Biblical Context: The Divine Council (The Spiritual Realm, Part 3) - Episode 006

## Introduction

- Welcome to the sixth episode of Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith.  My name is Carey Griffel and, for the moment, this is the last episode in this little mini-series I am doing that is centered on the spiritual realm which I started in episode 4.  I expect I will come back to this sooner rather than later, but we’ve got a lot to cover with all the stuff that starts here in Genesis so I feel we ought to move along after this episode.  Because I’m going to be jumping around in topics through my podcast, I’m going to do my best to keep things organized in groups in the titles of the episodes, like we have in this series.  So even if the episodes aren’t chronologically put out, this will allow us to trace themes forward through Scripture and through various implications and ideas while still being able to trace how they start in the Bible.  That is, of course, easier said than done, but as I know I’m not going to be able to exhaust a topic in one single stream, this will be my attempt to keep it as organized as possible so you can follow along, especially if you’re joining me later.  This also provides plenty of opportunity for people to submit questions if there’s something you’d like me to address or flesh out and I can organize Q&A type episodes.
- In this series about the supernatural realm, we’ve been bouncing a bit back and forth between specifics.  The first episode I talked about Gen 1:26 and how that doesn’t necessarily reference the Trinity but rather seems to reference the host of heaven.  Then I decided it made sense to talk directly about the Trinity because that was a foundational bit of learning in my own faith journey and I don’t want anyone left with anything less than a full appreciation of it.  Hopefully what I laid out made sense to you.  All of this does, by the way, connect together in the work of the scholar Dr. Michael Heiser, so if you’ve got questions or want a lot more information on all of this, he’s the guy I suggest you go look up on Youtube or read his books or listen to the Naked Bible Podcast or take his courses at the AWKNG School of Theology.  He also has a website at [drmsh.com](http://drmsh.com) (that’s dr, like “doctor” msh…his initials…dot com).  He also has a private community that you can join, as well.
    - And a personal note and request for prayer on his part and for his family and ministry, as well…Dr. Heiser is currently in treatment for cancer.  He’s been hospitalized lately, as well, so please, please pray for him and his family.
- This episode is definitely not the last that I will reference his work; if you get tired of hearing me talk about him—sorry not sorry.  I will do my best to make sure I’m bringing you the work of other scholars, as well.  Dr. Heiser is certainly not alone in his teaching and there is a whole wide world of learning that is just beckoning us all.
- In this episode I’m going to circle back to the idea of the spiritual realm and what is the deal with that?
- But I’m going, also, to introduce you to the importance of context.

## Context:  Why It Matters

- Remember how the Bible is…a book?  Well, it’s a series of books, but there’s one Ultimate Author and we can understand it as having one overall direction and purpose.  I want to say that’s hard to forget that the Bible is a book, but I think we do all the time.  If we do think of it as a book, we think it is so beyond any other book that it almost doesn’t matter that it’s a book.
- But it is a text that is embedded in a particular time.  And that means something for how we are supposed to read it.
- Have you ever read Shakespeare?  Have you ever done it without anyone explaining any of the idioms, any of the language, any of the historical background?  Even if you do have a general overview of the history of Shakespeare and the context of his plays—you’re still not going to understand many of his idioms.  The construct of his sentences might take a few readings to get the point.  Hearing it out loud and acted out might help, but nonetheless there is going to be a cultural and linguistic gap.
- If you’re over a certain age and you don’t commonly interact with the younger generation, you might find the same kind of disconnect going on.  A teenager might say something that you feel like you understand perfectly only to find out later that they meant the exact opposite of what it sounded like to you!
- There’s a real chasm of culture that needs to be bridged before you understand.  Why would we think that the Bible is any different when we are separated by centuries, by miles, by culture, by thinking?
- Thankfully we have many resources to help us.  Sometimes we do have an unbroken line of thought and interpretation that will help us understand.  It is true that sometimes tradition, that the historical interpretations of the body of Christ—is our aid in that—quite often, in fact!  But it’s also often the case that we look through history and see the struggles—even when we read the early church fathers, we see a lot of wrestling to figure out what something means.  When the church went from majority Jewish to majority Gentile—we lost some framework there.  The church at large began thinking in different ways.  And there were disagreements.
    - Now, it’s vitally important to note, I’m not really talking about doctrine or the major aspects of our faith.  It’s actually the case that we have striking agreement across time and writing regarding the pillars of our faith.  The various early Christian creeds are in agreement.  There were some outliers like Arius, there were occasional splits like the split between the eastern church and the western church, but there’s a reason these things were outliers.  They were rare, unlike the splits that happened post-Reformation, that continue to happen to this day.
- Regardless of how it might appear, Christian tradition is in much more agreement than might seem if all we are doing is looking at registered churches.  Even so, it’s not the place to go to really understand the nitty gritty cultural context of the Bible.  As I said, the Bible is literature…and as such, it might be fruitful to look at other literature from roughly the same time period.  This is not to suggest that this other literature is on the level of the Bible in any way.  It is not inspired.  But it can be helpful to use to get into the heads of what the ancient person would have been thinking.  In other words, we ought to read what they read.  Our Bible authors and readers would have read or heard about these other texts and stories, and these other stories would have informed or impacted their way of thinking in some way.
    - What we read actively moulds our thoughts and ideas.  Remember how in the first episode I talked about how we have avatars in our minds which interact in order to think?  A book functions just like this—and thanks to Taryn for pointing this out directly to me, because it’s a fabulous point…this is why reading is also so important for us today, because our minds will absolutely interact with what we’re reading to produce new thoughts; what we read enters our mental landscapes, enriching it and affecting it in real time.
    - The same is true for our ancient authors and readers.
- So, next up, we’re going to briefly look at some parallel literature.  By the way, you might notice that in a lot of ways we are going far afield from the book of Genesis in this episode.  But I opened that door last time by getting into Gen 1:26, and of course this material digs a line right through the text beginning in the first chapter of Genesis going straight through the NT.  This is what I meant by not restricting ourselves to Genesis here; so many lines come right back to it—or rather begin there.  We do see the action of the Trinity right in creation—God creates, the Spirit of God hovers over the waters, and in the beginning was the Word.  There is no lack of the Trinity.
- But, we know that the reality of the unseen realm is more than just the Trinity.  I mentioned the heavenly host, specifically in the form of the divine council.  So today it is time to get into a bit of this complexity of the spiritual realm and to do this, we’re going to try to get into the heads of the ancient person a bit by understanding how they—broadly speaking—understood the world, because we are all aware that ancient Israel did not live in a vacuum.  In fact, we’re pretty painfully aware of that because many of their interactions with their neighbors were harmful and destructive.  So we need to have a clear understanding of how these people intersected and what it means that they did.  When we see that they were similar to their neighbors, what does that mean?  Is that always a negative thing or are there other ways to see this?
- Just like today, literature and story was a key means of connection between people in the ancient world.  And much of their literature is quite similar while also being unique.

