Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 56

True Lies: The Reality of UFO Deception

Jack Brewer recently posted a short, cogent essay defending the reality of UFO “mirage men” — government disinformation agents whose work propelled (propels?) UFO interest and inquiry in decades gone by. His post most immediately defends the perspective of James Carrion, who focuses on this sort of thing in his own research. Carrion recently wrote an essay on his own blog entitled “Human Deception at Play during the UFO Wave of 1947,” which illustrates (with circumstantial documentation) how “mirage men” could have been involved in UFO events of that famous year.

I’m in agreement with Jack and James. I don’t see any reason to conclude that the approach isn’t plausible or that Carrion and others should abandon the trajectory.

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 115: Ezekiel 6

The episode is now live.

Short Introduction to the Apostles’ Creed

Listeners to the Naked Bible Podcast will recall that I had Rick Brannan on as a guest. Rick has produced a short (82 pp), 12-week introduction to the Apostles’ Creed that is available on Amazon and Kindle. While I’m not a fan of creeds, the Apostles’ Creed is so compact that it doesn’t suffer from problems that occur with later confessions — elaboration and proof-texting.

 

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 114: Ezekiel 4-5

The episode is now live.

John Piper Blogs on Psalm 82 — and Doesn’t Fudge the Text

I just wanted to extend a thanks to John Piper for his recent essay on his Desiring God blog. Dr. Piper’s short essay on Psalm 82 was entitled, “Putting the Gods in Their Place.” I hope you’ll all give it a read. (Thanks to those who brought it to my attention).

While I wish Dr. Piper hadn’t used scare quotes around the word gods, he doesn’t fudge the truth that the biblical writers believed the gods were real. In fact, he specifically (and accurately) connects the gods to the principalities and powers that Paul wrote about. Beyond that point, he takes a pastoral approach to the passage.

I’ve read too many evangelicals that basically end up saying the text in Psalm 82 just can’t mean what it plainly says. (“The gods are just people … move along citizens, nothing to see here”). Dr. Piper doesn’t do that. I don’t know if he has read my book The Unseen Realm or read any of my journal articles on Psalm 82 and the divine council. I’m going to ask Lexham to send him a copy of the book as a token of appreciation for not following the herd.

The essay (and the scare quotes) made me think of my first publishing experience. Way back in 2001 at the end of the editorial process for my article (“Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God”) in Dallas Seminary’s Bibliotheca Sacra journal, the editor (the late Roy Zuck) called me at home about the article. He told me understood what I was saying (the article had a whole section on Psalm 82) but was a little nervous about using the plural gods in the article. He was hesitant over what the readership response would be. I recommend that they substitute “plural elohim” for “gods” in the article. He loved the idea. What made me smile was that, of course, there was no difference in meaning, yet somehow the biblical Hebrew term made it “safer”!  When I got the proofs, though, nothing in the article was changed. He just needed a ready answer for protest letters, I suppose. Anyway, a good memory.

Unseen Realm Interview – A Canadian Podcast

Last week I did a two-hour interview with the Light for Souls Ministry on The Unseen Realm. The ministry is out of Alberta (Edmonton). Both of the hosts had read the book, which allowed us to spend some time talking about the impact of the content, as opposed to rehearsing the content. I thought it was a good interview.

More Kindle Academic Papers from Mike Available

A couple of weeks ago I posted three of my conference papers that have been converted to Kindle format. Here are four additional papers for Kindle:

Michael S. Heiser, “Thinking Clearly about the Jesus Family Tomb: A Conference Paper”

Michael S. Heiser, “Anthropomorphisms in P: A Conference Paper”

Michael S. Heiser, “Are Yahweh and El Separate Deities in Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32? A Conference Paper”

Michael S. Heiser, “Did Jesus Allow for Reincarnation?: A Conference Paper”

 

Important New Article on the Septuagint

I’m happy to announce and recommend this article by Ed Glenny: “The Septuagint and Biblical Theology.” I’m even happier that it’s freely accessible to all of you.

Ed was my first Bible teacher way back in the day at Bible college. Listeners to the Naked Bible Podcast may recall his name, as I chatted with him on the podcast during last November’s ETS/SBL meetings.

