So Many Gods!

And I gotta say, like, the reason that I chose this story was that you frequently shocked me with stories in the Bible that I had never heard or had never heard in the way that you explained them. Some of those stories were just interesting, but some were literally jaw-dropping, and today’s story dropped my jaw, so.

Hey, everybody.

Hi, friends.

This is Dan McClellan, and I’m Dan Beecher, and welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion.

My understanding is that we have a great episode today, Dan.

Yes, that’s what I’ve been told. I’m… I’m getting the information now. And yes, I am told that it is, in fact, going to be a fun episode.

Well, I, I like that we’re changing things up a little bit then.

Yeah, yeah, it’s… it’ll be a nice relief from… from what we’ve been doing.

I’m going to be talking about a little… a moment that you made me aware of in the Bible that kind of blew my mind. And… and I’ll have you sort of helping out, figuring out what’s actually happening there. And then… what are you talking about?

I’m going to do a piece, uh, what does that mean—talking about the Divine Council. I’ve brought that up a lot on social media in the past, and people always say, “Can you talk more about the Divine Council? What does the Divine Council mean?” So we’re going to talk about it in the Hebrew Bible. We’re going to talk about what literature, what archaeological evidence is out there to help us fill in the gaps in our understanding and how that changed into the Greco-Roman period Judaism and then into the New Testament.

All right, well, let’s dive into chapter and verse.

All right, sounds good.

All right, well, this story comes from 2 Kings , chapter three. And it opens by placing us in time and space. So the time is the 18th year of the rule of King Jehoshaphat of Judah, which is super helpful, I suppose, in terms of time. Now, a bunch of different kingdoms come into play in this story, and I have to admit that my knowledge of ancient Southwest Asia is scant.

So I did a little research and maybe you can help me out with this, Dan.

It’s a bit of a tangent, but I think that it’s useful.

Because the truth is that, like, when I would read the Bible, I didn’t know where anything was. I didn’t know… I didn’t have an image in my mind of any of this stuff, so I… I found it helpful. Maybe some of our listeners will too. When I looked up the ancient kingdoms, here’s what… the best that I could figure out. The whole area of at least this story, including all the various kingdoms, was roughly the size of New Hampshire, a little bigger than Delaware, but nowhere near as big as Ohio. According to the theoretical map that I found on Wikipedia, the four kingdoms at play—Israel, Judah, Edom, and Moab—basically surround the Dead Sea.

Israel’s to the north of the sea, reaching up over the Sea of Galilee. Its capital was Samaria. Is that right?

Samaria.

On the western shore was Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem. South is the kingdom of Edom, and east is Moab.

Correct.

Now, this chapter starts with Jehoram, son of Ahab, as king of Israel in Samaria. Not Sumeria, but Samaria.

Correct.05.250] Dan Beecher: Correct. Anyway, it’s just Samaria.

And there’s a weird passage that mysteriously tells us that, quote, he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, though not like his father and mother, for he removed the pillar of Baal that his father had made. Nevertheless, he clung to the sin of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, that he caused Israel to commit. He did not depart from it. Now, call me weird, but I had no idea what the heck this thing was talking about. And I texted you and was like, you’re gonna have to help me with this.

Yeah, so we’ve got some references before this, and we got some references after this. Now, it’s not perfectly unified. It doesn’t all make perfect sense. There are questions when we look at the rest of the text, but from 1 Kings 16 , we’ve got this statement about stelae, or standing stones. So these would have been divine images for Baal and for Asherah, one for Baal, one for Asherah. Now, we’ve got this statement here that he removed the pillar of Baal that his father had made. Now, if 1 Kings 16 is historically accurate, and if this is approximating historical accuracy, that would mean that he left the pillar for Asherah in place. Now, I actually think this has a chance of being historically accurate because Baal is the enemy of Adonai and of Israel, going back very far. And I think that’s probably because Adonai is trying to be the storm deity in this area that at one time was ruled over by Baal, and so they’re both trying to fill the same role.

So there’s competition. Asherah does not become demonized and vilified until around the 7th century BCE under the reign of King Josiah. And so a lot of the texts, as we have it, are later authors who are editing the history that they’ve inherited. So they’re looking back at the early history and saying, okay, that was bad, that was bad, that was bad. And they’re tweaking it here and there. But it wouldn’t surprise me for them to not really notice that the texts, the history they inherited, only says, oh, you removed the statue of Baal and not realize, well, if we want to be perfectly consistent, we need to also mention that they took out the statue of Asherah or mention that they left the statue of Asherah, and that was bad. So we… We’ve got some history that’s being filtered through later ideological lenses. And so… But the use of standing stones, of stelae, of divine images is something that is associated with Jeroboam.

He sets up calves at Dan and Bethel. He’s the king in the Northern Kingdom. And until the Northern Kingdom falls in around 722 BCE, they are criticized by those in the Southern Kingdom as, at least according to the text as we have them now, because they were always going after Baal, they were using divine images, they were doing all this stuff. In reality, there was probably nobody who cared about any of that stuff, apart from maybe Baal, until we get into the exilic period and they’re editing these old histories. And now it’s bad. We’re looking at the old history and we’ve got to say, well, they were all doing it all wrong back then. So there’s a lot of editorializing here. It gets a little complex. But in short, there was probably a stela for Asherah, one for Baal. The king gets rid of the one for Baal. So he’s taken one step in the right direction, but he’s still doing something wrong. Maybe it is holding onto that stela for Asherah.