## Parallel Literature

- So, what do we mean by “parallel literature”?  How do we determine what is parallel and what is not?  Well, there are many things we can look at to determine that.
    - An obvious point of comparison is genre.  But this might be more difficult to determine than we expect, especially in today’s postmodern environment.  *Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of the Bible* gives a definition of genre that says:
    - “Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific meter or structure) and upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose—more crudely, subject and audience)”
    
    *Kevin J. Vanhoozer et al., eds., Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (London; Grand Rapids, MI: SPCK; Baker Academic, 2005), 252.*
    - But the question is…is genre descriptive or prescriptive?  Meaning, does genre exist as a category within society that has rules and boundaries that a work must fall into?  Or do we use genre as a category within which we place similar materials?  In other words…does the chicken or the egg exist first?  Genre or the pile of writings that we categorize together?
    - The question becomes more difficult in the ancient world when we can’t always tell if two texts were intended to have the same purpose or if they just look similar to us now.
    - There are some texts that are obvious to just about anyone that they are parallel.  Lists of law code, for instance.  Though even then…law code might be embedded within a narrative.  What about love poetry?  That should be obvious, right?  But sometimes love poetry might function metaphorically as commentary on something larger than itself.
    - We want to look at the purpose of a text.  Was it used in ritual?  Was it a letter from a king that was distributed among his people to announce something?  Is it a receipt for goods or services?
    - We also want to look at themes or similar characters, doing similar things.  Occasionally we can see that we have the exact same story told slightly differently, such as parts of the tales of Gilgamesh which closely line up with the story of the flood in the Bible.
    - We also want to look at the language used—are similar words or phrases there?  How are they used?  To whom do they refer?  How about similar names?  What’s the imagery evoked?
    - Quotations or direct language is easy—but often ideas are paralleled, or themes are echoed.
- Thankfully, in the last century in particular we have found treasure troves of ancient writings that we can compare and contrast.  This has helped expound our understanding of the biblical world by leaps and bounds.  Archaeology and transmitted history are amazing, and seeing texts written down by the people of the time…that is priceless knowledge.  Most people have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Fewer people have heard of the discovery of the Ugaritic texts which were found just shy of a hundred years ago.  Discoveries like these help us not only understand the world and culture of the biblical authors, but also help clarify the biblical text because suddenly we have more insight on word meaning and themes since many of these languages were so similar.
- So now that we have a few different ways to find parallel literature, the question becomes…what does that mean?  How does it relate to the Bible?

