The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

by Michael S. Heiser

God may foreknow an event and predestine that event, but such predestination does not necessarily include decisions that lead up to that event. In other words, God may know and predestine the end—that something is ultimately going to happen—without predestining the means to that end.

The passages in 1 Kings 22:13–23 and Daniel 4 informed us that God can decree something and then leave the means up to the decisions of other free-will agents. The end is sovereignly ordained; the means to that end may or may not be.

There is also no biblical coherence to the idea that God factored all evil acts into his grand plan for the ages.

God does not need evil as a means to accomplish anything.

Evil does not flow from a first domino that God himself toppled. Rather, evil is the perversion of God’s good gift of free will. It arises from the choices made by imperfect imagers, not from God’s prompting or predestination. God does not need evil, but he has the power to take the evil that flows from free-will decisions—human or otherwise—and use it to produce good and his glory through the obedience of his loyal imagers, who are his hands and feet on the ground now

What we do matters. God has decreed the ends to which all things will come. As believers, we are prompted by his Spirit to be the good means to those decreed ends.

The worldview of the biblical author was an animate one, where the members of the unseen world interact with humans.

It’s a bit misguided when someone attempts to defend biblical literalism by appealing to the evolutionary history of snakes.

Genesis telegraphed simple but profound ideas to Israelite readers: The world you experience was created by an all-powerful God; human beings are his created representatives; Eden was his abode; he was accompanied by a supernatural host; one member of that divine entourage was not pleased by God’s decisions to create humanity and give them dominion.

The word el is another word that means “god” in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. The people of Ugarit called their high god El—they used the term as a proper name. So did the people of Tyre, which was a Phoenician city. The Phoenician religion had a divine council led by El, who was also called elyon (“Most High”) in Phoenician texts and considered the creator of the earth.

The point of assigning el and elyon to Yahweh was not to endorse how Phoenicians and residents of Ugarit thought about their gods, but to assert Yahweh’s superiority. He was incomparable among spiritual beings; the others were pretenders.

Luminescence is a characteristic of divine beings or divine presence across the ancient Near Eastern world and the Old Testament (e.g., Ezek 1:4–7, 27–28 [cf. Ezek 10:19–20]; Dan 10:6; Rev 1:15).

“morning stars” were the visible bright stars seen on the horizon as the sun rose. Astronomers (ancient and modern) knew another celestial object that behaved the same way—an object so bright it could still be seen as the sun rose. That object was Venus, and so Venus, though a planet, became known to the ancients as the “bright morning star.”

Isaiah 14 reads like an attempted coup in the divine council. Helel ben-shachar wanted his seat in the divine assembly on the divine mountain to be above all others. He wanted to be “like the Most High” (elyon). But there can be only one of those.

But n-ch-sh are also the consonants of a verb. If we changed the vowels to a verbal form (recall that Hebrew originally had no vowels), we would have 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.

since there are immediate clues in the story that the serpent is more than a mere snake, that he may be a divine adversary, the term nachash is a triple entendre. The writer wants his readers to consider all the possible nuances in their interpretive, intellectual experience. All of them carry theological weight.

The serpent (nachash) was an image commonly used in reference to a divine throne guardian. Given the context of Eden, that helps identify the villain as a divine being. The divine adversary dispenses divine information, using it to goad Eve. He gives her an oracle (or, an omen!): You won’t really die. God knows when you eat you will be like one of the elohim. Lastly, a shining appearance conveys a divine nature. All the meanings telegraph something important. They are also consistent with the imagery from Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28.

The curse levied at Adam (Gen 3:17–19) did not supersede God’s mandate to subdue the earth and take dominion. But it did make the task harder. The expulsion of humankind from Eden (Gen 3:22–25) turned a glorious dominion mission into mundane drudgery. We know that God would take steps to restore his rule, and that descendants of Adam (especially one of them—Gen 3:15) would be critical to that kingdom. 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.

The wording of Gen 3:15 is veiled. For reasons that I’ll make clear later, I believe prophecies like this that ultimately move in a messianic direction were deliberately cryptic. At the very least the verse tells us that God was not done with humanity yet.

