Bible Verses About Ghosts

What are the usual Bible verses used to attack belief about ghosts? Are they actually as solid a proof as the users claim, or do we have to read them within context? We need to explore these supposed anti-ghost Bible verses in order to see what they really are about.

The usual application of these verses is to attack the very idea of a conscious afterlife, such as

• Ecclesiastes 9:5, “the dead know nothing”, which is taken from a particular moment in the evolution of Hebraic afterlife understanding, and is not indicative of the later understandings where the dead are active in the afterlife.
• Luke 16’s Rick Man and Lazarus, speaks about no contact between paradise and where the Rich Man is located, not about contact between the afterlife and the earthly living plane.
• Satan as “an angel of light” is often used to discredit ghosts, but actually talks about false teachers, nothing to do with spirits.
• Hebrews 9:27 is regularly truncated to “it is appointed for man once to die and after that the judgement”, but if the whole sentence is read, it actually points to a gap between death and the final judgement.

Rather than being anti-ghost, the Bible actually supports the idea of ghosts in many verses and the cultures in which it was written, by both authors and original readers.

• Samuel rises from the underworld (and not an impersonating demon).
• The Ghost-Mistress of En-dor uses an ‘ob, an ancestral spirit, as her way to communicate with those in the underworld.
• The ittim in Isaiah are human spirits.
• The Rephaim are the human spirits of the nobility.
• Ghosts are mentioned by Jesus.

When we study Scripture in its original contexts, we see that what we thought we knew isn’t necessarily so, and things aren’t as black-and-white as we have been led to believe. Take a look through the articles below, as well as our database of articles on the paranormal and the Bible. What you think you know about the Bible with respect to the supernatural, angels, demons etc is probably based upon ideas from Milton and Danté rather than the Bible itself.