Okay. And we’ve got, you know, there’s a lot of gods at play in all of this. That’s, you know, the part of why we chose this story leading into your next segment, is that this is part…

This is part of that. The ancient world had a lot of gods going around, and everybody kind of believed in everybody else’s gods.Dan Beecher: Is that right?

Like, it’s not like, you know, these were all gods that everyone understood to be real.

Is that true?

Yeah. And in this early period, the idea is basically that Adonai is the God of Israel. He’s our God. And you even see in the Book of Judges , like, Jephthah’s messengers are confronting the Ammonite messengers. And the Ammonite messengers are basically like, “Hey, give us back the land you conquered.” And they say, “Hey, man, you keep what your deity has conquered for you. We’re going to keep what our deity has conquered for us.” And what Adonai conquered for them was that little piece of Ammonite land. And so, yeah, in early Israel, they saw every other nation as being ruled over by a patron deity. And they acknowledged, they believed that those deities existed. They believed they had power, and they believed that there was, to some degree, cooperation among them too. In another dimension, there was competition among them. And we’re going to see that in more detail when I get to the divine council discussion. But, yeah, we’re going to see it.

By the end of this story. And I’ve gotta say, like, the reason that I chose this story was that, you know, one of the things that I really was drawn to in your content, Dan, is that you frequently shocked me with stories in the Bible that I had never heard or had never heard in the way that you explained them. Some of those stories were just interesting, but some were literally jaw-dropping. And today’s story dropped my jaw. So. So that’s what we’re going on to. But for now, here, here’s the story. King Mesha, or Misha, how would you say it?

Mesha of Moab.

Mesha. Mesha. Okay, so King Mesha of Moab was apparently the big sheep guy of the region. And even though he was a king, he was apparently under Israel’s thumb. How, how would you characterize the relationship between Moab and Israel at this time?

So that was vassalage. So Moab was a vassal to Israel. Israel was the sovereign nation. And the idea here is… if you’ve… there’s an old episode of Police Squad!, which is what the movie Naked Gun was based on, where there’s a protection racket going down in the city. And so Frank Drebin starts up this fake key store. And it’s basically these two mobsters come in and they’re like, “This is a nice-looking key store you got here.” And Frank goes, “What’d you say about my keister?” They said, “Key store.” But then they say, “Hey, we’d hate for something bad to happen to you. So you give us 50 bucks a week and we protect you.” And obviously the idea is, “Hey, pay us money or we’re going to rough you up.” And then they say, “Nah, get out of here. You’ll get nothing from us.” And so they leave. And then Frank and his partner go back to work. And then suddenly there’s gunfire just erupts and glass everywhere and bullet holes just strafe the back wall.

And they don’t notice, but then Frank looks up and goes, “Look out!” And this brick comes through the window. And he picks up the brick and he kind of looks at it and he’s like, “I guess they mean business.” But, you know, ignoring the fact that the whole wall’s been shot up. But that’s basically the modern concept of vassalage.f vassalage.

A larger, more powerful nation roughs up a smaller nation and says, hey, we’ll protect you from these nasty people around here. You just got to pay us a tribute every year when we go to war. You’ve got to provide soldiers for. You know, we’ll get along great. And this was Assyria. The nation of Assyria kind of made this a big thing. And the concept of covenant in the Hebrew Bible is actually borrowed pretty much wholesale from some of the vassal treaties that Assyria had set up. And even the book of Deuteronomy is crafted after these Assyrian vassal treaties, which included things like, you will love us, and in turn we will love you, or else we will kill a bunch of you and drag off everybody into exile. So it was this contractual relationship. And so Moab was under vassalage to. To Israel. And then when Mesha.

I don’t remember if it happens right before Mesha, I think it’s when Mesha accedes to the throne, becomes king, he’s like, you know what? We’re not doing this anymore. And so the saying is, he threw off Israelite vassalage, basically refused to pay the tribute. And that means that the big bad sovereign nation has got to do something about that, right?

So, and the. The vassalage up until. And the big event was that Ahab had died. Who was. Who was the king of. Of Israel before his son, J- J- Jehoram. So anyway, so yeah, Moab had been delivering, and I don’t know if this was a yearly delivery or whatever. A hundred thousand lambs. And then depending on what translation you go with either a hundred thousand rams with their wool or just the wool of a hundred thousand rams. To me, that’s. That sounds like a lot of sheep. I don’t know about. I. I don’t know a lot about sheep. That sounds like a lot for a very small area.

Yeah. And that this is almost certainly exaggerated.

Okay, fine. Anyway.

Exaggerates. Okay, whoa, whoa.

I don’t know about that. We’re gonna have to check with some. Some other scholars to make sure that that’s true. Anyway, so Ahab dies, and as you say, King Mesha apparently didn’t want to. Apparently he didn’t think that Jehoram had the stones to keep the protection racket up. And he made the power play of not delivering the sheep. So Jehoram was having none of that. And he called Jehoshaphat, who you’ll remember was the delightfully named King of Judah. And he was like, hey, Mesha has joined up with the Tattaglia family, and now they’re not paying their sheep toll, so we’re going to the mattresses. Will you join me? And Jehoshaphat was like, he’s gonna sleep with the fishes. So they decided that they wanted to make triple sure that they’d beat these Moabites. So they went down to Edom and got the King of Edom, who doesn’t apparently have a name in this story.

Right.

But I’m pretty sure it’s something silly sounding that started with a J. I’ll call him Jingleheimer. Anyway, he joined them too. And they all took. They took all of their armies and started to march to Moab.

So you’ve got three kingdoms, three kingdoms worth of armies marching against the sheep kingdom, which seems unfair, but whatever.

The fellowship kings setting up.

