The gods of Antiquity
“You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3 NASB
gods – Today I want to make some comments on Michael Heiser’s book, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Heiser’s basic position is that the biblical text, including the apostolic writings, rests on cultural and religious ideas that arise from Mesopotamian and Egyptian origins. In this view, research shows that imagery used in the Bible is either derived directly from, or in polemic opposition to, Mesopotamian and Egyptian constructs about gods, earth, heaven and many religious practices and rituals. Essentially this means that our ideas about the spiritual cosmos are not what the authors of the Bible had in mind. In their world, gods and other divine beings (elohim and angels) occupy a spiritual but real realm under the sovereignty of the one supreme God, YHVH. This unseen spiritual world intersects in various ways with our earthly world and when it does there are either representations (manifestations) of spiritual beings or sacred places in our world. According to Heiser, the biblical view of this real spiritual realm is the explanation for many odd passages in Scripture because the authors of the text presuppose its existence, its population and its influence on our physical world.
What this means is that understanding the actions and events of the Bible requires a deep appreciation of the Mesopotamian and Semitic view of the world. Scattered throughout Scripture are references to this worldview, from Eden to Paul’s description of the third heaven. The Mesopotamian backdrop implies that the biblical text is in many ways a polemic against prevailing worldviews of Mesopotamian peoples. It is not a declaration of absolute truth independent of its cultural origins.
Heiser’s insights are useful in explaining some of the details of familiar but disturbing stories. For example, Heiser helps us realize that the “serpent” in the Garden is more likely to be one of the members of the spiritual realm, a “divine” being, one of the elohim, than anything like a snake. Set against an Egyptian and Mesopotamian backdrop, the idea that a disgruntled spiritual being attempted to undermine the connection between the first human couple and YHVH makes sense, while reading the story as if the tempter is either a snake or the Devil makes no sense. Abraham’s encounter with the strangers, Moses’ encounter at the burning bush, the passage about the sons of God having sex with human females and other experiences of divine beings all make sense within the context of Mesopotamian cosmic geography.
But this raises a serious question. If what Heiser suggests in true, including his proposal that scribes edited the texts during the Babylonian exile in order to fortify the message of this cosmic geography, then we might reasonably ask, “In what sense can we consider any of these stories actually true of reality rather than just another version of an ancient cultural explanation of the world?” How is the Bible any different than other religious sacred texts? If it borrows cosmological concepts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and other ancient cultures, why should we believe that it is uniquely the true revelation of the only supreme God?
The biggest problem we have with reading the Bible is thinking we know what it says.
Most of us read the text according to our contemporary worldview. We forget that the Bible was written to groups of people who lived thousands of years ago in social and political circumstances that aren’t even remotely like ours. Of course, we usually assume that because it is God’s word, we can read it as though God is speaking directly to us. But any serious investigation demonstrates that what the original authors and audience heard was very different than what we think we hear today.
Heiser pushes us to ask, “What did the original audience really think?” Now we have to deal with this problem. Ah, more questions. Don’t you love them?
Topical Index: Michael Heiser, gods, God, Exodus 20:3
I suppose there is the case that we can rest assured about absolutely nothing. After all, our progress is a movement away from something and towards something else. Have we not all changed an aspect of our understanding (beliefs) just a little bit concerning the bible? If you are reading this by the way…you are on a website that presents exactly the above, non assurance. Deal with it.
But Heisher’s view summation is nothing new. In some form this has been around longer than us, or at least longer than my aunt (the Harvard School of Divinity graduate) who has presented this view of copy cat’s sitting on Mt. Sinai. After being a Nun and then a Jew (For her ex-husbands’ family) she is sitting somewhere in Arizona praying to a boulder and connecting to god.
I would offer that if we accept that the account of creation given to Moshe (or whomever) is NOT the original accounting (or at least the right accounting) then Heisher’s and my aunt’s protestations are plausible. BUT, if we accredit the accounting as the true accounting and accurate in its relaying to the group of people the bible is centered around (and increasingly being validated as such); then we have to say any other aberration presented in similarity and developed subsequent to that creation event by ancient cultures is that…an aberration of the truth.
Do we really need to live backwards to move forward?
No negative reply intended. Clicked the “Read More” prompt and the thumbs down popped up.
I just watched a documentary on the Jesus movement that started in the 60’s. The modern contemporary Christian music originated from converted hippies. Their music and influence has changed church culture in only 50 years.
What have thousands of years done to the original message????
