A Fan of M. Heiser Challenges Me to Listen to Naked Bible Podcast 249 "Did Israelites View Their Judges As Gods"

 Michael Heiser argues that they did not, taking the view that when the 82nd Psalm says "I have said, Ye are gods" (Elohim) that it is referring to a heavenly Divine Council and not the elders and judges of Israel. Due to Christ's use of the verse in John 10:33-36 where He says "if He called them gods, to whom the Word of God came", most theologians believe this was referring to human judges. Heiser disputes this and argues that Christ is also referring to members of a Divine Counsel here, and that the scene for the 82nd Psalm is in heaven. 

I described why I thought he was wrong about the 82nd Psalm in this video (note that the links in the description section of the video point to more articles with more topics and details about where I think he is missing it). A fan of Heiser then challenged me, with good intentions I believe, to listen to Heisers podcast on the question of "Did Israelites View Their Judges as Gods". I had read "The Unseen Realm" and listened to his podcasts before but I decided to listen again on his word and, because, well if you are going to say a fellow has something wrong then the right thing to do is to listen and understand his position thoroughly. 

His video is an audio-only monotone near monologue. It is hard to listen to. But I did. While I did learn some more details of his position, and I usually learn things every time I delve into the text, my bottom line hasn't changed much if any on this question. Heiser thinks that there was a group of supernatural beings that were counted as "Elohim" that were also God's sons but that His earthly sons (Israel) were not Elohim. I think God sees us as we shall be, the same basis on which He referred to Gideon as a valiant warrior while he was hiding in a winepress. Like Christ said in John 10, some were elohim (gods) simply on the basis that the Word of God came to them. He knew what it would make out of those who received it in faith. Heiser himself, at 52:50 of that link, describes an elohim as "A being that is part of the supernatural world". That's a fair definition, but I think Abraham, Moses, Elijah and others fit that definition. They were in this world, but they were also a part of the supernatural world.

Heiser starts by talking about Gen. 35:7 and making the point, at great length, that the Elohim here could be the angels Jacob encountered in two earlier events in his life, described for example in Genesis chapter 32. But this argument is not really at issue for me. I am not saying that Angels can't be considered elohim, our disagreement is whether or not spiritual people who receive God's word can also be considered as such.  

Two of the verses that he talked about that most take to be places where humans are referred to as Elohim were Exodus 21:6 and 22:8. The word for "judges" is "elohim". Here is 21:6:

Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.

Heiser points out (minute 43) that there was no dispute here for the judges to judge, but this was an important legal agreement, one man is pledging to serve another for life even though the law says he is otherwise to go free after six years or in the year of Jubilee. It is reasonable to suppose that this is the kind of thing that should be brought before judges to insure the statement is not made under duress and that both parties understand the consequences of the contract they are about to enter. There should be no accusation later that this was a forced labor situation, or question whether the master followed the law. 

Heiser later notes that the requirement to bring him before the "judges" is "deleted" when this part of the law is cited in Deuteronomy 15. It isn't "deleted", it just isn't mentioned. The passage there mostly deals with being merciful and forgiving debt in a variety of circumstances and this one was just on the list. There is no indication that the requirement in Exodus changed or dropped, it just wasn't mentioned in the shorter run-down in Deuteronomy. 

He even (time 49-51) suggests that the "judges" or "elohim" were clay figures often kept in houses to represent one's departed ancestors. He said it was the equivalent of swearing before one's ancestors. Thus Heiser floats the idea that dead people may have been considered elohim, just not live ones. Of course, to God, all souls that are His are alive, that's why He told Moses I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If the dead ancestors of the typical law-abiding Israelite home could be considered "elohim" then how much more a living Moses and the prophets!

The other verse is Ex 22:8

If the thief be not found, then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges, to see whether he have put his hand unto his neighbour's goods.

Because the word judges is linked to plural verbs in these two verses, Heiser goes to some trouble to show that there can be references to the One True God which are linked with plural verbs. While that may be so, I don't lean on the use of plural verbs to make the connection that these are human judges rather than God. I start with what Jesus said in John 10  and work my way back to the context in which these words are used. God did not personally arbitrate these disputes or serve as a legal witness to these agreements, rather human judges serving under the law of Moses did so. They were the elohim, standing in for the ultimate Elohim. 