Right, exactly. The fellowship of the sheep.n: Unfortunately for them, much of Moab, much like the Moab that’s here in Utah, Moab next to the Dead Sea, was in the desert. And after a week of walking the armies of Israel, Judah and Edom suddenly found themselves in a place with no water, which you know is bad. Oh, and their cattle were going to die too, because apparently you bring cattle with you when you go to war. They had a whole. A whole bunch of. Of livestock, apparently.

Yeah. And this was. Warfare was a big deal. And so usually there was a season where you set out for war and you would be gone for months. And so again, some exaggeration going on here, but it wouldn’t be out of the question for them to be bringing their. Their meat with them before it had been slaughtered.

Keep everybody’s protein levels up.

Makes sense. Anyway, Jehoram was distraught. There was no water and they were going to die in the desert. But Jehoshaphat was like, didn’t you guys bring a prophet of the Lord with you?

Maybe he can help. Now his confidence does make me wonder, did the Judahites worship the same God that the Israelites worshiped?

They did. Our earliest reference of any kind to the house of David, for instance, comes from an inscription called the Tel Dan inscription, which it’s not exact. We have to kind of reconstruct who it’s a reference to, but it seems to refer to some kings either in Israel or in Judah with Yahwistic theophoric elements. So these kings already are named after Adonai, the God of Israel. And so I. There are different theories about where the kingdom of Judah came from. At this point in the early 9th century, it’s probably just the house of David as a dynasty, and they probably are splitting off from the northern kingdom and taking over Jerusalem and creating the southern kingdom, so that there are different reconstructions of how that happened. But, yes, Judah is. Does have Adonai as their patron deity by the 9th century.

Okay, so they bring out Elisha, who. Who poured water. But Elisha, right, he was going to say he poured water on the hands of Elijah so that, you know, he was good. Right. And in the chapter preceding this, Elisha watched Elijah. What was he? Carried away in a whirlwind or something? Like he was. Yeah, I think a chariot. Swing. Swing. Swung. Swung low and. And picked up Elijah, and he went up in the. In the whirlwind or the fire, whatever it was. That’s a. That’s a heck of a way to go. Don’t. Don’t even die. Just get picked up. Just call. Call a heavenly Uber, and then you’re there. So Elisha was a little salty with Jehoram at first, probably because of the whole Asherah stele thing, who knows? But he.

He was a little grumpy. But then he said, but because I see you’re hanging out with Jehoshaphat, and I’m a total Jehoshaphat stan, I guess I will do some prophesying for you on one condition.

He. He says, get me a musician. Yes.

This is my favorite part of the whole story. He couldn’t just prophesy right then and there. No. He needed some atmosphere.o, yeah, he summoned a musician. We’ve talked about vibes in here before. Yeah, we can do this.

Yeah, you got to get— You got to get this— You got to get things chill before you start prophesying. So he prophesied. He comes. He… You know, the… Once the vibe is set, he… He goes into his prophecy mode, and he comes up with two big things. The first thing is that if they dig a bunch of ditches, those ditches will fill with water, even though it won’t rain, and it’ll be enough for the soldiers and all their cattle and all that sort of stuff. So that’s good. And the second prophecy, he played it up like it was not a big deal. He said, quote, “This is but a light thing in the sight of Adonai; he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand. And ye shall smite every fenced city, and every choice city, and shall fell every good tree, and stop all wells of water, and mar every good piece of land with stones.”

Good old KJV. Yeah, so this is actually—

I don’t know that that was KJV. I… I think I was looking at…

That’s the KJV.

Oh, it may well have been. Yeah, it may well have been. So I… I bounced back and forth between translations a lot.

It’s hard to keep them straight. And so here we’ve got basically a scorched earth policy, which is something that the Neo-Assyrians innovated. We’re going to salt your fields, we’re going to tear down all the trees, we’re going to do all this kind of stuff. And even in those vassal treaties that we talk about, there are even, as we see in Deuteronomy, there were, like, prohibitions on doing this kind of thing. And so we can see borrowing from the way the Neo-Assyrians are dealing with their neighbors. So here they’re saying, and I think it’s important to note, in verse 18, it says, this is just a… You know, this is a trifle for Adonai. And it says, he will also give Moab into your hand. Let me see what the Hebrew says, natan et Moab, which is, he will give Moab into your plural hand. And the idea here is you will basically conquer Moab. You will return them to vassalage.

The promise here is unmistakable. Moab is throwing off vassalage. They’re going in. They’re not going in just to, like, slap them and leave. The point is to return them to vassalage, because that’s worth a lot of money. And it is also worth a lot of status, because if the new king shows up and Moab bounces and they let him go, that puts a taint on that king. And so the idea is we need to get Moab back under our thumb. And the promise here is unmistakable. The Lord will deliver Moab into your hand, meaning Moab will be back under vassalage to you.

Right? Yeah, it does feel a little vindictive. The cutting down of the trees, the stopping the wells, that… that’s a lot. And I feel like the throwing… throwing rocks in the field is… is just their version of the brick through the window. That’s… that’s just the “they mean business” bit.

Yeah. And… and part of it was if you’re not… if you’re not going to deliver these annual tributes and we come in and punish you to this degree, it’s going to make it a lot harder for them to actually deliver that tribute. And so there’s a degree to which the scorched earth campaign was kind of like a one-off. We’re just going to destroy your nation. We’re going to take whatever it is you have and then we’re going to bring you back into exile, we’re going to scatter you… scatter you around our kingdom so that you can’t organize and revolt and basically, okay, you don’t want to be under vassalage anymore. be under vassalage anymore. We’re going to destroy you and we are going to take all your resources. So that’s probably actually a little closer to what’s going on here rather than it might have been. You know, this is the threat. But we will return you to vassalage or we’re just gonna destroy your nation and we’re just gonna take you and everything that you have and it’s just gonna be a one off final payment that’s gonna go on.