The brain hurts some days.
Hey! I’m one of those Jesus Freaks of those years but we were all surfers in Pacific Beach San Diego! NOT HIPPIES! it was surf music and beach bikini bingo!
1 Timothy 6:19-21
19 Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.
20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:
21 Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Modern archaeology provides our current milieu, much as that Mesopotamian and Egyptian background provided that ancient worldview, and we look at the past through the lens of our worship of our own modern take on reality; namely science. This science, which we hold as the supreme authority, is what we judge the Bible through. If it does not line up with what science says, then we adjust our reading glasses; but modern science has its own paradigm, and that is humanism. Everything from how we attempt to date the past to how the modern translations interpret the text is filtered through this lens. If it does not exalt the human as the supreme starting point, then it must not be ‘true’.
According to modern science, a religious take on reality MUST be presupposed by what those people had invented, or believed to be true. Ancient societies, according to our modern humanistic lens, anyway, MUST have started out blindly guessing about God, and, over evolutionary time, they eventually, through the smartness of their ever increasing intellectual capacity, got closer and closer to the ‘truth’. Hence, we started out with ‘primitive’ notions of multiple gods but eventually we got smart enough to divine that there was just one.
But what if people started out perfectly well aware of Who God was because they had direct contact and a perfect beginning relationship with Him that only rebellion could deny? If you start from that beginning, isn’t it much more likely that the oral memory (which we know had to have been prodigious) a people had was much more related to their relative defiance of, or obedience to, Him than their ‘primitive’, up-from-the-mud imaginations would have concocted? What if we started from a Garden instead of primordial muck and the given state of people’s worldview had much more to do with the relative insanity created by rebellious defiance than it did with any evolution from simple to complex?
Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, too, developed DIRECTLY after the flood. The tower of Babel was not built out of ‘primitive’ ignorance, but out of intelligent defiance, and both these religions came directly out of Babel. These were people who “forgot” their God the exact same way the Israelites kept “forgetting” Him. Maybe we are still wanting to “forget”, too.
Sounds like a whole lot of assuming going on. Borrowing from other cultures, editing, etc. is only another aspect of assuming something is true. But, this I know, if I pick up a rock and drop it, it hits the dirt. If someone does the same thing on the other side of the globe, while to me it seems it’s rising, to them it also hits the dirt. Truth works the same way everywhere you apply it, but it’s relevant to where you’re standing. The narratives in scripture, along with the laws, precepts, etc. are like that, the question for me is, what am I looking for, the story, or the truth.
We live 20 minutes from the hall where the Jesus seminars took place. The “Biblical Scholars ” Voted on what they belived where the actual words of Yeshua and what where conjecture (might be true) or fabrications. A friend was allowed to join the “Scholars ” and vote with one of the three little beads that represented their votes. Simply pas them in for the couting aND we hAve our corrected text. . Anyone could who wanted to, (no credentials necessary I presume.) could. Vote just show up. The vtoes where simple 1.. agree it is a true word of Jesus 2. It was a fabrication of the apostles for but might be truel. 3. It was a lie. Our graphit designer friend was the sole descent in vote on many a scripture. So does man continue to sit on the judgment seat and decide who he thinks God is or does man take him at his word? And how do we know for sure whichever words are actually His? Ah faith required yet agin to discern the mysteries of life and faith. “Faith” being the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things unseen. That’s what my Bible tells me is true and I choose to belive it. Although totaly unreasonable that’s my choice anyway.
Sorry for the typos editing protocols would be a blessing…
If you were to see an angel today, would it be different from an angel appearing
thousands of years ago? Eternal creatures remain eternal, right?
God’s Word is eternal, too. True, it has passed through ages and cultures, and obviously
the authors wrote according to what their inspiration was at the time. And no doubt,
the cultural insights of various time periods if they were known to us today, would heighten
and deepen for us certain points of their understanding. On the whole, however, Scripture
tells us His Word will never pass away. So you and I today are as richly blessed and
transformed by His Word and His Spirit as any man ever was. Will seeking more and digging
more help? Absolutely!!! “He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”
That’s why all of us are on this site!
Heiser’s “The Unseen Realm” gave me many things to consider. Glad I am not tied to a modern literal view I used to believe about scripture. (Thank you, Skip!) Just being able to recognize that both Moses and Paul had personal encounters in another realm, makes me wonder how I would convey that same information to others if it had happened to me.
Yes, Skip, I love the questions!
