Question:
Answer:
Deuteronomy 18:10-11 reads:
There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
Necromancy is communication with the dead in order to obtain hidden or secret knowledge beyond our ordinary human powers, whether about the future or current events. It’s not mere communication with the dead.
There are two reasons why we know eliciting secret knowledge from the dead is what Deuteronomy 18:10-11 has in mind.
First, the same verses also forbid “divination,” and seeking a “medium,” a “sorcerer,” and a “wizard,” all of which have to do with an attempt to gain knowledge beyond ordinary human intelligence.
Second, the subsequent instructions that Moses gives concerns a coming prophet. In verse fifteen, Moses says, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren—him you shall heed” (emphasis added). In other words, there is no need to go to mediums, sorcerers, wizards, or necromancers to gain knowledge, because God will send a prophet of his own.
Since the context is about looking to God’s prophet and not to mediums, sorcerers, wizards, or necromancers, it’s clear that the prohibition has to do with seeking hidden knowledge beyond ordinary human intelligence apart from God. And since conjuring up the dead (necromancy) is one way of doing that, God forbids it.
The Catholic practice of requesting the saints in heaven to pray for us simply doesn’t fit the necromancy bill. There is no request for a transmission of information from the dead to the living. In fact, the flow of information is the reverse. It’s the living that make their requests known to the “dead” (those who are alive in Christ).