Okay. So as you say, Adonai has, has promised that their campaign will be successful. All the cities will be delivered into their hands. So the water came into the ditches just as Elisha prophesied and everyone got enough to drink, so that was good. And the war started. And there’s a whole thing where the Moabite army thought that the water in the ditches was blood and then assumed that all the Israelites and Judahites and Edomites were dead. So they meandered into their camp and got their butts handed to them. That, that was a whole debacle. But then Jehoram marched everybody from city to city in Moab and they just wrecked everybody and threw their stones in the field and stopped their wells and cut down their trees. So it’s going well. Everything’s going according to plan.

Finally they make it to the capital city where the final big boss, the Moabite king was. And you know, they duke it out for a bit, but the Moabites were losing pretty badly. So the king of Moab, he pulled a desperation move, he grabbed his firstborn son and sacrificed him as a burnt offering on the wall of the city, which, I mean, you know, yikes. And then here’s what the last verse of the chapter says. I’ll just read the quote. And there was great indignation against Israel and they departed from him and returned to their own land. Now, to me, that wording is underplaying it.

But it certainly sounds like Jehoram and by extension Adonai lost. Is that what happened? What happened here?

It does. I think you’re. You’re right on both counts. It sounds like they lost. And it also sounds like they’re underplaying it. Like the author is being very kind of just trailing off, just so people don’t notice what’s going on here. But this phrase, ketsef gadol, great fury, KJV says great indignation. This comes from somewhere. And then we have Israel pulling up camp and going home. And we know from the historical record that Moab was not returned to vassalage because we have an inscription from Mesha crowing about having thrown off Israelite vassalage. So we’ll get to that in a second. But I want to talk about this phrase. Ketsef gadol, great fury. This occurs, I think, 28, 30 times in the Hebrew Bible. Two of the occurrences are late Persian period prose couplets. They’re not relevant here. And they. They’re kind of poetic references to just general fury.

All the other ones are referring to divine fury and specifically Adonai’s fury against somebody, whether it’s Israel or somebody else. So it’s a divine fury. And so this would seem to suggest there is some kind of divine fury against Israel that forces them to retreat, that forces them back to their own nation without having conquered the nation of Moab. And within the context of this discussion, they’re losing the battle. They sacrifice the heir to the throne on the city wall immediately. There is something that is probably divine fury that chases Israel off, man. It certainly sounds like a deity came down and chased them off. And we have a parallel story that is almost identical later on in 2 Kings 18 and 19, where when Hezekiah comes to the throne, he decides he’s going to throw off vassalage to the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

So this is Israel throwing off vassalage?

To the Assyrians, Judah. So Hezekiah—Israel is destroyed—Hezekiah becomes king over Judah, decides he’s going to throw off vassalage to the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib, which angers Sennacherib. And so he mounts an invasion and comes in and destroys cities and basically does what Israel is commanded to do here, what this coalition is commanded to do, just razes cities to the ground. A scorched earth campaign comes all the way to Jerusalem. And we actually have what’s called the Sennacherib Prism, a text by Sennacherib that says he trapped Hezekiah in his city like a bird in a cage. And the text doesn’t say he took the city because he didn’t. He actually abandoned the campaign and left Hezekiah on his own. He had successfully thrown off vassalage. And if you look in 2 Kings 18 and 19, it’s a muddled text. There are actually a few different versions of this story that are being woven together and they don’t make a lot of sense.

Like, first, there’s this messenger who comes and says, “Pay me my money.” And it says Hezekiah had to go down to strip the silver and the gold from the doors of the temple and just paid what he was owed. And then the very next verse is Sennacherib showing up and saying, “Hey, pay me my money.” And now Hezekiah says, “Wouldn’t be prudent, not going to do it.” And so we have this standoff. Hezekiah prays, Isaiah prays, and you have the angel of the Lord, the angel of destruction, goes through the camp overnight and kills 180-something thousand Assyrian troops. So the next day they wake up, everybody’s dead. And it says Sennacherib pulled up camp and went back home. Uses the same verbs that are used here to refer to Israel departing, to refer to Assyria departing. So we’ve got this parallel story. A new king throws off vassalage, the sovereign nation invades, gets to the last city, is going to take the city, and then divine intervention drives them off.

But there’s no reason that the God of Israel would be driving Israel out of Moab. And so what most critical scholars agree on, and I think is the only rational reading of the text, is that the author is kind of furtively suggesting, well, their god beat us and we ran out. So the god of Mesha, Chemosh, drove out the Israelites, and their intervention was catalyzed by the sacrificial offering of the heir to the throne. So that basically appeased the god of Moab, who came down and drove off the Israelites, frustrating the Yahwistic prophecy and freeing Moab from vassalage. And that’s even what the text of the Mesha Inscription, which dates to around the middle of the 9th century BCE, says. Mesha boasts that Israel made things hard on them, but Chemosh drove them out of the land.

Wow. Yeah, that is a… That… The first time I heard you explain that story, I was befuddled. I suppose it makes sense that you don’t often hear Sunday school talking about that sort of thing. It’s not exactly faith-promoting or whatever, but I find it fascinating. Fascinating.

Yeah, I find it fascinating too. And I think the author is definitely kind of, you know, muttering this under their breath. They don’t want to acknowledge this openly. You know, it’s not two chapters worth of narrative like it is in 2 Kings 18 and 19. It’s just like, yeah, and then, you know, we go. But at the same time it’s making an excuse because Moab successfully threw off vassalage.