## How Do We Understand Parallel Literature?

- There are quite a number of ways in which literature can relate to other literature.  Perhaps the first one that comes to mind to us is plagiarism.  There are a number of different types of plagiarism.  And, just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism myself, I am getting these categories from the book *Quality Research Papers: For Students of Religion and Theology.*  By the way, with every episode, you can check out my show notes for the sources I use.  Part of the point of this podcast is to get more people familiar with what’s out there for study and critical thinking.  Okay, so on to the types of plagiarism:
    - The first is taking a text and copying it wholesale…word for word, and claiming it as your own.  That’s not a problem we have in Scripture—at least not since the canon was closed.  Copying word for word is literally what scribes were doing in order to make new manuscripts, and the scribes weren’t claiming that they wrote the text themselves.  In the days prior to mass printing, copying by hand was the only way to get another copy of a work.  That obviously wasn’t plagiarism.  Could we have had that early in the textual transmission of the Bible?  Maybe, but if so, it was divinely inspired plagiarism because we trust the text as we have it today.
    - The second type of plagiarism is similar, but this takes only a portion of someone else’s work and incorporates it into one’s own without credit.  Now, we do have evidence of this at times in ancient literature—but the question is, was it plagiarism, which is after all a form of ”stealing”—or was it something else?  Usually there is a reason for plagiarism—a financial reason.  The earliest account of outright plagiarism that I could find with a quick internet search involved the Roman poet Martial whose poetry was stolen by someone else.  He didn’t have legal recourse, so he responded to the theft by writing a poem calling it out.
        - Note that so far, plagiarism is about credit to an author…the fact is, much of the Bible was written by people who did not claim authorship, or at least this claim was not recorded in the mss.  Authorial credit was, apparently, a bit more flexible and not as big of a deal as we see it today.  It was common to write something and give someone else credit for writing it, in fact.  These types of writing are called *pseudepigrapha*—false inscription, meaning false attribution to someone else.  You can’t call that plagiarism.  You can make the claim that the writer is being duplicitous because he is counting on his writing having more weight than it ought to have since he’s using someone else’s reputation.  It’s stealing a reputation, not stealing writing or ideas.
    - A third type of plagiarism is taking someone’s work and just changing a few words to make it look like it’s not the same writing.  Another way to do this is to take from multiple sources and mix them together.  I could be mistaken, but I don’t think writers in the ancient world were concerned with this simply for the fact that writing wasn’t mass printed and so there was no mass access to texts to compare one with the other.
        - There’s also the possibility that cultures mixed ideas together all the time and it was probably not for the malicious intent of “stealing” an idea but because they liked an idea that came from somewhere else and they wanted to incorporate that idea into their own story.  Much later on in the podcast, I want to explore how this idea might have impacted things like how we see great flood narratives all over the world.  Did a culture *really* have its own ancient flood myth—or is it just that Christian missionaries influenced the native people, possibly inadvertently?  After all, in many cases, these stories were first written down by the pen of Christian missionaries.  And in many places, it’s simply part of the cultural practice to incorporate stories of other people.  This was not strange or wrong to them.
        - Okay, now that I’ve freaked you out with that idea….listen, I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything here; if these stories were truly part of the history of these people, that’s great…if they weren’t, that doesn’t have to reflect on the truth of the Bible, and there’s many reasons that’s the case.  If we want to be good apologists, we want our evidence to stand on its own.  We don’t need to be afraid of what we find because we rest in the truth.
    - A final form of plagiarism is that credit may or may not be given but the writing style of another is “stolen.”  This seems to me to fall better under other types of influence rather than “plagiarism.”
- Okay, so that basically covers plagiarism as our option of influence.  When parallel literature is brought up, the claim is often trotted out that the Bible “plagiarized” from someone else.  It seems to me that there must be a better way—or at least a more nuanced way—to think about the relationship between most ancient literature because none of the types of plagiarism that I just described seem to fit the vast majority of cases.
- Plagiarism is a very direct dependence of one thing to another.  It requires direct access and particular intent, usually malicious intent.
- Now I’m going to get into some information from Kenton Sparks from his book *Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible*.  In the introduction of this book, Sparks discusses explanations for textual similarity.
    - The first he mentions is the idea of **cultural diffusion**.  Texts from one place or people are going to be similar to texts from a nearby place or people simply because ideas pass between the cultures, both directly and indirectly.  Sparks discusses four types of cultural diffusion.
        - The first is with a **direct connection**.  This is when one thing is directly dependent on another thing.
            - Plagiarism would fall into this category, of course, but there are other ways that something might be directly dependent on an original idea.
            - Satire, for instance, has a direct dependence.
            - Polemic also has a direct connection.  A polemic is something that directly refutes or corrects another idea.  A polemic supports a specific position by undermining an opposing idea.  Polemics have particular motivations.
            - Derivative literature is another category of direct influence…a derivative work will include elements of an original work, but will use them in a unique way.  One example of this today would be the Youtube channel Bad Lip Reading which takes preexisting video clips from movies and other places and redubs the vocals.  Sometimes they take various clips and incorporate them into entire music videos which then your children become obsessed with.
            - Derivative literature can be a form of satire like Bad Lip Reading or Weird Al songs, but it can also be literature that takes themes and ideas and plots and characters and reuses them in recognizable form, such as in the newer adaptations of Sherlock Holmes.
            - Usually, of course, direct connections aren’t *that* direct.  But in order to call it a direct connection, there needs to be more than passing resemblance.  Things like repeated language and content help make the case of direct connection.  It is also important to note that sometimes in the case of ancient literature, it can be difficult to know which text came first, so we can’t always be sure which is dependent on which.
                - I’m sure you’ve all heard that of course the Israelites stole from the Canaanites, this is obvious when we see similar flood narratives, they say…but this ignores the fact that the Bible has a source for the Canaanites—and who were they?  That’s right, they were descended from Canaan, the grandson of Noah.  I wonder why they’d know about the flood?
        - The second type of cultural diffusion that Sparks mentions after direct connection is **mediated connection**.  This is when there is a middle source of connection.  Here, the text would know about the original source not because of the original source but because of a third source that connects to the original one, that goes between the two.
            - A visible example of this might be the book *The Travels of Marco Polo*.  People in Europe began to know about Asia not because they went there themselves but because Polo brought back this information.  The connection between the East and the West became more direct as more people were encouraged to travel and bring back goods, but at first it might have been stories that people heard.