Here’s a portion of the Glenny article, drawn from this link (which contains notifications of some other new Septuagint [LXX] work, but those aren’t freely accessible):

This article addresses the question: How does the LXX relate to the Christian Old Testament, and more specifically, what role does the LXX play in Christian biblical theology? The first part of the article is a brief overview of five different approaches to the role of the LXX in a whole-Bible biblical theology. The five approaches are: (1) LXX Priority and Canon, (2) LXX Priority, Hebrew Canon, (3) Hebrew Priority and Canon, LXX Bridge, (4) Hebrew and Greek Are Sanctified by the Spirit, and finally (5) Hebrew Priority and Canon, LXX Commentary. Building on the different perspectives surveyed in this study, it is suggested that that the importance and function of the LXX in Christian biblical theology is at least fourfold: (1) The LXX can function as the source of Christian biblical theology; (2) The LXX is valuable for biblical theology in its role as a commentary on the biblical text; (3) The LXX is a bridge or link between the Christian OT and NT; and (4) The LXX complements the Hebrew Scriptures.

Testimonial Regarding Recent Fern and Audrey Work

I’m writing this as vaguely as possible due to privacy interests.

The following testimonial comes from someone in the ministry I met during one of my Unseen Realm events. This pastor and his wife needed Fern and Audrey’s help as they are working through survivor / ritual abuse / trauma-based mind programming issues. For what that language (broadly) entails, see here. Regular readers will of course know about Fern and Audrey’s ministry to survivors. The MIQLAT ministry is helping to raise money to cover survivor expenses.

The first line made me chuckle — the comparison to the X-Men “school for the gifted” (no Wolverine there). This pastor and his wife have had several sessions with Fern and Audrey at this point. The outcome is precisely what we all hope to see.

Our arrival at Dr. Xavier’s School for the Gifted (what I fondly call the office of Fern and Audrey) set the tone for our entire stay. Fern and Audrey greeted my wife and I with warm hugs and great hospitality. From the first moment, we felt welcomed and loved. Fern and Audrey have created a safe place for survivors of SRA and TMC to begin to heal and discover their gifts. These wonderful women are truly on the front line, seeking to advance God’s rule and reign by beginning the process of helping move His precious children into the glorious future He has in store for them. Through the generosity of the MIQLAT community and the Go Fund Me campaign, my wife and I have begun the journey to healing and wholeness! Thank you, everyone, who has contributed to Fern and Audrey’s work! My wife and I are so humbled and grateful.

Gender Insanity and a Witless Rabbi

Someone sent me this editorial today from the NYT: “Is God Transgender?”

The article is by a rabbi who (intentionally? ignorantly?) thinks that metaphor and the “inconsistencies” of grammatical gender in the Hebrew Bible mean that God is either transgender or doesn’t care about gender distinction.

This is utterly absurd. While Dr. Michael Brown has already weighed in on this (with a lot of salient detail from the biblical text), I’d like to add that grammatical gender has nothing to do with “creating” biological gender or endorsing transgenderism. Grammatical gender is an artificial means by which inflected languages (languages that use suffixes, prefixes, and infixes on nouns and verbs) match words with each other for grammatical coherence. That is, it’s through grammatical gender that speakers and readers of a given language know what words go with what — which word is the subject or object of a verb, for example.

From a scholarly book on Hebrew morphology (perhaps the rabbi needs to read something about Hebrew):

In Biblical Hebrew, as in the other Semitic languages, there are two genders: masculine and feminine. Gender is a grammatical category that formally marks agreement between words in a sentence; thus, its primary function is syntactic. As is true of many languages with gender, the gender of substantives in Biblical Hebrew sometimes correlates with the natural sex of animate beings. But this correspondence is only partial; more broadly, all nouns, including inanimate objects, are classified as grammatically masculine or feminine. Therefore, not only animate beings are either masculine (like אִישׁ ‘man’) or feminine (like אִשָּׁה ‘woman’), but also inanimate objects (such as שֻׁלְחָן ‘table’ masculine, כִּסֵּא ‘chair’ masculine, אֶ֫רֶץ ‘earth, land’ feminine, יַבָּשָׁה ‘dry land’ feminine).

So … should we assume that a table has a penis? That dry land has a vagina? If my table lacks a penis is it a hermaphrodite table? Did someone give it a sex change?

How about German … The noun for “maiden, little girl” in German is das mädchen, which is grammatically neuter (some inflected languages, like German and Greek, have a neuter gender category). Are little girls in Germany considered sexless?

One could go on and on with this sort of linguistic idiocy and self-delusional political correctness that demonstrates our culture’s flight from reason. Once people have abandoned reason, there’s little one can do. You can’t . . .  well . . . reason with them. This sort of nonsensical thinking about language doesn’t do anything to help people who truly struggle with gender identity.

  Joshua Blau, Joshua. Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction. Edited by M. O’Connor and Cynthia L. Miller. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010, 263.