How are they going to explain how the God of Israel let that happen? Usually if somebody comes in and defeats you, you can say, oh, well, we were wicked and we… And we, you know, God abandoned us, or God was angry with us and God used the other nation to punish us so that we would learn. And we get a lot of that in the Hebrew Bible and that’s in the Mesha inscription as well. The reason that Mesha says Israel was allowed to oppress Moab, the text says Chemosh was angry with his land. So it’s the exact same kind of rationalization. So what the author is doing here is just coming up with another explanation for how this could have happened that allows Adonai to still be the sovereign over Israel and just says, well, Adonai lost home court advantage. They were outside of their territory, they were in another deity’s territory, they were out of luck and they got driven back. And you know, it’s funny because I did see, I have seen some people, you know, doing apologetics for this and saying that, you know, Israel must not have obeyed the law, you know, obeyed Adonai in some, you know, they must have been wicked in their campaign or something.

But there’s no mention of this anywhere in this story.

So. All right, there you go. A fascinating look at the time when the God of Israel kind of, you know, apparently didn’t quite… Didn’t quite… It came up a little short this one time.

And you don’t win them all.

We’re just gonna sneak it in between the lines of that one verse right there. And then we’re gonna move on. Quick, quickly, quickly. We will move on and… And I suppose you and I can move on too. Thanks a lot. And let’s, let’s go on to our next segment. Okay. Hey, everybody, have you ever wondered how you can support the Data Over Dogma podcast?

I mean, why wouldn’t you wonder such a thing? Well, you can become a patron of our show and that is a fairly easy thing to do. Go over to patreon.com, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N-dot-com/dataoverdogma. You can choose how much you want to give. It’s a, it’s a monthly thing. And your, your contribution helps foot the bill for everything that we have to do here, helps make the show go. And we sure would appreciate it if you’d consider becoming a patron. Thanks.

Thank you. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about what the divine council is now.

We’ve kind of set the stage with this discussion of Adonai, the God of Israel going into another nation and doing battle against the patron deity of that nation. And at least in 2 Kings 3:27 , Adonai loses that battle. Now, there are, there are other times where Adonai goes into Egypt, for instance, with the Exodus, and does battle against the gods of Egypt and judges the gods of Egypt and defeats them, as the text says. And what this reflects is this ancient Southwest Asian notion that the different empires and territorial states in the world, the different sovereign entities, had their own patron deities. And these were deities that had sovereignty in their land and over the people who occupied that land. And we see this idea reflected probably most clearly in Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9. And this is a passage that the Masoretic text, the traditional critical text of the Hebrew Bible here, has a little bit of a change.

And I’ll mention that briefly, but I’m…

But talk to me first. Can you define what Masoretic means? Where does that word come from and what does it refer to?

Yeah, so the Masoretic text is a medieval manuscript or set of manuscripts that all descend from the same set of scribes, scholars who were responsible for transmitting this manuscript, and they developed a system of vowels and different kinds of cantillation marks, and so basically created this complex composite manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that has become the most authoritative manuscript in the world, is the one that is used by most scholars today who are producing translations.rs today who are producing translations. And so it probably starts up, the Masoretes are scribes who live around the Sea of Galilee in the medieval period. And the family there begins to copy these texts and creates a system for vowels, a vocalization system. There are a couple that had been created, but this is the one that… …that becomes predominant, and they write a bunch of notes in the margins of the manuscripts about how many times words occur and that kind of thing.

So they create this whole manuscript tradition and it gets handed down through the generations. And so the… …the Leningrad Codex is the main copy of the Masoretic text that is generally used when people want to create a translation of the Hebrew Bible. There’s an earlier one called the Aleppo Codex, which is almost identical in every way. The variations have to do with how some of those marks were added to the text. And then there’s another manuscript that’s actually going up for auction soon that is probably around the same age as the Aleppo Codex, if not a little bit older. So the Leningrad Codex, I think, dates to around 1000, 1008 CE. The Aleppo Codex and this other codex—not new, but this other codex that is being auctioned off—they’re probably about 100 years earlier than that, so maybe around 920 CE.

So somebody should buy that for us. I feel like our podcast should have that. So who, whichever one of you wants to be our… …the patron that buys us the priceless, precious, ancient document, we, we… …we will gladly accept. We will send you a… …a free sweatshirt.

Yeah. So the Masoretic text has a slight change here. And I’ll mention this, but… …but this text kind of establishes a bit of the worldview from this time period. And we have Deuteronomy 32 is the Song of Moses, which is at the end of the book of Deuteronomy . And it’s probably much older than the rest of the book of Deuteronomy . Deuteronomy begins to come together in the seventh century and into the sixth and fifth century, but it preserves some much older text. And so this poem, the Song of Moses, is probably much older than the rest of the book of Deuteronomy . And then verses 8 and 9 are probably even older than that. But this statement in verse 8 and 9 is introduced with this saying, “Remember the days of old. Consider the years long past. Ask your father, and he will inform you, your elders, and they will say to you.” And then we have, quote, “When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humanity, he set the boundaries of the people according to the number of the children of God.