I’m not tied to a literal interpretation of scripture, but then I am tied to a literally interpreted God as I walk His in the realms of wonder. Yet I do believe whole heartily that it’s simply history and not allegory while yet allegorical. Nonsense you think? or Non-rational?
I have said it before, but I will risk saying it again.
What is truth? Truth is what we measure everything else by, but truth will always be subject to what we bring to it. Therefore, truth will always require a measure of faith. Truth may be self evident, but that does not mean that we can see it for what it is, for we bring our paradigms along with us. Before we get hasty and think we have the ‘correct’ lens through which to view history, I say we need to look at the lens first.
If the Bible does not provide its own lens (standard) by which to measure itself by, then what do we use? That subjective interpretation of extinct cultures we call ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian? Are THEY the correct lens? Seen through which modern viewpoint? Archaeologists? Who is going to tell us what THEY see truth as?
I have to bring a measure of faith to whatever viewpoint I choose, but do I now need to bring it to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to ‘help’ me? Are they the ultimate standard; the ultimate lens through which to assess the truth? Whatever happened to the Bible being its own interpreter (not to mention that much-maligned Holy Spirit Who just can’t be trusted), and I don’t mean that we don’t need all the historical angles we can get our hands on, I just mean that, in the end, we are going to still have to put all of it through some sort of crucible. My question is, what crucible? Egyptian? Really? I am supposed to put my faith in the Egyptian view of reality in order to ‘understand’ the Bible? Are we serious?
I am questioning the questioners, seeing how questions are the order of this day.
Now either you’ve said too much, or you’ve said too little… 🙂
How is the biblical text any different than any other religious sacred text? This is the question I have been asking! So what is the answer? Why do we chose this story as ours and hold it up as “truth” over other religions?
Could the answer be that through out history only the Jewish nation came back from total exile and it is the ONLY nation that has done so?
I have never been a given to the presupposition that every word found in our Scripture is for certain, God breathed, God dictated or God ordained. I find no heartburn with the assumption that our Holy Writ may have well been, to some extent, derived some of its’ origins from other cultures, cultures that had no recognition of the Creator nor His purposes for creating nor His plan to renew and redeem His creation. I have some knowledge that at least some number of our Proverbs, came from Egyptian wisdom literature, that some of the New Testament letters credited to Paul, were actually not penned by Paul, but by someone using his name to get that letter accepted, (scholars can only say with certainty that six of the Pauline letters were actually written by Paul), yet all ‘Paul’s’ letters are considered inspired. I accept that the original books to be canonized were more or less forcibly termed canon, by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who appeared to be a Christian in the least sense of the word (continuing to mint coins with images of pagan gods and coming to faith only days before his death through Baptism). These are just a few items and I accept that there are many more that I am not aware of and those I am aware of, but because of brevity, choose not to mention. In its’ simplest form, the Bible is a very human account of the Creator of the Universe’s interaction with humanity and humanity’s interaction with God. It is a continuous narrative from Genesis to Revolution of those interactions; both successes and failures. It is a story of God’s faithfulness to His covenant with Israel and His intent to bring all the Nations into that covenant under Israel’s Messiah. So if a tale or two, for whatever reason, made have made its’ way into Holy Writ, it’s not a big deal in the overall scheme of God’s plan. That plan is that His will, will be done, on this Earth as it is in His space (Heaven). We can snivel about things like ‘inspiration’ and inerrancy until we draw our last breath, and it really won’t mean a ‘hill of beans’. Scholars and theologians have been doing that for over two thousand years. And to what end? It seems to me, it just keeps us from doing the work of the God’s Kingdom today and tomorrow. This Earth matters. And unless you are married to the Platonic dualism the Western church has been mired in, for the past three hundred years, you will know salvation is of this Earth, on this Earth and will eternally be attached to this Earth, when all God’s saints are raised to new bodily life on planet earth. We were created for this Earth, to steward this Earth and to reflect God’s glory into His Good Creation. The Renewed Creation was inaugurated with Yeshua’s resurrection and will be completed when the Lord returns and the dead in Christ are raised to new life, complete with a new transformed body, reflective of the Lord’s present human body, presently residing in God’s space (Heaven). His return will be the final merging of Heaven and Earth and we will do the work God has prepared for us in his renewed Creation. So does it really matter if Scripture contains talking snakes or asses or contains some truth brought in from pagan cultures? To me it doesn’t. What matters is the continuous narrative of the human story, God’s interaction with that story and God’s faithfulness and love for all humanity and His covenant.