            - Another example of a mediated connection is Disney’s *The Lion King*.  In today’s world, we have fewer and fewer direct connections between the world of Shakespeare and our own.  Many today may have never read or seen *Hamlet*, but we’d be hard pressed to find someone in America who didn’t know the story of *The Lion King*.  While *The Lion King* had direct dependence on *Hamlet*, the Disney movie has created a situation where people are not aware of the story of *Hamlet* even as the themes of *Hamlet* have entered the modern consciousness in a different way.  *The Lion King* functions as a mediator, so we can see how these direct connections might be lost in time, unknown even to the people of the time.
            - Just like with direct connection, when talking about ancient sources, it can be difficult to tell which is the original, which is the mediator, and which is the later work.  These are the kinds of questions that scholars attempt to figure out when they’re looking at, for instance, which gospel was written first and what were the sources from the different gospel accounts.
        - A third type of cultural diffusion other than direct connection and mediated connection is when two different works come from a **common previous source**.  It can be difficult to know if two similar accounts fall under a mediated connection or if they simply are both dependent on the same source.  An example of something that has a common source is the modern genre of fan fiction.  Another example that we are all familiar with are the Marvel movies—I think in particular of the gajillion Spiderman movies.  They are all based on the common source of the comic books.
        - The last type of cultural diffusion that Sparks mentions is **common tradition**—this is similar to having a common source, but it is less about deriving from a single source than it is that it is embedded in a common matrix of ideas.  After some point, that might be more of an accurate picture of the world of fantasy writing than suggesting common source material.  While much fantasy fiction uses the exact same fantasy races, acting in the exact same way, that JRR Tolkien developed in *Lord of the Rings*—elves and dwarves and hobbits and the like—fantasy has developed into a entire genre that can be seen as more of a tradition than something that is solely based on one source.
        - You can see that in reality, the situation on the ground is often more complex.  Multiple types of influence often occur simultaneously.
- When we are looking at biblical literature compared to its contemporaries, cultural diffusion seems to be a better way to look at similarities than plagiarism.  Cultural diffusion is simply how people share ideas with one another and incorporate those ideas.  Cultures don’t exist in vacuums.
- Some people still call this kind of thing “borrowing,” usually with a hint of superiority that “borrowing” is some kind of slam against the text.  But there’s nothing nefarious going on with this type of thing.  In fact, it would be both weird and it would make the text harder to interpret if this kind of thing wasn’t going on.  “Borrowing,” in fact, makes the job of the Bible translator or interpreter *easier.*  If the biblical author couldn’t share mental spaces with his contemporary, then it would make it very difficult for him to transmit information to other people.  The Bible is full of imagery…if the writing of the biblical author was the first time anyone encountered these images, then imagery, metaphor, idiom…these would all need to be explained before anyone could understand the point of the text.
- Another explanation of similarity that Sparks calls, “more basic,” is the context of shared humanity.  There are basic universal experiences and desires that seem common to humans at large.  We don’t need to appeal to a common source when we see two texts both contain a character who wishes to find a way to live forever, for instance.  If those two stories contain similar words or particular examples, that is when we can go down the route of exploring more particular connections.
- I have seen it suggested that the Bible has to be absolutely unique in order to be inspired.  This simply does not follow logically.  The Bible can be simultaneously embedded within its context and inspired truth.
    - I’ve further seen suggestions that it had to have been written in “God’s holy language” (but then I ask myself why the disciples and Jesus didn’t speak this holy language and why they found it perfectly acceptable to use different manuscript traditions, not to mention asking how we are supposed to understand the Bible when we aren’t reading it in this supposed holy language).  There are convoluted explanations for all that…the corruption of the language at some point required a new sacred language, and so on and so forth until we get to the ultimate Bible translation, the King James Version.  (Which, they probably aren’t even reading the original version of that, either, incidentally.)  The fact is, the language that the Bible was written in was very similar to other languages around it at the time.  So it makes perfect sense that different cultures would use the same words or even names when speaking about their deities.  Similar names do not mean that the same being is being referenced necessarily.  Similar names do not mean that one culture *merely* appropriated the deity from another culture.  Yes, this does happen.  But I’ve seen it too often that we assume some direct flow through history and I ask myself why we see things like that when, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, that kind of takes pagan literature at its word and…I just don’t think we ought to do that.
    - I’ve seen it suggested that if anything in the Bible is similar to anything outside the Bible, then that must mean that the pagan literature must also be inspired.  This is not a necessary conclusion.  Both the Bible and pagan literature were floating around in the same cultural mix; that cultural mix is not what is inspired; it simply means that there will be similarities.  Similarities in stories, similarities in pictures and metaphors and constructs.  The Bible is inspired; the culture of the Bible is not.
    - I’ve seen it suggested that a vision from God cannot contain pagan imagery or associations in any way.  This idea, too, possesses a logical disconnect.  If God knows that his people are embedded within a pagan culture, then he can very well communicate with them in images and language that will make sense to them in that culture.  This isn’t lying or deceiving or making things up.  This is accommodation in order to communicate a message.  The alternative to God’s accommodation is for God to download an entirely new set of presuppositions into the person he is talking to in order to get his message across.  And God would not only have to do this with the person he’s speaking to, but to every other person who was listening to the first person; either that or the spokesman would have to go into detail to explain what the imagery of the vision meant.  If that is the case, why wouldn’t God just download all this information into every person…why even bother using a vision or a spokesman or a text at all?
        - Remember we are talking about the Bible as inspired literature.  The options are NOT, “either the God of the Bible is 100% unique in every way—meaning there can be ZERO similarities with other deities” OR “the God of the Bible is made up/borrowed from someone else and did not, in fact, reveal himself to anyone.”  These are not our only two options.
            - What is a third option between those two?  That God did, in fact, reveal himself, and he did so within a specific culture and time and language rather than coming down and making an entirely NEW culture and language himself.  God’s revelation doesn’t require that he reveal a new culture or new language.  He merely needs to communicate within the existing one.
- The bonus to all of this is that we can use parallel literature in order to interpret or understand the Bible.  We can use other literature to “get into the head” of the ancient person, as Dr. Heiser likes to say.  It can help us understand the way they thought.  It can help us understand how God interacts with the world.
- When looking at comparative literature, it is important to note that the similarities are not the only thing that matters.  Quite often, it is the differences that matter.
- So with all that being said, let’s look at the Baal Cycle.