And Adonai’s portion was his people. Jacob was his inherited share." Now, in the Masoretic text, what many translations say is “according to the number of the children of Israel.” But we know this is a later change. We have the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation that actually reads “angels of God”—“according to the number of the angels of God.” And we’ve known for a long time the Septuagint translators liked to translate “angels of God” when they found the Hebrew for “children of God,” Bene Elohim. And so a lot of scholars hypothesized that’s probably what they had in front of them. And then we discovered a Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, 4QDeuteronomy j, that read precisely that: “according to the number of the children of God.” And this tells us a couple of things. One, that they understood back then that each nation of the earth had been given to one of the children of God. And so these different patron deities were being represented as the children of the High God. And Adonai was also represented in this text as one of the children of the High God.

And they are receiving as their inheritance… And Israel is referred to as the… …the Lord’s inheritance many times in the Hebrew Bible, they are receiving Israel as their inheritance. So Adonai in this early period is the deity only of Israel and every other…

So they would have… Understand… Understood like you said, Chemosh was the, the God of Moab.

So in the same sort of distribution of, of… …of godly dominion, Chemosh gets this, Adonai gets that, and it… And it’s… And… And there’s just sort of a, a divvying out.

Yeah. Sort of like King Lear at the, at the beginning of King Lear, know that we have divided in three our kingdom or whatever.

Yeah. And you see deities associated with different regions throughout the Hebrew Bible. Asherah is referred to as the deity of the Sidonians. So Sidon up in Phoenicia and Baal is the deity of Ekron, which is probably not totally accurate. That was a… That would have been a… That would have been a Philistine city. So… But the idea is basically that every nation has their own deity. And we see this with Naaman in the Book of Kings, who comes down and he’s got a skin disease. It’s referred to as leprosy in the Bible, but it wasn’t leprosy. It would have been a pretty harmless skin disease that would have caused skin to turn white like vitiligo or something like that. But he comes down and he’s healed and he says, “Now I know that there is no deity and, or no God in all the earth except in Israel,” which is not a monotheistic statement that, you know, this is the only God in the world. It is a statement that outside of Israel there’s no God, period.

You’ve got to be inside Israel if you want there to be a God. And this, this is a rhetorical denigration of the… …the other gods. But he says when he’s back in Syria, he wants to be able to worship Adonai, the God of Israel. And so you can’t worship this deity in another nation. So what is his response? He takes two cartloads of Israelite soil back to Syria with him. So the God who can only be worshiped on Israelite soil can now be worshiped…

So you gotta love those godly loopholes.

I mean, it makes sense if you’re working within that worldview, it makes sense. But so we see throughout the Hebrew Bible this notion that the nations all have their patron deities. And how are these deities and their own sociality in the heavens organized? That brings us to the divine council. There was this idea, and there are two different theories about what it’s based on. And I think it probably was based on each of these to some degree in different times and in different places. But basically you had a council of the gods ruled over by the high deity. And we see this in the Ugaritic literature. This is pre-biblical texts that were written in a city called Ugarit, a city-state up north in Syria, in a language very closely related to Hebrew. But we have the council of the gods, the divine council that is referred to in that literature. And those gods are referred to as the 70 children of Athirat or Asherah, and they’re referred to as the children of El.

And we have very similar statements in the Hebrew Bible, Psalms 82 , and I’ll get into that in a bit more detail in a moment, but it talks about Adonai standing within the Adat El is the Hebrew, the council or the assembly of El, or the divine council, if you understand El adjectivally, which you can. And so it seems like the Hebrew Bible is reflecting a perspective very similar to what’s going on in the Ugaritic literature.ng on in the Ugaritic literature.

There is a divine council and there are two theories on how it’s organized. According to Mark Smith, and probably the theory that’s more prominent, the divine council is patterned after the idea of the patriarchal household, where you have a patriarch who rules over this household that is composed of the patriarch’s wife, the patriarch’s children, servants, craftspeople, stuff like that, that make the household work. And so the idea is that this divine council is an organization of this divine patriarchal household. Another theory is that it’s patterned after the ancient Southwest Asian bureaucracy. So this high deity is like the king, and the king has their queen, the king has princes who have responsibility over the affairs of the kingdom. And then the. The bureaucracy also has functional servants and craftspeople and stuff like that. So there’s some overlap in the way these things are reconstructed. And the bureaucracy theory is attributed to Lowell K. Handy in a wonderful book called Among the Host of Heaven.

But in short, they understood the world to be governed by patron deities who each had sovereignty over their own nation. And then they were organized within this hierarchy known as the divine council. And Elyon, in Deuteronomy 32:8 , Elyon means Most High. So that would be the patriarchal high deity, who would be the one who ruled over, who sat on their throne, who exercised authority over the other gods. And in Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, we have this very, very early view where Elyon is distinct from Adonai, and Adonai is one of the Bene Elohim, one of the children of God. But elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, we see Adonai, who is in that position of ruler over the divine council. So we have references to the council of Adonai. So for instance, Jeremiah 23:18 , Jeremiah is trying to suggest that these other prophets are not legitimate prophets. He asks who has stood in the council of Adonai?

And this is a way of saying, I’m a real prophet. I have stood in the council. I have heard the deliberations of the divine council. None of you have. You’re not real prophets. And Isaiah, in Isaiah 6 , Isaiah sees God seated upon their throne. The seraphim and everything are are flying all around. We have Micaiah in 1 Kings 22 tells Ahab, I see the Lord seated upon his throne surrounded by the host of heaven. So this host of heaven is supposed to be all the other divine beings of the divine council. And I think the most explicit representation of the divine council is what we see in Psalms 82 . And I’m going to pull that up real quick because I think it merits looking at.

While you’re doing that, let me ask you this really quickly. When, when Adonai becomes sort of ascends to the head of the council, do you think that there was a story behind that that we have now lost? You know, either either El, you know, somehow loses that position or, or, or cedes it to Adonai, or do you think they just sort of conflated El with Adonai and so at some point it was just that they merged or something?

