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February 3 - April 18, 2023
Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth.
Christopher Lewis Kozoriz liked this
Was my loyalty to the text or to Christian tradition?
When you open your Bible, I want you to be able to see it like ancient Israelites or first-century Jews saw it, to perceive and consider it as they would have. I want their supernatural worldview in your head.
it would be dishonest of us to claim that the biblical writers read and understood the text the way we do as modern people, or intended meanings that conform to theological systems created centuries after the text was written. Our context is not their context. Seeing the Bible through the eyes of an ancient reader requires shedding the filters of our traditions and presumptions.
Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible. They are artificial. They are filters.
The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible.1 Every other context is alien to the biblical writers and, therefore, to the Bible. Yet there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational preferences.
The biblical answer is that the heavenly host was with God before creation. In fact, they witnessed it. What God says to Job in Job 38:4–7 is clear on that point:
The original morning stars, the sons of God, saw the beginning of life as we know it—the creation of earth. Right from the start, then, God has company—other divine beings, the sons of God. Most discussions of what’s around before creation omit the members of the heavenly host. That’s unfortunate, because God and the sons of God, the divine family, are the first pieces of the mosaic.
God’s divine council is an assembly in the heavens, not on earth. The language is unmistakable. This is precisely what we’d expect if we understand the elohim to be divine beings.
The term literally means “one of a kind” or “unique” without connotation of created origin. Consequently, since Jesus is indeed identified with Yahweh and is therefore, with Yahweh, unique among the elohim that serve God, the term monogenes does not contradict the Old Testament language.
The story of the Bible is about God’s will for, and rule of, the realms he has created, visible and invisible, through the imagers he has created, human and nonhuman. This divine agenda is played out in both realms, in deliberate tandem.
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.
Eden was God’s home on earth. It was his residence. And where the King lives, his council meets.
The Old Testament has a three-tiered council structure like that at Ugarit. Yahweh is at the top.2 His family-household (“sons of God”) are next in hierarchy. The lowest level is reserved for elohim messengers—mal’akim (the word translated “angels”).
In the last chapter we saw the beginning of the theological idea that humans are the children of God. It was God’s original intent to make them part of his family. The failure in Eden would alienate God from man, but God would make a way of salvation to bring believers back into that family (John 1:12; 1 John 3:1–3).
Genesis 1 and 2 aren’t intended to be chronological in their relationship. What they reveal is that the man’s original task was to care for the garden, where he lived (Gen 2). After he gets a partner (Gen 1), God says to both of them (the commands are plural in Hebrew) to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over its creatures.
The distinction helps us see that the original task of humanity was to make the entire Earth like Eden.
We saw in an earlier chapter that imaging status is something shared by human and nonhuman, divine beings. This fact is reflected in the plural language of Genesis 1:26, when God said, “Let us make humankind.” The ensuing singular forms guided us to conclude that the passage has humankind created by a single creator, the God of Israel, who creates humans as his imagers. The prior plural language was a clue that God’s other family, the divine sons of God created sometime earlier, were also imagers of their creator.
The heavenly council works under the same kind of arrangement. God decrees his will and leaves it to his administrative household to carry out those decrees. That’s apparent from two Old Testament passages.
19 And he [Micaiah] said, “Therefore, hear the word of Yahweh. I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne with all the hosts of heaven standing beside him from his right hand and from his left hand.
Here we see that the ultimate authority behind the decree is God, the Most High, and yet the watcher who delivered the decree in verse 17 said “the sentence is by decree of the watchers.” Both God and his divine agents were involved in the decision.
The worldview of the biblical writer was: Where Yahweh is, so is his council. Yahweh had announced his intention to create humankind as his imagers (Gen 1:26). The council members heard that these humans, new members in Yahweh’s family, would be tasked with overspreading the earth, advancing God’s kingdom rule. They were Yahweh’s choice to be steward-kings over a global Eden under his authority.
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.
The satan in Job 1–2 is not a villain. He’s doing the job assigned to him by God. The book of Job does not identify the satan in this scene as the serpent of Genesis 3, the figure known in the New Testament as the devil. The Old Testament never uses the word saṭan of the serpent figure from Genesis 3. In fact, the word saṭan is not a proper personal noun in the Old Testament.1 Old Testament scholars are well aware of all this.
Most of the twenty-seven occurrences of saṭan in the Hebrew Bible, however, do indeed have the definite article—including all the places English readers presume the devil is present (Job 1:6–9, 12; 2:1–4, 6–7; Zech 3:1–2). The satan described in these passages is not the devil. Rather, he’s an anonymous prosecutor, as it were, fulfilling a role in Yahweh’s council—bringing an accusatory report.