This is very consistent with chapter 18 of Exodus, which Heiser attempts to debunk when he says that the human judges are never referred to as "elohim" within chapter 18. And he is almost right about that. Exodus 18:15 says:

"And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people come unto me to inquire of God:"

So if they wanted to ask God something, they asked Moses. I am not saying that they thought Moses was God, but they thought Moses was speaking for God. They thought he was a man with access to the supernatural realm- which fits Heiser's definition of an elohim! And the judges which are discussed later in the chapter are to stand in for Moses even as Moses stands in for the people before God. So when 22:8 says "brought unto the elohim" for them to decide (next verse) it IS consistent with the events of chapter 18. They came to Moses to hear from God and now the people are going to the judges he appointed to hear from God. Even if, as Heiser claims, the verse is about hearing from the One True God, the unrivaled Elohim, that is done through men. Men decide these cases. 

Moses had already been made an Elohim by God in Exodus 7:1. I know that most translations insert the word "as" in the verse. It is often rendered "I have made you as God to Pharaoh" but I am going to link to the interlinear so that you can see this is assumed and there is nothing in the actual Hebrew to justify adding the word "as" into the text. Moses was already an elohim on behalf of Yahweh Elohim as regards to Pharoah. He was declaring the Divine Will on earth. In chapter 18 he is acting in the same capacity for the children of Israel. His father-in-law suggests he share that burden, and this is the right thing to do because all of Israel (God's son per Ex 4:22) can also reflect His image and be elohim. Just like daddy. 

Look, we are meant to be a royal priesthood and a holy nation. We are even meant to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and the very Body and Bride of Christ. How can it be, if an Elohim is simply a being with access to the supernatural realm and not a Deity in the western sense, that spiritual men and women who have been "born of the flesh and of the spirit" in Christ are not also elohim? And God didn't get a new program. His OT one pointed to His NT one. I'm not saying M. Heiser is a bad guy, I'm saying he's wrong about something, and that he can just as easily be right about it. 

Look, this stuff is fascinating and all that, but I would rather turn your attention to a higher excellence. Though I don't have a problem with God having a court full of Divine Beings, I don't see them all over the Old Testament. I see Christ all over the Old Testament, and that's what my book is about. 

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Michael Heiser Doesn't Have the 82nd Psalm Right

 I was prepared to like "The Unseen Realm", but if he has his two "go-to" passages wrong, what are the chances he has the rest right? Here I address his take on the 82nd Psalm

The Book of Enoch: Did the Apostles Consider it Inspired?

Probably not, for reasons made clear here...

Other Options for A Local Flood

 The Christ-Centered Model for Early Genesis posits that Adam's biblical role was not to be the first man, except in the sense that Christ is the second man. He is a figure of Christ, not the father of humanity. He was formed to bring Messiah. Thus, there were other people in the world when Adam was formed, even as Christ came into a world full of people. 

In such a case, the flood need not be global in extent to have global consequences, ending the line of Messiah would doom the entire planet, even if that line existed only in a small geographic region in the ancient Near East. I call this a "local flood with global consequences" and the language used in the text allows for this view. It was still a flood that threatened to bring the entire world to ruin by cutting off the line of Messiah and thus cutting us off from God. 

In the book, I speculated about the timing and location of the flood. The text has more give in the date than Bishop Ussher's methods would indicate, but not a great deal more. Perhaps we look a few thousand years further back than his numbers, but not much further. As for the location of such a flood, I have proposed we look to eastern Anatolia, perhaps the Araxes River Valley and nearby. But I don't think the text demands this location at all. It is a speculative matter. Perhaps it was a bit further east, in the Kura River Valley or beneath the Lesser Caucus Mountain. Less likely but still possible in my view is that they were further west and north, for example in the Ezurum Plain near Pasinler. 

I am basing these locations on the idea that the Garden of Eden was near the source for the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers, not their mouths. That and also that their movement appears to have been "east". After the flood it says they journeyed "from the east" to reach a plain in the land of Shinar. Based on that, you would think that the flood and the landing point of the ark were east of Mesopotamia. But some have said that this verse is only saying they journeyed "in the east". I don't buy that, but if that is true then perhaps the area of the line of Adam was in the area later inhabited by the Hurrians, circled in black below. Notice that the land in this region forms, with a couple of exceptions, a fairly effective "bowl" in which flood waters could accumulate. There are a couple of wide valleys that would argue against this, but suppose those valleys had been made wide by run-off from the great flood? 

I would add that the eastern-most portion of this choice is in the area of "Mount Judi" where many say that the Ark landed. The text of Genesis says only that it landed on "the mountianS of Ararat". This is a broad region from the old land of Uratu that includes both today's Mt. Ararat and Mount Judi. If the clans of Noah went down the Tigress to find the plains, known in antiquity as "the River of the East" then I suppose one could even keep some sense of a journey "from the east" to reach the land of Shinar. It would just mean from the river which defined the eastern boundary of that land.  

The diagram below also shows circled in black part of the more southernly reach of where I think the flood was, which is just my best guess right now. This is in the Lake Urmia basin area. 

