Isaiah 8:19

19. Distrusting Jehovah, and afraid of Assyria, some of the people were resorting to sorcerers for counsel. The blended folly and impiety of this our prophet now exposes.

Familiar spirits These were necromancers, conjurers, supposed to be able to call up the dead, who could give information of the future world or future events. Obhath is the plural of a word meaning hollow, and in its secondary or concrete tropical sense it means the conjurers themselves evoking, as with ventriloquising voice, spirits from the regions of the dead. Deu 18:11 ; 1 Samuel 28:8, etc.

Wizards Knowing ones, or sorcerers, magicians, adduced along with obhath, and spoken of lying prophets, Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:11.

That peep… mutter In the original, chirp, whisper, tricks of ventriloquism, no doubt.

Should not a people seek unto their God This is the reply which the believers in Jehovah. who “wait upon him” and “look for him” in times of peril, are instructed to give to the half-idolatrous ones tempting them to consult necromancers and the like. The prophet says to his adherents: “When they call you off to such responses by means of their miserable tricks of spiritism, [for this is not a modern invention,] should you not seek answers from your own living, almighty Jehovah?”

For the living to the dead A continued expression of the prophet’s astonishment. “Go to the dead to inquire in behalf of the living!” The meaning turns on the preposition בעד , (bead,) instead of, or better, in behalf of. The best critics adopt the latter; so, literally, the phrase is, In behalf of the living to the dead!