WORD STUDY – AN EVIL SPIRIT – RAUCH RA’AH רוח רעה  

I Samuel 18:10: “And it came to pass on the morrow that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul and he prophesied in the midst of the house.”

“There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.” – Sophocles

The spelling of the word evil in Hebrew ra’ah is identical for an adjective or a verb. As an adjective, the root word would be ra’a. Ra’a is an evil which results from envy and causes sorrow or sadness. As a verb, the root word would be ra’ah which is something that consumes you or feeds upon you. 

The syntax is very ambiguous in this passage. Most of your modern translations will take a traditional approach and render this as an adjective expressed as an evil spirit from God.  However, a literal rendering would say: “The spirit of God was evil to Saul.” Or take the nature of evil used in ra’ah and you would say: “The Spirit of God was consuming or feeding on Saul.

We automatically think of a demonic spirit when we read the words evil spirit. I believe the Bible does clearly teach the existence of demonic spirits, but I do not see that to be the case in this passage.  I find it very hard to believe God would order a demon to take control of Saul. I personally believe that God did not need to send a demonic spirit upon Saul; he just needed to fire up the old conscience. A guilty conscience can conjure up a good sense of depression, fear or anger. Saul had once worshipped God with all his heart and he had once loved God with all his heart. But when sin and disobedience entered his life and heart there grew a separation between himself and God. God often uses our conscience or the conviction of the Holy Spirit to awaken us to our disobedience or sin. You see ra’ah does not need to be rendered as evil in English; in fact, it is sometimes used for the word shepherd as in Psalms 1:1 or even as a friend.  Ra’ah is merely a consuming passion. To render this word as evil is not incorrect, it is just misleading. In reality what this Spirit that came upon Saul may not have evil in our understanding of evil. What made him depressed and angry could very well have been the Spirit of God. God was wooing Saul back to Him through the conviction of the Holy Spirit and like many who resist the loving persuasion of the Holy Spirit, they become depressed or angry because they often interpret the conviction or consuming passion of the Spirit of God as just a guilty conscience. Such moves by the Holy Spirit will either bring us to repentance or cause us to rebel all the more and do exactly what Saul did. He began to prophesy

Now we need to look at this word prophesy. We all know that this is basically speaking the will of God.  However, in this particular form, this word in the Hebrew is in a Hithpael form, a reflexive form.  In other words, the rendering should be: “He prophesied in his own name to the house.” I am not too sure just exactly what that means but following this rendering it would appear that God put Saul on one major guilt trip. 

You could call this spirit that tormented Saul a demonic spirit, but if you do you could be shutting yourself off to a very important lesson. By letting sin enter your life the presence of God will have the opposite effect on you. Instead of bringing you that warm fuzzy feeling of love and peace, it will react to the sin in your life bringing you misery, depression, fear, and anger. The Jesus that you invited into your life cannot sit in unity with sin.  There will be a clash.  David responded to the intrusion of sin into his life by embracing God. Saul responded by embracing the sin. The results have been public record for over 3,000 years.