Green Baggins

As lately as twenty years ago or so, if you had asked me what I thought about demon possession in the West, I would have said Satan doesn’t need it since he has the entire entertainment industry, greed, and substance abuse to carry out everything he wants, while he and his ilk are pushed off into the shadows and thus ignored. Remember (via Lewis’s Screwtape Letters) that he likes either to be ignored or to be put on equal footing with God. What he doesn’t like is to be warred against by prayer warriors who know that he exists, and is very powerful (much more powerful than we are), but still infinitely below God Himself.

So in today’s world, with paganism on the rise, witchcraft becoming intriguing to people, and Satan worship also becoming appealing, more attention needs to be paid to these kinds of issues in the West. Incidentally, I came up with a syllogism recently concerning Satan worship that seems powerful to me. Firstly, Satan is a murderer (John 8:44). By means of his deception, he murdered Adam and Eve (which is not to absolve them of guilt, but still, Satan’s part is diabolically murderous). Secondly, Adam represented the whole human race. Therefore, Satan worshipers are bowing down to their own murderers.

The demonic world is not the only part of the unseen realm getting new attention, however. Enter Michael Heiser, who died last year at the age of 60. Before he died, he wrote several books related to these topics, and the one that seems to have gotten the most traction in the scholarly and evangelical world is The Unseen Realm. I believe, that while he has some very interesting and helpful things to contribute to the topic, he does not prove, in the end, to be a reliable guide. I propose to go through this book chapter by chapter and evaluate his arguments and conclusions.

Chapter 1 is entitled “Reading Your Bible Again-for the First Time.” He describes the pathway by which he arrived at the conclusion that there is a pantheon of divine, supernatural, yet created “gods” (Hebrew Elohim). A friend of his handed him a Hebrew Bible open to Psalm 82, verse 1, which he translates in the book as follows: “God (elohim) stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgment in the midst of the gods (elohim).” Noting that the word elohim occurs twice in the verse, he noted that the first instance refers to Yahweh, but the second verse says “plain as day: The God of the Old Testament was part of an assembly-a pantheon-of other gods” (p. 11).

He dismisses the classical interpretation of the elohim as human judges quite dismissively (he does this with most interpretations he disagrees with) by saying that it was “disturbingly weak.” He knows that they could not be correct because “Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth” (12). This is not a given in the text of Psalm 82. The foundations of the earth in verse 5 could simply mean that justice is problematic everywhere if it is problematic in Israel. The call for God to judge the earth in verse 8 could simply mean that God’s justice everywhere will ensure justice in Israel. The elohim are therefore not explicitly said to be corruptly governing the nations of the earth in Psalm 82.

There are huge problems with Heiser’s interpretation of Psalm 82. The first problem is a simple one. The question of verse 2 hardly seems likely on a divine being interpretation. The “wicked” are surely wicked humans. How then could the elohim, if they are divine beings, be showing partiality to the wicked? How does the divine-to-human partiality work in this situation?

Secondly, as Richard Phillips notes in his commentary on the passage, why would God entrust justice of the weak, fatherless, afflicted, and destitute to these elohim in verse 3?

Thirdly, Jesus interprets verse 6 authoritatively in John 10:31-36. Jesus’ point is that He should not be accused of blasphemy simply by claiming to be the Son of God, since even humans could be called elohim on occasion. Heiser has an extremely convoluted attempt to circumvent the meaning of this passage in footnote 3 on p. 268. He says modern commentators fail to give due place to the original context of Psalm 82 “which has the divine council as its focus.” This is doubtful. He misses the point of Jesus’ words entirely when he says that Jesus was trying to argue about Himself. He wasn’t. He was arguing about the Jews’ injustice in charging Him with blasphemy. He begs the question of Psalm 82’s focus as well. Jesus’ words plainly challenge the “divine council” interpretation of Psalm 82, to which Heiser basically says, “but Psalm 82 is about the divine council, therefore John 10 can’t be saying what commentators think it is saying.” It is difficult to see how this interpretation of Psalm 82 as referring to humans could undermine Jesus’ claim to be God, when, as Andreas Kostenberger says, “In essence, Jesus is saying that there is OT precedent for referring to humans as ‘gods'” (CNTUOT, 465). Kevin Bauder (in an article cited below) adds an intriguing layer to this interpretation, since He is standing among people who are setting themselves up to be His judges!

The other, more serious objection to the “human judge” interpretation is verse 7, which seems to put distance between men and gods: “nevertheless, like men you shall die.” However, Kevin Bauder has an excellent answer to this objection in his article “Who Judges the Judge? Psalm 82” in the volume The Old Testament Yesterday and Today: Essays in honor of Michael P.V. Barrett, pp. 153ff. His argument is that these unjust judges became arrogant to the point of thinking they were superhuman (pp. 176ff). So the stricture in verse 7 says that they have not progressed or evolved beyond humanity nearly as much as they think they have.

A further objection to the divine council interpretation is the ignorance ascribed in verse 5. This seems unlikely on a divine council interpretation (see Bauder, 177).

Despite Heiser’s attempts to reboot the divine council interpretation of Psalm 82 on a footing independent of the history of religions basis most liberal scholars used before, his case is ultimately unconvincing here.