## Ugarit and the Baal Cycle

- Baal tends to be a big word these days.  More people are hearing about this deity.  Unfortunately, a lot of what people hear is not accurate, but so it goes these days.
- The Baal Cycle is a group of texts from the city of Ugarit, which is north of Israel.  The language of Ugaritic is closely related to Hebrew.  A treasure trove of texts from this city were found around 1928 or 1929.  This discovery has given us a lot of information about biblical Hebrew.  It has also given us some cultural context from the time.
- Baal is the main deity of these texts.  He is a judge, a king, and the one who rides the clouds, imagery that is associated with his being the storm god, the god who brought or kept back the rain that was so necessary to the fertility of the land—and thus, the survival of the people.  Baal is also called the most high, but when we compare what that means in the Baal Cycle with what that means in the Bible, there is a striking difference, a difference that will be clear as we look more into Canaanite religion.
    - There are many literary parallels between the Baal Cycle and the Bible, so it is valuable to our Bible study to become familiar with this text.
    - When we first see Baal, he is in conflict with the sea god, Yam.  (As mentioned above, Ugaritic and Hebrew are closely-related languages; you can see this relation once you know that the Hebrew word for sea—*yamm*—parallels the name of this Ugaritic deity.)  Baal is actually not yet the most high god when the story opens.  That title belongs to El—an important name that also shows up in the Bible.
    - In the Baal Cycle, El has declared Yam, the god of the sea, to be his vice regent, his second in command.  Baal doesn’t like this because it requires him to give up his gold to Yam, so Baal challenges the appointment of Yam as vice-regent.
    
    ## Water Chaos
    
    - The conflict of a god with the sea or the sea god is a common motif in ANE literature…and it’s interesting that we both see this …and don’t see this in the Bible.  (Remember, when comparing literature, it’s important to not only notice similarities, but also differences—a key message is often in the differences.)  In Genesis, we don’t see God battling the water.  We do see plenty of water and at first it is chaotic—but God’s Spirit hovers over it peacefully rather than fights it.  In Job, we see the sea creature Leviathan but this isn’t anywhere near the imagery we have in the battle in the Baal Cycle.
    - Job 41 is a passage with God speaking…
    - Job 41 (ESV)
    1 “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord?
    2Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?
    3Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you soft words?
    4Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever?
    5Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on a leash for your girls?
    6Will traders bargain over him? Will they divide him up among the merchants?
    7Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears?
    8Lay your hands on him; remember the battle—you will not do it again!
    - So it seems here that we are seeing God battling a sea creature.  But the sea creature is not all that menacing if God can leash him and play with him like he might play with a bird.
    - Then we have Psalm 74…another passage of God vs the sea.
    
    Psalm 74:12–17 (ESV)
    12Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.
    13You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters.
    14You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
    15You split open springs and brooks; you dried up ever-flowing streams.
    16Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
    17You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.
    
