The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

Understanding that we are God’s imagers on earth helps to parse the plurals in Genesis 1:26 and the change to singular language in the next verse. God alone created humankind to function as his administrators on earth. But he has also created the other elohim of the unseen realm. They are also like him. They carry out his will in that realm, acting as his representatives. They are his heavenly council in the unseen world. We are God’s council and administration in this realm. Consequently, the plurals inform us that both God’s families—the human and the nonhuman—share imaging status, though the realms are different. As in heaven, so on Earth.

After the fall that plan was not altered. Eventually, God would decide to tabernacle within humans, through his Spirit. Language describing believers as sons or children of God (John 1:12; 1 John 3:1–3), or as “adopted” into God’s family (Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5) is neither accidental nor pragmatic. It reflects the original vision of Genesis. And once we are glorified, the two council-families will be one—in a new Eden.

But the description of Eden as the home of humankind deflects our attention away from Eden’s primary status.

Eden was God’s home on earth. It was his residence. And where the King lives, his council meets. As modern readers, we don’t see how that thinking is telegraphed in the biblical text. Ancient readers couldn’t miss it.

The divine abodes of gods—the places they lived and where they met for governing the affairs of the human world—were portrayed in several ways. Two of the most common were gardens and mountains. Eden is described as both in the Old Testament.

ANCIENT UGARIT

Scholars have learned a lot from this library, about both Ugarit and the content of the Old Testament. The chief deity of Ugarit was El—one of the names that appear in the Old Testament for the God of Israel. El had a divine council whose members were “the sons of El,” and he had a coruler, Baal. Since El’s and Baal’s duties sometimes appeared to overlap, and since Ugarit was so geographically close to Israel, it was small wonder that Baal worship was such a problem in Israel. The discoveries at Ugarit put all of that Old Testament history in context.

As we’ll see in the ensuing chapters, the biblical version of the divine council at the divine abode includes a human presence.

One more verse about Eden—one that will vault us into the next chapter: Eden is described in Ezekiel 28:2 as the “seat of the gods.” The phrase should be familiar to modern readers. It speaks of governing authority (“county seat”; “Congressional seat”). Ezekiel’s words draw attention to Eden as a seat of authority and action. There was work to be done. God had plans for the whole planet, not just Eden.

Not all the world was Eden.

Notice that verse 28 says that the earth needed filling. This does not refer to Eden.

Cultivation of the garden and subduing the earth are not the same tasks.

Genesis 1 and 2 aren’t intended to be chronological in their relationship.

We can see that the tasks of humanity, taken in tandem with the earlier observations that require Eden and Earth to be distinct, distinguish Eden and the earth. It makes no sense to subdue the garden of God. It’s already what God wants it to be. There’s no place on Earth like it. If it needed subjugation, that would imply imperfection. That’s something that cannot be said about Eden, but it’s true of the rest of the world. For sure God was happy with the whole creation. He pronounced it “very good” (Gen 1:31). But “very good” is not perfect.

It makes no sense to subdue the garden of God. It’s already what God wants it to be.

That’s something that cannot be said about Eden, but it’s true of the rest of the world.

This is perhaps important to those who’d argue that the earth was created “old” and therefore could have us believing it’s millions of years old. Maybe?

The distinction helps us see that the original task of humanity was to make the entire Earth like Eden.

Adam and Eve lived in the garden. They cared for it. But the rest of the earth needed subduing. It wasn’t awful—in fact Genesis 1 tells us that it was habitable. But it wasn’t quite what Eden was. The whole world needs to be like God’s home. He could do the job himself, but he chose to create human imagers to do it for him. He issued the decree; they were supposed to make it happen. They were to do that by multiplying and following God’s direction.

First Kings 22 provides a revealing glimpse into a divine council meeting.

The first fifteen verses set the context. After three years of peace between Syria and Israel, King Jehoshaphat of Judah, the southern Israelite kingdom, paid a visit to Ahab, the king of Israel, the northern kingdom that had broken away from the tribes loyal to David’s dynasty. The northern kings were described throughout the Old Testament as spiritually apostate. Ahab was arguably the worst of the bunch.

Verse 25 says very plainly that the Most High is sovereign. It is clearly singular. The phrase “heaven is sovereign” is interesting because the Aramaic word translated heaven (shemayin) is plural and is accompanied by a plural verb. The plurality of shemayin can point to either the members of the council or the council as a collective. In any event, the wording is suggestive of the interchange between council and Most High earlier in Daniel 4.

