What is the Divine Council? Part 2: Supernatural Rebellion
In the Bible, the Hebrew term elohim is used to describe not only God, but other supernatural beings as well. One use of Elohim is for members of God’s Divine Council, supernatural beings that help God govern creation. In modern thought, we would call these supernatural beings angels, although angel means messenger and is more of a job title. In this post, we describe three events in the Bible where members of the Divine Council rebelled against God’s rule.
In a previous post, we discussed the Divine Council view of the Bible, popularized by the late scholar Michael Heiser. In this view, the term Elohim, one of the Hebrew names for God, does not just refer to only God, but also a wide variety of supernatural beings. Included in this description are members of God’s Divine Council, supernatural beings who help God govern creation.
In modern thought, we would call these supernatural beings angels, but this is not an entirely accurate description In the Old Testament. The Hebrew word translated as angel is malak, which means messenger. In the New Testament, the Greek word translated as angel is aggelos, which also means messenger. A close reading of the Old Testament reveals that other words besides malak are used to describe supernatural beings who serve in the court of God. In other words, some Elohim in God’s service act as angels, or messengers, while others have other roles.
For example, Cherubim and seraphim are winged creatures that guard God’s throne room and the entrance to the garden of Eden. The sons of God (bene Elohim) are members of God’s courts. Ha satan is the accuser, a supernatural being who advises God in the book of Job. Together, all of these supernatural beings are members of God’s Divine Council.
The scholarly consensus is the members of the Divine Council were, like mankind, created by God. When this creation occurred is unknown, but it is presumed to have occurred before the creation of the universe described in Genesis 1.
Not all member of the Divine Council appear to have agreed with God’s decision to create mankind, however and many of them chose to rebel against God, becoming fallen angels. Michael Heiser, the Old Testament scholar who popularized the Divine Council view, points to three separate events in the Bible which he sees as acts of rebellion of the elohim against God. The exact reason for this rebellion is not given in the Bible, but most scholars agree that these supernatural rebels opposed the creation of mankind.
The Garden of Eden
The first act of rebellion Heiser points to is in the garden of Eden. In Genesis 3, the snake (Hebrew nachash) tempts and deceives Eve. Rather than a literal snake, Heiser identifies the tempter as a snake-like supernatural being, or an elohim. Much later, in the New Testament, this elohim is identified as Satan.
In Genesis 3, the nachash, convinces Eve to disobey God and eat from the tree of life. Of note, the nachash must convince Eve to act of her own free will, choosing to disobey. In order to convince her, the nachash raises three doubts in Eve’s mind: God didn’t really tell Eve not to eat from the tree of life, God lied and eating the fruit will not cause Eve’s death, and God doesn’t want Eve to eat from the tree of life because if she does, she will become like God. One of the themes this series will explore is these lies about God will be repeated again and again whenever the forces of evil want to cast doubt on the intentions of God.
In the end, Eve gave into the argument of the nachash and ate from the tree of life. She also gave the fruit to Adam, who ate as well.
As a result, God curses the nachash and exiles Adam and Eve from the garden. God also foretells a coming conflict between the seed of the nachash and the seed of the woman. The nachash is not specifically identified as Satan in Genesis 3, but later passages, especially in the New Testament, link the nachash to the primary adversary of God and mankind, Satan.
Because of his actions in the garden, the nachash, or Satan, is identified as the first supernatural rebel, or fallen angel. As the original fallen angel, he is given a special role in the Bible and by the time of the New Testament, he is identified as the ruler of the world and leader of other fallen angels.
The Nephilim
The second rebellion by supernatural beings Heiser identifies is right before the flood, in Genesis 6. In a short passage that has puzzled scholars for centuries, the Bible describes an episode where the sons of God took the daughters of men as wives.
When man began to multiply on the surface of the ground, and daughters were born to them, God’s sons saw that men’s daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives. Yahweh said, “My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were in the earth those days, and also after that, when God’s sons came in to men’s daughters and had children with them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of reknown.
Genesis 6: 1-4.
Here we see the term ben Elohim, or sons of God, a term that almost universally refers to supernatural beings, or angels. Taking this translation, this passage seems to describe an episode where supernatural beings, angels, took human women as wives, creating hybrid children called Nephilim. The exact meaning of Nephilim is unclear, but in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, the word gigantos is used, which means giants.
This is admittedly, a strange story. It is so strange in fact, that numerous scholars have proposed that the term bene Elohim must refer to some group of men, instead of a group of angels. While this view is more in line with our modern sensibilities, every other time in the Old Testament, when bene Elohim is used, it refers to supernatural beings, or angels.
As strange as this story seems, it is expanded on in the Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch, or more specifically, the First Book of Enoch, is thought to have been written in the Second Temple Period, the couple of hundred years between the Jewish return from exile in the 5th Century BC up until the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.
Enoch, the titular character of the book, was an ancestor of Abraham, and is discussed in Genesis 5.