    - We don’t see this kind of imagery in the first chapters in Genesis, but clearly we still have the motif of God vs the waters.  But this wasn’t how God created in Gen 1.
    - There are other details in the Baal Cycle we might touch on, but it starts getting complex to analyze because there seems to be some repetition in the text and other gods like Baal’s consort, Anat, get in on the action, as well.  Some things we can take away is that Baal is seen to be the god of the storms and sea and probably the god of the dead, as well, since there is also a fight against Mot, the god of the underworld.
- Okay, so we see all these ideas floating around in the Baal Cycle…we see common terminology, we see common imagery.  When these ideas clash one way or another with the Israelites and the Bible, there are reasons for that and we’ve already discussed some of the ways that these might relate.
    - Before we go further, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves of what we’ve already gone through already.  We talked about plagiarism and I hope you can see how that isn’t really very helpful to sort all this out.  The ideas of cultural diffusion seem to make much more sense.  Within this understanding, we have direct connections of various sorts, we have mediated connection, and common sources and traditions.
    - While there could be some mediated connection going on, we know that these cultures interacted directly and repeatedly, so direct connections as well as common sources are quite likely.  Probably both are going on, to various degrees.  Direct connections seem visible when we have the similar language and very specific imagery, such as the cloud riding motif.  Common sources or general tradition also seem likely since the idea of fighting chaos in the form of water is extremely ubiquitous.
    - One way to talk about these similarities is to say that they are all based on a common reality that occurred.  This doesn’t mean that everyone is writing inspired literature.  It just means they have ancient cultural memories that have been preserved in their myths and stories.  While I think that some of that is quite likely, I personally feel there is too much similarity in many cases for this to always be the case.  When you have a common source with diverging paths, the farther along in time you go, the more likely the stories will have very little in common.  It seems much more the case that these myths have grown together as similar texts within a genre.
        - But of course it also might be the case that we have *both* things happening!  That we have common memories and then they are all written in similar ways because they come from very similar cultures.  So you see, it gets very…complex very quickly.
        - And now some of you are probably throwing up your hands and thinking, well what’s the point, then?  Why are we even trying to work this out?
        - Why?  Why, indeed?  Because it’s a puzzle and it’s worth working it out.  Because we don’t always need to find The Right Answer.  Because by thinking, by processing, by finding where we might be wrong, we become more right.  Because by going through these things, we connect with the humanity of others, even the humanity of those who lived long ago.  We tend to be very myopic and we forget that humans have always been humans and that we are connected together in creation and in God’s order.  We tend to think of “those pagans” as all being wrong….and I’m not saying that they’re not.  But I am saying that there are things to think about rather than painting everything with a broad brush and calling it complete.
        - My personal suggestion is to look at comparative literature with a critical eye to all of these things, because I think they are visible at times.  Where do we see polemic going on where the Bible might be correcting the prevailing view?  Where might we see satire, even?  Do the connections help support historicity?  And, quite importantly to our study and understanding of Scripture, how do these parallels help us to understand the way of thinking of the biblical author and reader—nevermind the chicken and egg-type questions.  When we look at how ancient cultures ordered and explained their world, when we see how central the spiritual realm was to them, we can better understand the theological message of the text.  And we don’t need to be shocked or dismayed to see these parallels.  Nor do we need to accept the skeptical opinions which suggest that Israelite religion was simply developed out of their surroundings rather than being based on revealed truth.
        - I know we are getting pretty deep into this episode already and I haven’t even gotten to the meat of it yet, but I think this is all pretty essential to the overall perspective I’m trying to get around to here.  Some of you have already gone down these paths, but to many people this will be new and I want to set some good groundwork for our investigation.
- So let’s get back into some more specifics with the Bible.  Are the descriptions of God defeating Leviathan functioning as a polemic—or a correction—to the traditions of Ugarit and other nations?  Do we have the Spirit of God hovering over the waters in Gen 1 as a point that counters these violent narratives?  It is quite possible.
- We can continue with the connections that the Baal Cycle has with the Bible.  Baal defeated the sea and gained control over water chaos.  He became the lord of the the clouds and weather.  He rode on the clouds.
- And where do we see this imagery in the OT?

## Cloud Rider (Isaiah 19:1)

- God is described as one who rides the clouds in various passages.  One of my favorites is Isaiah 19:1:
- Isaiah 19:1 (ESV)
An oracle concerning Egypt. Behold, the LORD is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; and the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them.
- I find it interesting that YHWH God as the cloud rider is enacting judgment on Egypt and its idols.
- Another place we see YHWH as a cloud rider is in Psalm 104:1-4:
- Psalm 104:1–4 (ESV)
1Bless the LORD, O my soul! O LORD my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
2covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent.
3He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind;
4he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire.
- Now we ask ourselves…why does the same imagery show up in pagan literature as well as inspired Scripture?
- This is where we are going to look at all those points I made earlier.
    - Our God riding the clouds doesn’t seem to be an obvious extension of being human, so the connection must be more direct than one which arises out of a shared common humanity.
    - Plagiarism is really a silly idea.  The imagery is the same, but the words are not directly lifted from anywhere that we know about.
    - This leaves the idea of cultural diffusion of some type.  Can we tell if this is direct borrowing, mediation, or a common source or tradition?
        - Mediation is not likely because the imagery is so very similar.  It is definitely possible that there is a common tradition or way of describing a deity in this way, because deities are so often connected to the way the weather behaves.  It could also be direct borrowing.  This language might be a polemic against Israel’s neighbors—correcting the idea of who, in fact, has the power to ride the clouds.
            - Baal of the Baal Cycle is not the ultimate creator; it is not likely that the people of Ugarit took the imagery from the people of Israel because then Baal would have been depicted as a more powerful entity than he appears.  If the Baal Cycle functioned as a polemic against the Bible, then it doesn’t work very well either that way.  Compared to YHWH, Baal is a comparatively weak figure who needs to battle to achieve his ends.  The Bible, however, shows a God who is not subject to any higher deity, who is not depicted as needing battle chaos in order to reign supreme.  So it does seem most likely that this is a corrective polemic that the Bible is using—unlike those fickle gods whom you have to bribe for rain, the actual Creator is very much different.