I use the phrase “the satan” deliberately. The Hebrew (satan) means something like “adversary,” “prosecutor,” or “challenger.” It speaks of an official legal function within a ruling body—in this case, Yahweh’s council. When Yahweh asks the satan where he has been, we learn that his job involves investigating what is happening on earth (Job 1:7). He is, so to speak, Yahweh’s eyes and ears on the ground, reporting what he has seen and heard.

This is why, in the Hebrew Bible, the sons of God are actually never called angels. That is, there are no passages in which beney elohim (and similar phrases) occur in parallel with malʾakim (“angels”).

Compare Isa 14:13–14.

The notion that stars were animate divine beings was part of Israelite thinking.

The fact that, in biblical theology, there can by definition be only one uncreated being in turn means that all other elohim inhabitants of the spiritual realm are made of something. We often mistake invisibility with nonmateriality, but that is scientifically (materially) not the case.

A good scholarly resource on this point is Guy Waters, The End of Deuteronomy in the Epistles of Paul (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 221; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). See especially footnote 12 on page 134, where the Waters provides a list of commentators that argue Paul has Deut 32:17 explicitly in view in 1 Cor 10:20. Proving that the elohim/shedim of Deut 32:17 are not merely idols does not depend on 1 Cor 10:20. Their spiritual identity is evident after a trip through Deuteronomy. In Deut 32:8–9 (reading v. 8 with the Dead Sea Scrolls, as do the ESV and NRSV), when the nations were divided at the tower of Babel incident, the nations were placed by God under the authority of lesser elohim, the “sons of God” (see chapter 14 of this book for more detail). The parallel passage to that text is Deut 4:19–20. There the gods “allotted” to the other nations while Yahweh took Israel are called the “host of heaven.” Worshiping them is forbidden. This is the same language as in 1 Kgs 22:13–23, where the prophet Micaiah has a vision of a divine council meeting (see chapter 7 of this book). These members of the “host of heaven” are called elohim in Deut 17:2–5, where Israel is again warned to not worship them. Unfortunately, Deut 29:25 informs us that Israelites did worship elohim that were not “allotted” to them. These passages, along with Deut 32:17, interchange the following terms or phrases: host of heaven, gods (elohim), and demons (shedim). This is whe...

The most exhaustive scholarly treatment of the plural language and the image is W. Randall Garr, In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 15; Leiden: Brill, 2003). See especially pp. 17–94. Seeing the Trinity in Gen 1:26 is reading the New Testament back into the Old Testament, something that isn’t a sound interpretive method for discerning what an Old Testament writer was thinking. Unlike the New Testament, the Old Testament has no Trinitarian phrases (e.g., “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”; cf. Matt 28:19–20). The triune godhead idea is never transparently expressed in the Old Testament. Since, as we saw in chapter 3, other references to divine plurality involve divine beings who are lesser than Yahweh, we must be careful about attributing the language of divine plurality to the Trinity. Doing so will get us into theological trouble in other passages. As we’ll see in chapters 17 and 18, Israelites and first-century Jewish writers did discern a two-person Godhead in the Old Testament. I believe that the evidence for a two-person Godhead discussed in those chapters can in places reveal a third person in the Old Testament (see the companion website). In chapter 33 we’ll see how New Testament writers used the two-person Godhead perspective of the Old Testament to talk about Jesus as God and to articulate the belief that the Spirit was part of the Godhead as well. The answer to the plurality language is also...

Only one passage in the New Testament suggests a differentiation between body, soul, and spirit: 1 Thess 5:23. Since the Old Testament clearly sees two parts to humans (body and soul/spirit; material and immaterial), it is best to interpret this single verse the same way for theological consistency. Many scholars do not consider soul and spirit in this verse as discrete, separate items. This verse is similar to the shema (Deut 6:4; cf. Matt 22:37; Mark 12:29–30), which tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, and might. The point is totality, not that heart, soul, might (and mind in the gospel references) are separable. The Old Testament uses both nephesh and ruach to describe the source of these inner parts. Totality is also the point of Heb 4:12 (which actually uses four items, not three).

The claim here is not that creation failed to conform to God’s will. Indeed, the creation was precisely what God wanted at the time. Rather, creation was not all that Eden was, a contrast that God intended and which informs the biblical-theological story.