensively relied on by the credulous votaries of superstition) was condemned dud interdicted in the law of Moses, and is classed in the New Testament among "the works of the flesh" (Galatians 5:20). From the energetic measures which he himself had taken for extirpating the dealers in magical arts, the profession having been declared a capital offence, his most attached courtiers might have had reason to doubt the possibility of gratifying their master's wish. Anxious inquiries, however, led to the discovery of a woman living very secluded in the neighbourhood, traditionally believed by the Jews to have been Abner's mother, who, probably on that account, had escaped, and who had the credit of possessing the forbidden powers; and to her house he repaired by night in disguise, accompanied by two faithful servants, who are said, in Jewish tradition, to have been Abner and Amasa. En-dor - `the fountain of Dor'-was situated directly on the other side of the Gilboa range, opposite Tabor; so that, in this midnight adventure, Saul had to pass over the shoulder of the ridge on which the Philistines were encamped, until he reached, by a circuitous route, the hut of the sorceress, perhaps in one of the caves which abound in the neighbourhood of the present village. 'He probably kept to the east of Jezreel, crossed the valley below 'Ain Jalud, and thence over the shoulder of this Jebel ed-Duhy to En-dor; but it must have been perilous in the extreme; and nothing could have induced Saul to venture there but the agony of despair' ('Land and Book,' p. 168).