This human threat to the nachash is fitting. The seduction to sin meant that Yahweh would have to be true to his word and eliminate humanity. The nachash counted on the justice of God to eliminate his rivals. God was just in this regard. Elimination from Eden did indeed mean death, but not in the sense of immediate annihilation.

Adam and Eve had contingent immortality prior to the fall. They had never-ending life, depending on certain circumstances. The imagery of Eden, home of the life-giver, and its tree of life convey the notion that, so long as Adam and Eve ate from the tree of life, called Eden their home, and didn’t do anything that resulted in mortal injury (they were truly human after all), they would live.

After the fall, the only way to extend the work of God’s human council-family was childbirth. Eve was redeemed through childbearing (1 Tim 2:15). So were the rest of us, in the sense that that is the only way God’s original plan remained viable.

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. In Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14, we saw the villain cast down to the ʾerets, a term that refers literally to the dirt and metaphorically to the underworld (Ezek 28:17; Isa 14:9, 11–12, 15). The curse also had him “eating dirt,” clearly a metaphorical reference, since snakes don’t really eat dirt as food for nutrition. It isn’t part of the “natural snake diet.” 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 curses that followed the events in the garden bound the fate of humanity together with the seed of the nachash, all those who oppose the rule of God in either the earthly or the spiritual realm. The rule of God known as Eden would disappear, kept alive only through a fledgling humanity to whom God extended mercy.

ancient parallels restrict divine sonship language to kings. Consequently, the idea of a group of sons of God lacks a coherent ancient Near Eastern parallel.

It was God’s original design for his human children to be servant rulers over the earth under his authority as his representatives—in the presence of his glory. Restoring the loss of the Edenic vision eventually involves creating a people known as Israel and giving them a king (David), who is the template for messiah. In the final eschatological outcome, the messiah is the ultimate Davidic king, and all glorified believers share that rule in a new, global Eden.

the plurality of the phrase “sons of God” and the heavenly contexts of its use elsewhere show us there is no exegetical reason to exclude the occurrences of the phrase in Genesis 6:2, 4 from the list of supernatural beings. What drives this choice is apprehension about the alternative.

All Jewish traditions before the New Testament era took a supernatural view of Genesis 6:1–4.16 In other words, they were in line with 2 Peter and Jude. 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.

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.

Genesis 6:1–4, too, has deep Mesopotamian roots that, until very recently, have not been fully recognized or appreciated.2 Jewish literature like 1 Enoch that retold the story shows a keen awareness of that Mesopotamian context. This awareness shows us that Jewish thinkers of the Second Temple period understood, correctly, that the story involved divine beings and giant offspring.

Genesis 6:1–4 is a polemic; it is a literary and theological effort to undermine the credibility of Mesopotamian gods and other aspects of that culture’s worldview. Biblical writers do this frequently. The strategy often involves borrowing lines and motifs from the literature of the target civilization to articulate correct theology about Yahweh and to show contempt for other gods. Genesis 6:1–4 is a case study in this technique.

Mesopotamia had several versions of the story of a catastrophic flood, complete with a large boat that saves animals and humans.4 They include mention of a group of sages (the apkallus), possessors of great knowledge, in the period before the flood. These apkallus were divine beings. Many apkallus were considered evil; those apkallus are integral to Mesopotamian demonology. After the flood, offspring of the apkallus were said to be human in descent (i.e., having a human parent) and “two-thirds apkallu.”5 In other words, the apkallus mated with human women and produced quasi-divine offspring.

The divine transgression before the flood is retold in several Jewish texts from the intertestamental period. At least one has the divine offenders coming to earth to “fix” the mess that was humankind—to provide direction and leadership through their knowledge. They were trying to help, but once they had assumed flesh, they failed to resist its urges.

The apkallus were the great culture-heroes of preflood knowledge. They were the divine sages of a glorious bygone era. Babylonian kings claimed to be descended from the apkallus and other divine figures from before the flood. The collective claim was that glorious Babylonia was the sole possessor of divine knowledge, and that that empire’s rule had the approval of the gods. The biblical writers and later Jews disagreed. They saw Babylonian knowledge as having demonic origins—in large part because the apkallus themselves were so intertwined with Mesopotamian demonology. The Babylonian elite taught that the divine knowledge of the apkallus had survived the flood through a succeeding postflood generation of apkallus—giant, quasi-divine offspring fathered by the original preflood apkallus.

