This picture seems originally to have shown 'Rizpah watching the Bodies of her Sons' (2 Samuel XXI, 9-10) and was engraved as this subject for the Liber Studiorum, R.46 and published 23 April 1812 (No.86). In the engraving Rizpah is shown protecting the bodies of her two sons by Saul from predatory birds and beasts 'in the days of the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of the barley harvest'.

Subsequent to the preparation of the Liber Studiorum engraving, which could have been at least begun any time after the scheme was first mooted in 1806, Turner seems to have overpainted the oil painting, replacing the bodies of Rizpah's sons by enormous insects dragging off the bodies of other creatures, adding another female figure behind that of Rizpah, and introducing several spectral figures and a mysteriously glowing light. The subject now seems to be a scene of incantation, possibly suggested by the encounter of Saul and the Witch of Endor during which the ghost of Samuel foretells the death of Saul and his sons (I Samuel XXVII, 8-20). However, though one of the apparitions could well be Samuel, 'covered with a mantle', and the others are a soldier about to slay with a sword a child held by another, the putative Saul is a woman with bare breasts.

What was almost certainly this picture was shown at Turner's gallery in 1808 when it was described in The Review of Publications of Art. The reviewer, probably John Landseer, was obviously baffled by the subject which had presumably already been altered by Turner:

Of an unfinished picture which hangs at the upper end of the room, the subject of which is taken from the Runic superstitions, and where the artist has conjured up mysterious spectres and chimeras dire, we forbear to speak at present.

The suggested title was not necessarily Turner's.