Now many of my brothers and sisters are convinced of a southern location for Eden. One where the mouths of the Tigress and Euphrates are, and not their source. If that is so, it would be unlikely that the ark of Noah would drift north and wind up on "the Mountains of Ararat" as the region drains south. There was a land named "Arratta" that was probably to the east somewhere in the southern part of Iran, and if that is what is meant then I suppose a southern Eden is reasonable. I have drawn an arrow pointing to the direction of this unlikely location of the local flood of Noah. 

Click on picture to get a larger view 

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"Evolutionary" Radiations Don't Match Mass Extinctions

 Report in Popular Mechanics 

The article notes that mass extinctions seem to occur at 27 million year intervals. It also says that evolutionary radiations do not match up well with recovery from mass extinctions! Mass extinctions have been a go-to explanation when asked why organisms change is spurts and then have long periods of stability. This seems to challenge that explanation.

What causes periods of rapid change in natural forms if not mass extinctions with new niches opening up? It seems nature operates independently of the events that naturalists have been saying drive it. So it is something else!

Jews Don't Believe in the Doctrine of Original Sin. Have We Misinterpreted Paul?

 Jews do not believe in "original sin" as taught by most Christian denominations. That is, they do not believe that we inherit sin nature by virtue of being the offspring of Adam and Eve. They would say that they do not believe in it at all, though of course the Ultra-Orthodox would agree that Adam committed the first or original human sin. It seems that they do not extrapolate that to mean anything about our spiritual condition today. They sort of dodge question of whether we have a sin nature and if so, what its origin might be, saying "Whether man is a sinner by nature or not is immaterial." because repentance provides a way out. 

While I could take issue with how material it is, I was fascinated that they don't "believe in original sin". Again, when they say that, they mean that they don't think Adam's sin means anything for the rest of his offspring. His sins were his alone, not something for which we are accountable. If this is true, it resolves some theological questions regarding Adam being formed as a figure of Christ, a representative for an already-existing, though in innocence, humanity. 

Could Christian theologians have been misinterpreting the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:12? I think they have been. Not in the sense of "there is no such thing as original sin" but the nature by which Adam's original sin effects the rest of us has been misconstrued. For more on why I think that, and what Romans 5:12 really means, see....

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On Utnipishtim and Noah

 This are some rough notes, a comment I made in a FB group, that I wish to flesh out later. The question being "what evidene is there that the account in Genesis predates that of Utnipishtim?
He didn't "predate" him, because they are the same person! What we have to do is look at the elements of the account and determine which is most reasonably the derived version. The Babylonians kept using clay tablets while the Isralites adopted more Egyptian methods such as scrolls made of hide so unfortunately we can't just see who has the oldest record- you can't expect the hides to last as long. Scholars who accept the historicity of Moses put him in the 15th century BC, but the tolodoth phrase in the first 36 chapters of Genesis indicates he was stringing together an anthology of older accounts. That easily gets you prior to the 18th century BC record of Utnipishtim.

So let's look at the elements of the accounts and see which is most reasonably a derived version. Both say that the ark landed near the northern edge of Mesopotamia. This is a good distance from Babylon, and much farther from Uruk where Gilgamesh reigned. It is on the edge of the other end of Mesopotamia. It is even farther from Israel but the most common Y-haplogroup among Cohen surnamed Jews is J-M172 and J-M267 is the most common among the rest. This points to an origin in the Caucuses/Armenian region. This fits better with an origin account of people from the mountains that moved in to "the land of Shinar". So this fits better with the idea that they told the story to those dwelling in Mesopotamia when they got there, and those folks passed on a derived version.

Utnipishtim and his wife gain immortality. Noah lived much longer than a normal human, and his descendants revereted to more normal life-spans in a few generations, but the former seems more likely to be a dervived version of the latter, and more fanciful.

The conflicting account of what the god Ea said to Utnipishtim is also far more significant than the overlapping instructions of Elhohim and Yahweh to Noah. Did the god appear to him in person or in a dream? The Bablonian tale conflicts on this. The Genesis account can easily explain this as a coflation of the instructions Noah got from Elhomin, in a vision or voice or dream, and Yahweh, who seems more anthropomorphic (He shut them in the ark Himself).

The Babaloynian account also seems garbled when it comes to the process of landing. It makes it seem like he saw the slopes of the mountain that he landed on, as if it was out of the water, and yet still had to release the birds, who at first could not find land, even though Utnipishtim saw the slopes of the very mountain they were resting on. This indicates a garbled version of the Genesis account where they ran aground but the tops of the mountians were only visible either at a great distance or still under the water. This makes more sense with the birds not finding land at first.

So I would say the elements of the account make it clear which is the derived version.