What Eliphaz says is significant. Here are two scriptural statements that God’s heavenly council members are corruptible; they are not perfect.
God knows that Job could indeed fail—just like the divine beings in his council. Even the lesser elohim cannot be completely trusted.
Without genuine free will, imagers cannot truly represent God. We saw earlier that the image of God is not an attribute or ability. Rather, it is a status conferred by God on all humans, that of representing God.
Since the lesser elohim were also created as God’s imagers, they too must have free will. Both human and nonhuman imagers are less than their Maker. Only God is perfect in the possession and exercise of his attributes.
This fits well with Psalm 8:5, where the psalmist notes that humankind was created “a little lower than elohim.” We aren’t a “little” lower than God—we’re light years lower. Relatively speaking, the gap is narrower if we assume the reference in the psalm is plural (“a little lower than the elohim”). This is the way the writer of Hebrews takes the phrase.
There is no biblical reason to assert that God predestined all the evil events throughout human history simply because he foreknew them.
God foreknew the fall. That foreknowledge did not propel the event. God also foreknew a solution to the fall that he himself would guarantee, a solution that entered his mind long before he laid the foundations of the earth. God was ready. The risk was awful, but he loved the notion of humanity too much to call the whole thing off.
In some respects, we know that the Genesis “serpent” wasn’t really a member of the animal kingdom. We have other passages to help us grasp that point, particularly in the New Testament. We understand that, even though New Testament writers refer to the serpent back in Eden, they are really referring to a supernatural entity—not a mere member of the animal kingdom (2 Cor 11:3; 1 Thess 3:5; Rev 12:9).
The Hebrew word translated serpent is nachash.
nochesh, which means “the diviner.” Divination refers to communication with the supernatural world. A diviner in the ancient world was one who foretold omens or gave out divine information (oracles). We can see that element in the story. Eve is getting information from this being.
The human yearning for utopia is interesting in this light. We seem to have an inner sense of need to restore something that was lost, but Eden cannot return on purely human terms.
But the judgment on Eve also tells us that the nachash would have offspring as well. The rest of the biblical story doesn’t consist of humans battling snake people. That’s no surprise, since the enemy of humanity wasn’t a mere snake.
All who oppose God’s kingdom plan are the seed of the nachash.
The nachash was cursed to crawl on its belly, imagery that conveyed being cast down (Ezek 28:8, 17; Isa 14:11–12, 15) to the ground.
The point being made by the curse is that the nachash, who wanted to be “most high,” will be “most low” instead—cast away from God and the council to earth, and even under the earth. In the underworld, the nachash is even lower than the beasts of the field. He is hidden from view and from life in God’s world. His domain is death.
The seed of the nachash is therefore literal (people and divine beings are real) and spiritual (the lineage is one of spiritual rebellion). This description has secure biblical roots. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father” (John 8:44), and called them “serpents” and “offspring of vipers” (Matt 23:33).
There are few Bible passages that raise as many questions as this one.1 Who are the sons of God? Are they divine or human? Who were the Nephilim? How do these verses relate to the human evil described in Genesis 6:5?
The first group is human and female (the “daughters of humankind”). Verse 2 introduces the other group for the contrast: the sons of God. That group is not human, but divine.
the angels who sinned, but held them captive in Tartarus with chains of darkness and handed them over to be kept for judgment, 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah,
especially those who go after the flesh in defiling lust and who despise authority (2 Peter 2:1–10).
the angels who did not keep to their own domain but deserted their proper dwelling place, he has kept in eternal bonds under deep gloom for the judgment of the great day,
They describe an episode from the time of Noah and the flood where “angels” sinned.11 That sin, which precipitated the flood, was sexual in nature; it is placed in the same category as the sin which prompted the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. The transgression was interpreted by Peter and Jude as evidence of despising authority and the boundaries of “proper dwelling” for the parties concerned. All of those elements are transparent in Genesis 6:1–4. There is simply no other sin in the Old Testament that meets these specific details—and no other “angelic” sin at all in the Old Testament that
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The interpretation of the passage, at least with respect to its supernatural orientation, was not an issue until the late fourth century AD, when it fell out of favor with some influential church fathers, especially Augustine.
But biblical theology does not derive from the church fathers. It derives from the biblical text, framed in its own context. Scholars agree that the Second Temple Jewish literature that influenced Peter and Jude shows intimate familiarity with the original Mesopotamian context of Genesis 6:1–4.