I, I think the data indicate that they merged probably between around 900 BCE. You have Adonai originally comes in as a second-tier deity who adopts this storm deity profile. And then I think you probably have a king who rises to the throne who is a devotee of Adonai and doesn’t want to have competition between Adonai and El. Like everybody before him is an El devotee and he wants Adonai to—he doesn’t want to abandon Adonai. And so there’s probably a campaign of conflation, of identification that takes place. And so in this way, Adonai not only takes over El’s rule over the pantheon, but Adonai also takes over El’s consort, El’s wife Asherah, which is why Asherah is associated with Adonai.ith Adonai. And some of these inscriptions that we’ve discovered from around the year 800. We probably haven’t talked about God’s wife yet on the podcast, have we?

Well, we talked about it a little bit with Francesca Stavrakopoulou, but we probably need to get more into that because it also sounds a little bit like she used to be his mom, which we’re getting very Oedipal now. But we’ll move on from that.

Maybe so. Yeah.

And one other thing I want to point out about the divine council is this exists from beginning to end in the Hebrew Bible, though it’s negotiated. And I’m going to talk about that a little bit in terms of Psalms 82 , however, you can still see it even in places like Second Isaiah. So Isaiah 40 through the end of Isaiah. There are scholars who suggest that this is the onset of monotheism, but you still have these references to the divine council. So in the Hebrew Bible where you see God calling on people to witness or to testify or to bring their case or to do these things, this is a reference to the divine council. And you even see it at the beginning of Deuteronomy 32 . Usually you don’t have the person referred to explicitly. It just says give ear or testify or something like that. In the beginning of Deuteronomy 32 , it says something like give ear O heavens, and listen O earth.

And so this is adopting this way to call upon the divine council to testify or to witness what’s going on. But in Psalms 82 , we have God. It says, God has taken his place or, or taken his stand in the divine council in the midst of the gods. He holds judgment or he judges and then asks some questions. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? And here I’m kind of reading from the NRSV, but also editorializing as I go. Give justice to the weak and the orphan, maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked. So we’ve got Adonai standing in the divine council, wagging their finger at the other gods of the divine council. They have neither knowledge nor understanding. They walk around in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I have said, you are gods, children of the Most High, all of you.

And so here we have that reference to Deuteronomy 32 . The Most High Elyon is separating out the nations to the children of God. You are children of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you shall die like humans and fall like any prince. And then the last verse says, rise up, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all nations. And so we’ve got an interesting text here that is representing this divine council court scene. God is standing amidst the divine council and is judging them all for something. And we have these serial imperatives. So this repetition of commands and these serial imperatives are related to what they would have understood the responsibility of deities to do, which is to maintain social order. So we have how long will you judge unjustly, show partiality to the wicked, give justice to the weak and to the orphan, maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver from the hand of the wicked.

So basically, the gods of the nations are being condemned because they have failed to uphold social order. And I published a paper in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2018 where I argue that this is most likely the God of Israel condemning the gods of the nations for allowing the exile to happen, for allowing Babylon to come in and destroy Israel, destroy the temple and cart off the Judahites into captivity, into the exile. And so this is God’s opportunity to condemn the gods of the nations who allowed that to happen.en. But there’s a specific reason for this.

And just so I’m keeping track of this correctly at this point in this psalm, when God says, you are children of the Most High, is he saying, you’re children of me? Or is he saying you’re children of my dad also?

So that depends.

We are all.

Yeah, that depends on how you date Psalms 82 , and not in terms of where you take it to dinner, but what time period you believe it was composed in. There are a lot of scholars who date this very, very early, suggest this may predate the conflation of Adonai and El. And for instance, you have Adonai is standing in the divine council, but at the very last verse, the psalmist calls on Adonai to rise up, which suggests that. That God is seated. And so some scholars say the one on the throne is the high deity. Adonai is just one of the other deities who’s standing amidst the divine council. So that’s one argument that’s been.

So I, when I. When you read that, I read it as not the psalmist saying Adonai saying, you know, Lord, stand up, but as Adonai saying, oh, God, to the high gods, to the high God, stand up and do the thing. Okay, a possible reading, or am I wrong?

That is a reading that, that has been proposed by scholars in the past. I don’t think it’s the most likely reading. I’ll get to what I believe the most likely reading is in a moment. But all this depends on. On where you place it chronologically. Now, other people will say, no, Adonai and, and the Most High and whoever is being called upon in the last verse, these are all the same deity. Now here’s why I think we have to date this after the conflation of Adonai and El. 1. It makes the most sense as a reference to the exile, not only because this is what the gods of the nations have done most wrong throughout the entire Hebrew Bible, but also because the psalms surrounding this passage or surrounding Psalms 82 are talking about the destruction of the temple, are talking about the exile, and they keep pleading with God to do something about this. And there’s one psalm in particular, I believe it is the verse 21.

I. I think it’s in Psalms 76 . And let me make sure I’m not mistaken there. No, maybe it’s not 76. Maybe it’s 78 or 74. I don’t remember where it is, but it’s in my paper. If you get my paper.

Pretty sure read the paper.

Yeah. And the paper is freely available. If you go to my link tree, you can find access to all the stuff I’ve published. We have this. There’s only one other place in all the Hebrew Bible where we have the exact same phrase we have in the last verse of Psalms 82 , where the Psalm where somebody says, rise up, O God, Kuma Elohim. This other psalm says Kuma Elohim. After complaining about the exile, the psalmist says, Kuma Elohim, rise up, O God, and plead your case. And so Psalms 82 is God rising up and pleading their case before the divine council. And then we have the psalmist at the end of that saying, rise up, O God, and judge the earth, for you will inherit all nations. And this is right after they have condemned all the gods of the nations to mortality. So my reading is that this is coming from the post-exilic period. And this is the psalmist talking about God condemning the gods of the nations for allowing the exile to happen, condemning them to mortality.

