There is a greater amount of evidence than is generally realised that in old Israel there was a cult of the dead. The archaeological evidence is less than one would expect. There is a certain amount of evidence from the second millennium B.C.—ornaments and jars, small cups and suchlike, found for instance at Gezer—but we have very little material from the time of the Israelite occupation. It is true that according to I Samuel 28.3 Saul is said to have ‘put away all those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land’, and that there is a law against them in Exodus 22.18 (‘thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live’). It is not, however, until Deuteronomy 18.11 that we get the stern prohibition of the cult of the dead in every form, and there is every reason to believe that it was on the basis of this prohibition that King Josiah acted when he put away ‘them that had familiar spirits, and the wizards’, 2 Kings 23.24. This was not an isolated action of his, but was part of a general reform in which he got rid also of the teraphim (which may have been connected with the cult of ancestors) and idols generally. There is no record of any king of Judah dealing with necromancers before King Josiah.