Enoch lived sixty-five years, then became the father of Methuselah. After Methsuelah’s birth, Enoch walked with God for three hundred years, and became the father of more sons and daughters. All the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him.
Genesis 5: 21-24
The Book of Enoch builds on Genesis 6 and Genesis 5 and expands the story. It tells of the Watchers, angelic beings who came to Earth and bred with human women. For their disobedience, God condemned them to the Abyss. Later in the book, Enoch is taken up to heaven and given an apocalyptic vision.
While scholars seem to universally agree the Book of Enoch was written thousands of years after the time that Enoch would have lived, the story seems to have been well known among the New Testament authors. The Dead Sea scrolls, which include the oldest existing copies of the Old Testament, also contain fragments of 11 manuscripts written in Aramaic This implies Enoch was considered important enough by the scholars at Qumron to have multiple copies. Additionally, both Jude and Peter seem to make specific reference to the content of 1 Enoch.
Jude references the coming judgement from Enoch’s apocalyptic vision:
About these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their works on ungodliness which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Jude 1: 14
While 2 Peter references the judgement of the Watchers:
For if God didn’t spare angels when they sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and didn’t spare the ancient world, but cast them down to Tartarus and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;
2 Peter 2: 4-5
Heiser points to the acts of the bene Elohim in Genesis 6 as the second act of rebellion by supernatural beings. By taking human women as wives and creating children, the Watchers violated God’s commands, violating the separation between the supernatural and natural worlds. In 1 Enoch, the watchers are cast into the Abyss as punishment for their acts.
The Tower of Babel
The third example of supernatural rebellion Heiser points to is the tower of Babel. Genesis chapter 10, called the table of nations, lays out the 70 nations founded by the descendants of Noah. Chapter 11 describes how each of these nations came to have their own language.
The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”
Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Cone, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of the earth.
Genesis 11: 1-9
Although this passage does not initially seem to any relation to the Divine Council, Heiser points to a verse in Deuteronomy 32, a song Moses gives to Israel. In it, Moses refers to the division of the nations after the tower of Babel.
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
When he separated the children of men,
He set the bounds of the peoples
According to the number of the children of Israel.
Deuteronomy 32: 8
In the Masoretic text, the Hebrew text that is the basis for modern translations of the Old Testament, Moses sings God divided the nations “According to the number of the children of Israel.” In Hebrew, this phrase in bene Israel.
However, in a scroll of Deuteronomy found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, this phrase is “According to the number of the children of God”, or bene Elohim. Since the Dead Sea scrolls predate the Masoretic scroll by almost a thousand years, Heiser proposes the Dead Sea scroll reading is the original, true text.
Heiser then argues that the Tower of Babel was an act of rebellion against God. Instead of worshipping God, mankind decided to make their own rules. In response, God divorced himself from the resulting nations, assigning each nation to its own elohim, or supernatural being. At some time, either before the tower of Babel or after the allotment of nations by God, these Elohim decided to pursue their own goals and interests and not those of God. These Elohim became the gods of the foreign nations, opposing the will of God. God would later begin to reverse this punishment when he picked Abram to be the father of a new nation, God’s nation of Israel, which God would use to reconcile the rebellious nations with God.
Strength of the Divine Council View
While the Divine Council theory may seem strange to modern sensibilities, it does have great explanatory power. The entire Bible now becomes a struggle between the forces of God, representing creation and life, and the forces of the rebellious elohim, representing destruction and death.
A quick analysis reveals that the Divine Council theory provides a better explanatory model for the use of Elohim than the other theories discussed in previous posts. Under the Divine Council, Elohim is a generic term, not an outgrowth of polytheism. While other polytheistic religious systems, such as Canaanite, Babylonian and Egyptian bear some resemblance to the Divine Council theory, these are corruptions of the true order of Creation where God is the Most High and the other elohim were created to serve him, but later rebelled. When taken in light of this idea, it becomes clear that in many instance of the Bible, God deliberately challenges the other elohim, reminding them that he is indeed the Most High.
As an explanation for the various names of God, the Divine Council also provides a better explanation than the Documentary Hypothesis. Instead of an indication of separate religious traditions that were merged into one, Elohim is a generic term and YHVH is the name God gives to Israel (translated as He is, a reference to the statement “I am who I am.”)
The Divine Council theory does not undermine the Christian view of the Trinity, either. Heiser points out many instances of the different manifestations of God. One is a fiery, dangerous presence while the other is a man-like figure that interacts with humans. The Spirit also makes appearances, often as ruach Elohim, or the breath or spirit of God.
For the purpose of this series, a discussion of the theme of spiritual warfare within the Bible, the Divine Council theory has great explanatory power. Several difficult passages, when taken in the context of the Divine Council, fall into place and paint a larger, more complex picture. For this reason, we will use the Divine Council theory as a model for analyzing and explaining the Bible in terms of spiritual warfare.
Previous: Who are the Elohim?
Additional Reading
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press. Bellingham ,Washington. 2015.