Genesis 6:1–4, along with 2 Peter and Jude, portrays Babylon’s boast as a horrific transgression and, even worse, the catalyst that spread corruption throughout humankind. Genesis 6:5 is essentially a summary of the effect of the transgression. It gets little space—it’s a restrained account. The later Second Temple Jewish literature goes after it full bore.

Since the Babylonian apkallus were considered demonic, it is no mystery why Peter and Jude link the events of Genesis 6:1–4 to false teachers (2 Pet 2:1–4). While attacking their aberrant knowledge, Peter and Jude evoke the imagery of Genesis 6. False teachers are “licentious” men who indulge in “defiling lusts” (2 Pet 2:2, 10; Jude 8). Like the divine beings of Genesis 6 who “did not keep to their own domain” (Jude 6), defecting from the loyal elohim of Yahweh’s council, false teachers “despise authority” and “blaspheme majestic beings” whom angels dare not rebuke (2 Pet 2:9–11; Jude 8–10).

The biblical writers draw attention to Noah’s blamelessness (Gen 6:9). Scripture does not specifically exempt Noah and his family from the sinful cohabitation of Genesis 6:1–4, but since the event was so heinous, it would be absurd to presume otherwise.20 As concepts like divine sonship began to appear in the Bible with respect to Yahweh’s people Israel (Exod 4:23), the Israelite king (Psa 2:7), and, ultimately, the messiah, the theological messaging became important. Noah is in the line of Christ (Luke 3:36; cf. 3:38). At no point could it be claimed that the ultimate seed of Eve, the messianic deliverer, was the son of any elohim besides Yahweh.

the futility and danger of trying to recover Eden on any terms other than those God has set.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes how Yahweh’s dispersal of the nations at Babel resulted in his disinheriting those nations as his people. This is the Old Testament equivalent of Romans 1:18–25, a familiar passage wherein God “gave [humankind] over” to their persistent rebellion.

a contrast in affection and ownership is intended. Yahweh in effect decided that the people of the world’s nations were no longer going to be in relationship to him. He would begin anew. He would enter into covenant relationship with a new people that did not yet exist: Israel.

As odd as it sounds, the rest of the nations were placed under the authority of members of Yahweh’s divine council.7 The other nations were assigned to lesser elohim as a judgment from the Most High, Yahweh.

Ziggurats were divine abodes, places where Mesopotamians believed heaven and earth intersected.8 The nature of this structure makes evident the purpose in building it—to bring the divine down to earth.

The building of the tower of Babel meant perpetuating Babylonian religious knowledge and substituting the rule of Babel’s gods for rule by Yahweh.

After the flood God had commanded humanity once again to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen 9:1). These words reiterated the original Edenic intention.

it was God’s intention, right on the heels of his decision to punish the nations, that the Israelites would serve as a conduit for their return to the true God. This is one of the reasons Israel is later called “a kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:6). Israel would be in covenant with “the God of gods” and the “Lord of lords” (Deut 10:17). Those disinherited would be in spiritual bondage to the corrupt sons of God. But Israel would be a conduit, a mediator.

From the fateful decision at Babel onward, the story of the Old Testament is about Israel versus the disinherited nations, and Yahweh versus the corrupt, rebel elohim of those nations. The division of the nations and their allotment under other elohim is behind the scenes in all sorts of places in biblical history.

Biblical scholars are in unanimous agreement that the “princes” referred to in Daniel 10 are divine beings, not humans. This is transparent from the mention of Michael in 10:13 and 10:21, who is called “prince” (cf. Dan 12:1). They are also agreed that the concept is based on Deuteronomy 32:8–9.

Paul’s rationale for his own ministry to the Gentiles was that it was God’s intention to reclaim the nations to restore the original Edenic vision.

Paul’s terminology for the powers of darkness reflects the cosmic-geographical worldview arising from Deuteronomy 32:8–9.

The incident at Babel and God’s decision to disinherit the nations drew up the battle lines for a cosmic turf war for the planet. The corruption of the elohim sons of God set over the nations meant that Yahweh’s vision of a global Eden would be met with divine force.