When was the last time that Samuel saw Saul?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

1 Samuel 15:35 closes the Amalek episode with a categorical statement: after Samuel hews Agag in pieces and pronounces Saul's rejection, "Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death: nevertheless Samuel mourned for Saul." The Hebrew is welō'-yāsaf šemû'ēl lir'ôt 'et-šā'ûl 'ad-yôm môtô — "Samuel did not continue/add to see Saul until the day of his death." The temporal scope ("until the day of his death") is explicit and total. Yet four chapters later, in 1 Samuel 19:24, Saul arrives at Naioth in Ramah, where Samuel is stationed with the prophet band, is overwhelmed by the spirit, strips, and "prophesied before Samuel," lying naked a day and a night. Samuel is plainly present; the narrator places him in the scene.

The apologetic harmonization (Archer, with a version in Tsumura) leans on the verb yāsaf and the idiom lir'ôt. They render 15:35 as "Samuel did not continue to seek out / visit Saul" — that is, Samuel ceased his official, deliberate prophetic visits — so the chance encounter in chapter 19, where Saul comes to Samuel uninvited rather than the reverse, does not violate it. Grammatically the construction yāsaf + infinitive can carry the nuance "did not again do X," and rā'â can in some contexts mean "go to see / visit" rather than merely "lay eyes on." So the reading is not impossible on lexical grounds.

It nonetheless fails against the wider narrative. First, the verse extends the no-seeing "until the day of his death," framing it as the permanent state of the relationship, not a pause in social calls. Second, and decisively, 1 Samuel 28 corroborates 15:35: at Endor Saul resorts to a necromancer precisely because he has no living access to Samuel or to any prophet who will answer him — "the LORD answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets" (28:6). The narrative logic of the whole Saul cycle is that after Amalek Samuel withdrew from Saul absolutely, and only Samuel's summoned ghost speaks to him again. Hertzberg, McCarter, and Auld therefore treat 19:24 as an originally independent tradition — part of a David-flight cycle — that the redactor spliced in without reconciling it to 15:35.

There is a further compositional consideration. As noted in the companion entry on the "Is Saul among the prophets?" proverb, 19:18-24 may itself be a doublet of 10:9-12, both supplying an etiology for the same saying. If 19:24 is a literary variant of the chapter-10 prophet-band tradition rather than a discrete later event, then the "meeting" between Saul and Samuel it reports is an artifact of duplicated tradition, not a datable encounter that must be slotted into the timeline after 15:35. On either account — splicing of an independent flight-tradition or doublet of chapter 10 — the economical explanation is editorial, not historical.

The grammatical defense is thus possible in isolation but strained in context: it must read a deliberately absolute, death-bounded statement as a narrow comment about who initiated visits, and it must ignore both the witch-of-Endor confirmation and the doublet structure. The simplest account is that the Deuteronomistic compiler placed two traditions side by side, one insisting the prophet and the rejected king never met again in life and one depicting exactly such a meeting.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction arising from the conflation of independent Samuel-Saul traditions.