The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator

by Irving Finkel

It is probable that Crown Prince Ashurbanipal himself is now speaking, and he is quoting the opinion of a ghost that can only be a dead queen:

enormity of summoning the dead queen could only be undertaken in total secrecy,

It must have been an earlier copy of this same Babylonian necromantic grimoire from which the spell and ritual in K 2779, later taken to Nineveh, were excerpted.

Ritual for the Land-of-no-Return.

the Babylonian ghost talking out of a skull has wider implications for the ghost historian,

What we cannot assess on available evidence is how rare or commonplace the mechanism of talking to the dead or interrogating them for information might have been during the centuries of our anti-ghost literature.

such activities were not uncommon among the ancient Mesopotamians, or inaccessible to private persons.

can trace no sense of attached stigma or wrongdoing.

Finally, there is the matter as to how, or why, the Mesopotamian dead should be thought by their descendants to know about what was going to happen. It is unlikely that, even if the great gods in Heaven were fully up to speed on the minutiae of the Great World Plan, the individual dead (such as someone’s great uncle) could be privy to the future in general: it was hardly their concern.

We have drawn from the Mesopotamian landscape and its writings the model for our classic picture of man’s relations with ghosts. The dead are buried, sometimes below floors, sometimes in cemeteries. The individual’s eṭemmu – ghost or spirit – goes below, to a Netherworld whose location and visualisation varies, the destination where the peaceful dead maintain their existence and wait for the great recycling process to touch them. They can expect in the meanwhile to receive offerings and be remembered.

When it comes to ghosts in particular, the Hebrew Bible is a most complicated source. When the

flourishing abominations in widespread use that the Deuteronomist was quick to itemise:

Deuteronomy 18:9–14

the translations of the RV (Revised Version) and the New Revised Standard Version (NSRV) are often surprisingly divergent, and when it comes to biblical ghosts, awareness of this fluctuation becomes important.

The prophet Isaiah, cutting the wicked Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar down to size,

it rouses the shades to greet you,

Sheol (Hebrew šeʾôl) is the Old Testament term for Netherworld, easily defined from the scattered references as the place of darkness where the spirits of the dead go.

The dead went down to get there, it is fitted with gates and bars at which they have to wait to enter and to keep them in, it has depth and those who go down to Sheol do not come up. The

Rephaim is also used as a gentilic or ‘race’ term in the Hebrew Bible for the aboriginal giants who were thought to have inhabited Canaan long before the Hebrews got there.

Rephaim originally just referred to these primeval populations with their own royal heroes,

refer to the dead in general.

voice will be as a ghost (‘ôb) from the Netherworld,

It seems to me obvious that ‘ôb refers to a ghost of human origin and yiddeêʿonî to a spirit of non-human origin, or, to put it more plainly, ‘ôb means ghost and yiddêʿonî means demons.

King Saul and the so-called ‘Witch’ of Endor in 1 Samuel 28:3–16.

Saul had expelled ghost and spirit

from the land.

take it that Saul, head of state and the highest authority, outlawed ghosts and spirits, as opposed to the individuals...

When Saul inquired of the LORD, the LORD did not answer him, not by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets.

fortune-tellers (who apparently only used the Urim component of the two-part, lot-throwing Urim and Thummim).

Note, crucially, that the original Hebrew is ba‘alat ’ôb, literally ‘Ghost-Mistress’, while the conversation also implies that there was more than one Ghost-Mistress in the country.

Saul thus reveals himself to be a dyed-in-the-wool subscriber to necromantic consultation, convinced of its validity and taking it entirely for granted.

‘Divine for me by means of a ghost (’ôb),’ and

‘Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the ghosts and the spirits from the land.

When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice; and the woman said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!’

only when Samuel appeared. That is indeed strange.

see a divine being coming up out of the ground.’

Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and did obeisance.

15 Then Samuel said to Saul, ‘Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?’

This, if I may say so, is my favourite line in the whole Hebrew Bible.

the two Hebrew words that make up En-dor is Well of Generation.

was obviously the long-established, central port of call in the land for those needing such services.

until, one at a time, they were required to give life to a new baby child, was shared also by the pre-Hebrew Canaanites.

To my mind the passage can be neither backdated ‘creative writing’ nor a made-up, ‘historical’ episode, as it is often characterised.

The only possible author of the record as we read it in its own terms is one of Saul’s two

companions. They witnessed an historical event like no other, and the published account is exactly that of the silent observer. No one else but the Ghost-Mistress knew what had happened. Guildenstern, then, or Rosencrantz, confiding to some chronicler engaged on recording dynastic history, spilled the beans. In our hunt for the ghost world of the ancient Middle East, the affair at Endor is of unparalleled importance. Its descrip...

According to the summary of Saul’s career in the biblical 1 Chronicles 10:13, he died for being unfaithful to the LORD and, moreover, enquiring of a ghost. But in the later Deutero-canonical book of Sirach, the whole episode is thoroughly bowdlerised: Even after he [Samuel] had fallen asleep, he prophesied and made known to the king his death, and lifted up his voice from the ground in prophecy, to blot out the wickedness of the people. Sirach 46:20 (NSRV version)

encapsulates the very transition from the stage when ghosts were believed in perfectly to when naive ghost belief is no longer deemed acceptable.

And up he came. In that world, around the turn of the first millennium bc, that is what people did.

baʿal ’ôb [‘Ghost-master’]

By the time the New Testament was being written in Greek, the parallel exclusion of ghosts from sacred narrative is almost complete.