You’re no longer gods, which means their seats on the divine council and their patronage over the nations now sit empty. And this is where the psalmist says, rise up, judge the earth, you inherit all nations. And so whereas Israel is the Lord’s inheritance throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, in the exile they are like Naaman outside of the land of Israel.lellan: How can we sing the song of the Lord in a foreign land? They don’t have access to the deity. They did not think to bring two cartloads of Israelite soil with them to Babylon.

If they just brought all the dirt they could have, it would have gotten crowded.

But the idea is the same: that we are outside of the land on which our deity is sovereign. And just like how in 2 Kings 3 , Adonai lost home court advantage and got run off, when they’re in Babylon, they have no access to their deity. But now with this Psalm, we’ve condemned all the other deities of the divine council to mortality. And therefore Adonai can rise up, can inherit all nations, can judge the earth, and can take over rule of all the nations, which allows us, wherever we are—wherever in the diaspora we happen to be found, but mostly in Babylon—allows us to now access this deity. And so this is in a sense a renegotiation of the divine council, saying we were isolated to our own nations because we all had seats on this divine council as patron deities. And now I’m going to get rid of all the other gods of the divine council and I’m going to take over rule of all the earth. And this is a rhetorical device.

The divine council didn’t go away. Once we get into the Greco-Roman period, the divine council is still there. There are still deities over all the nations of the earth. But they get renegotiated and they change from gods into angels.

Interesting.

There’s an idea you see rising after the Greco-Roman period where every nation has a guardian angel. And this is reflected in the book of Daniel . We have Daniel talking about the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece, and the chief prince, the prince of Israel—the archangel Michael. It doesn’t name the princes of Persia and Greece, but it’s the same idea. Instead of patron deities, we’ve now squished all the other gods of the nations down into this servile bottom category of the pantheon. They’re all now servile angels rather than second-tier deities like they were earlier in the history of the divine council. So the organization, the hierarchy of the gods doesn’t go away. We’ve just renegotiated the positions so that our deity, the God of Israel, one, can take over rule—direct rule—of all the nations, and so that we can access our deity outside the land of Israel. And then two, we’re going to exalt our deity so far above all the other gods that are still around by squishing them down and saying, “You are all demoted, you are all relegated to angelic status”—angelic or demonic status, depending on what text you’re looking at.

But once you get into the Dead Sea Scrolls and into the New Testament, you still have references to gods and the other gods. And so there is still a sense that the divine council is still there, but you have it thought of as God ruling over the host of heaven, the stars and the planets. This is the divine council. And so Deuteronomy 4:19 is kind of rereading Deuteronomy 32:8-9 , where Adonai has distributed the host of the heavens to the nations. And this is reflecting that idea that they all have their deity ruling over them, but their deities are really just the stars and the planets and the sun and the moon. And Deuteronomy 4:19 says, “Don’t go worship them.” They’re just the sun and the moon and the stars. So the divine council is there the whole time. It just gets renegotiated away to serve the rhetorical interests of these writers who are trying to protect Israel’s access to their God and trying to elevate and exalt the God of Israel over and above the other gods of the nations.

So that God can say in Psalms 83 , the next Psalm after Psalms 82 —at the very end, Adonai is called upon to humiliate the nations. And the psalmist says, so that they will know that you, whose name alone is Adonai, are most high over all the earth.

So you’re the one now you’ve taken over rule of all the nations. You have taken over the Divine Council. You are most high over all the earth. And interesting. Yeah, it’s, it’s a fascinating story. There are different depictions all throughout the Hebrew Bible, but I think we can weave a, a tale, a narrative about how that Divine Council changes through time.

I feel like the story of the Divine Council being then either sort of mostly disbanded or, you know, one of them rises up to be to all to sort of universal power, and the other ones are relegated to a much lower status. I think the Bible may have stolen that from the prequels of the Star Wars series. Is that true?

Well, I mean it, it depends on what translation you’re using, because we could, we could render that, you know, I could translate the Bible so that we have somebody saying there can be only one.

That’s right.

And then, then we’ve got the Highlander series that is being.

Oh yeah, that’s true, that’s true.

That is being ripped off.

But I feel like that reading is contradicted by Palpatine chapter 3, verse 2.

So anyway, I recognize that canon; everybody knows they made this up as they went along.

Well, I mean, I, I, I will refrain from comment on that point. Thank you so much, Dan. That is super interesting stuff and, and I think helpful as we read through the Bible to, to understand that, because there’s stuff that can be very confusing without that context. And having it makes a lot of things make a lot more sense.

I think so. Including 2 Kings 3 . What’s going on here? If we understand, hey, this nation is like, we got our God in charge of everything. We’re going to march into this other nation and, and we’re going to beat them up. Oh no, their God is, is doing their own thing. So, yeah, it contextualizes a lot that is otherwise mysterious or not clear that can easily be misappropriated, misinterpreted to serve our own ends. These days we can say, oh well, this is what makes sense to us today. But the reality is there was something else that made it make sense to them anciently. And one of those things, one of the main things when it comes to geopolitics was the Divine Council.

Yeah. All right, well, there you go. Go forth and figure out who your, your God is and we’ll talk to you again next week. Thanks so much.

Bye, everybody.

So Many Gods!

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