Commentaries:
Barnes' Notes
The devotion of faith, which would manifest itself in obedience to the commandment to keep God' s Sabbaths and to reverence His sanctuary Leviticus 19:30, is the true preservative against the superstition which is forbidden in this verse. The people whose God was Yahweh were not to indulge those wayward feelings of their human nature which are gratified in magical arts and pretensions. Compare Isaiah 8:19.
Familiar spirits - literally, "bottles" . This application of the word is supposed to have been suggested by the tricks of ventriloquists, within whose bodies (as vessels or bottles) it was fancied that spirits used to speak. In other cases, the word is used for the familiar spirit which a man pretended to employ in order to consult, or to raise, the spirits of the dead. See I Samuel 28:7-8.
Wizard - A word equivalent to "a knowing man" , or, "a cunning man" .
Other Barnes' Notes entries containing Leviticus 19:31:
Leviticus 26:3-45
Deuteronomy 18:11
1 Samuel 28:3
2 Kings 21:6
Isaiah 8:19
Isaiah 19:3
Acts 8:9
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