A FAMILIAR SPIRIT, or a spiritist — and the one thing that can be said about it without interpreting is that it is built on the verb yada, to know. A knowing one. It stands in ten verses of the Hebrew Bible and the company is exact: Leviticus 19:31, 20:6 and 20:27, Deuteronomy 18:11, the witch of En-dor twice (1 Samuel 28:3, 9), Manasseh (2 Kings 21:6), Josiah's purge (2 Kings 23:24), and Isaiah twice (8:19, 19:3). ⭐ All ten pair it with ov: the word never once stands alone in the Hebrew Bible. Its partner does — ov stands by itself at 1 Samuel 28:7-8, Isaiah 29:4 and 1 Chronicles 10:13 — so the dependence runs one way, and yidde'oni is less a word than ov's companion. That is why the shelf mostly treats the two as one idiom — 'mediums and spiritists' — though Hebrew keeps them as two words, and why Deuteronomy 18:11 binds them with and where this translation and almost the whole shelf read 'or'. ⭐ Isaiah 8:19 is the sharpest of the ten: it asks why a people should inquire of the dead on behalf of the living, using the same verb darash that Deuteronomy 18:11 attaches to corpses and 18:19 to God. → first discussed at Deut 18:11