## The Cloud Rider Imagery in the NT

- The OT is not the only place we see a cloud rider.  Let’s read Matt 26:63-65; this is Jesus before Caiaphas:
- Matthew 26:63–65 (ESV)
63But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”
64Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
65Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy.
- Remember that “Son of Man” was the most common way that Jesus referred to himself.  While the phrase “son of man” might mean that he’s just calling himself a human like any other, this quote by Jesus blows that idea out of the water.  “Son of Man,” was, actually, a Messianic title.  Let’s turn to Daniel 7.
- Daniel 7:13–14 (ESV)
13“I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
14And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
- That was verses 13 and 14.  Something that struck me here is the additional ending of the Lord’s Prayer that was probably not in the original NT but added later.  “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory…”  In Daniel 7, the Son of Man was given dominion and glory and a kingdom.  So that’s pretty cool!  Note, too, here that the Son of Man comes before the Ancient of Days.  I’m now going to read a quote from *The Unseen Realm*:
- To ancient people all over the Mediterranean, Israelite or not, the “one who rides the clouds” was a deity—his status as a god was unquestioned. Consequently, any figure to whom the title was attributed was a god.

Old Testament writers were quite familiar with Baal. Baal was the main source of consternation about Israel’s propensity toward idolatry. In an effort to make the point that Yahweh, the God of Israel, deserved worship instead of Baal, the biblical writers occasionally pilfered this stock description of Baal as “cloud rider” and assigned it to Yahweh…

*Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, First Edition. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 251.*
- Heiser lays out several “cloud rider” passages, and then he says:
- The literary tactic made a theological statement. The effect was to “displace” or snub Baal and hold up Yahweh as the deity who legitimately rode through the heavens surveying and governing the world.

The lone exception to the pattern of using this unambiguous deity title of the God of Israel is Daniel 7:13. There a second figure—a human figure—receives this description. The description was known across the ancient world as Baal’s. No one questioned Baal’s deity status. Daniel 7 therefore describes two powers in heaven—two Yahweh figures, since, in all other places in the Old Testament, Yahweh is the cloud rider.

Just as importantly, the one who rides the clouds in Daniel 7:13 receives everlasting kingship from the Ancient of Days. As we saw in the previous chapter, everlasting kingship belonged only to the son of David.

*Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, First Edition. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 252.*
- The Son of Man in Daniel 7 is commonly acknowledged to be a Messianic figure, so at minimum what Jesus is doing before the high priest is claiming to the be the Messiah.
- But how does the high priest react?  He makes the claim of blasphemy.  Now, it wasn’t, in fact, all that uncommon for Jews of Jesus’ day to claim messiahship—but these Messianic pretenders weren’t simultaneously charged with blasphemy.  Jesus was being charged with blasphemy because he was claiming to be God**,** YHWH himself.
- We discussed last week what Dr. Heiser meant when he references this idea of the two powers of heaven.  This is another picture of Jesus as God.
- Okay, so now we’ve looked at some of the chaos/sea imagery from the Baal Cycle and compared it to the Bible, and the image of the cloud rider.  Now let’s turn to looking at names.  The name of El in particular and some of the characteristics of El.

## Language/Names of God

- I’m going to read a section from Sparks again.
- In Ugaritic tradition, creation was attributed to the god El and his consort Athirat (or Asherah), who carried the epithets “the creator of creatures” and “creator of the gods,” respectively.  The Hebrew Bible and inscriptional evidence similarly indicates that Yahweh/Elohim was the creator god and that at least some Israelites viewed Asherah as his consort.  Although El and Athirat were prominent in Ugaritic theology as the parents of the gods and creators of the cosmos, tales about them are generally wanting.  There were, however, numerous Ugaritic myths that featured the storm god Baal as the protagonist.

*Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible, p 332*
- First, a couple things may have stuck out at you in that.  YHWH’s consort, what is this??  Yes, some Israelites did worship Asharah in this way…this comes from archaeological evidence and, again, should not surprise or concern us unduly as the Bible has a ready and obvious answer for this.  Remember—what kind of sin did the people of Israel fall into, again and again?  That’s right.  Pagan idolatry.  Because of what the Bible says, we ought to see evidence of paganism within the borders of Israel, and we do.  Some take these archaeological finds as indicating that the Israelite religion grew from Canaanite religion, but it’s just as likely (and of course we believe correct) that the Bible is, in fact, honest about the chosen people of God—they were, frequently, pagan worshippers.
- Throwing in a little tidbit from my LDS background, as well…the LDS church takes this kind of information as evidence for the idea that YHWH was himself a created being, that he had parents named El and Asherah, or alternatively that YHWH has a wife named Asherah.  Their explanation for why this isn’t explicit in the Bible is because of course YHWH knew he’d get flack from people and he didn’t want his beloved wife to also be the target of these offenses, so YHWH protects her from the people…from her own children, so…she can’t have a relationship with them?  That always really bugged me as a child, and it bugs me even more as a mother today.  If we, in fact, had a heavenly mother—I’d imagine she’d be heartbroken not to have a personal relationship with her children.  Either that or she’s not the very motherly type….  Oh, they say that she will have a relationship with us later…yeah, that’s not cool.  If I was told I could have children but I could only relate to those children after they’d grown up, yeah, **not cool**.
    - But I’m digressing a bit.  My point here is that once again we see people who take pagan literature as a basis for truth rather than the Bible.
- So back to our point about El…El is the high creator god in Ugaritic literature.  He is the head of a pantheon of gods.
- El also happens to be a name or a referent for YHWH God in the Bible.
- What do we do with this information?
    - Of course, many have taken this to indicate that the Israelites “stole” their idea of YHWH from the Canaanites.  We’ve discussed at length how we can see parallels between literature and culture, so we know that this is not a necessary conclusion by any means.
    - We need to ask more specific questions before coming to any conclusions.
    - First, do El and YHWH share attributes or characteristics of any kind?  If they do, it is still not necessarily the case that they are the same deity or that YHWH is necessarily derived from El, but this is nonetheless important information.
    - As Sparks points out, we don’t actually know a whole lot about the Canaanite or Ugaritic god El.  He is a creator.  He is over a pantheon, and he has an escort.
    - As it so happens, those are all elements that can be connected in some way to YHWH.
        - Hang on a second, you say…weren’t you just saying that YHWH *doesn’t* have a consort?  He doesn’t…but along with the fact that some Israelites obviously thought he did, Asherah does shows up in the Bible in the form of pagan worship at Asherah poles.  Look in Judges 3, 1 Kings 15, 1 Kings 21, 2 Chron 24, and 2 Kings 22.  These are all examples of Asherah worship and it is condemned and judgment is pronounced upon it.
    - Okay, so we can say that YHWH, otherwise known as El in the Bible does not have a consort.  El/YHWH is Creator.  But the God of the Bible creates through his word, not through destruction and reforming matter.
        - So far we see striking differences in the similarities.  Remember how I said that the differences often tell far more than the similarities?  The God of the Bible, as similar as he sounds to this other Canaanite deity, is not the same.
    - What about the fact that El is over a pantheon?  YHWH in the Bible can’t be said to parallel that, can he?
- Weeeelllll, actually….yes he can.

## The Divine Council

- Remember two episodes ago when I said that the gods of the nations were real?  That Gen 1:26 wasn’t God talking to himself but was, in fact, more likely to be God talking to his heavenly host?
- In a number of places through various ways, we see that God, indeed, has a council.
- 1 Kings 22:19–22 (ESV)
19And Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left;
20and the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said one thing, and another said another.
21Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, ‘I will entice him.’
22And the LORD said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.’
- This is God sitting on a throne amidst the host of heaven, working out a judgment plan for Ahab—God has decided that Ahab is going to die in battle, but he doesn’t declare how this is done.
    - It’s not that God can’t figure out how to do this on his own.  He’s letting his council participate in the process.
- Now let’s look at the first chapter of Job.
- Job 1:6–12 (ESV)
6Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.
7The LORD said to Satan, “From where have you come?” Satan answered the LORD and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”
8And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?”
9Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason?
10Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.
11But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”
12And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand.” So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.
- This one is interesting because it’s God having a discussion with “the satan.”  Many people read this in English and say, oh it’s talking about the Devil, Satan, the main enemy of God.
    - I’m not going to suggest that this absolutely cannot be that figure.  I’m not denying the reality of the devil.  But…that Hebrew word there isn’t a name.  It says “**the** satan,” and “satan” means “adversary.”  It could be a job description.  “Satan” is used elsewhere in the Bible where it most definitely cannot refer to the Devil.
    - Either way, what we have in Job 1 is once again God in a council.
- So...God has a council of spiritual beings with whom he works to administer his rule.
    - We can see the functions of some of these beings.  Of course, they can function as messengers.  (That is literally what the word “angel” means, “messenger.”)  Members of the heavenly host also have a mediating role with humanity.
        - Job 5:1 (ESV)
        1“Call now; is there anyone who will answer you? To which of the holy ones will you turn?
        - Job 33:23 (ESV)
        23If there be for him an angel, a mediator, one of the thousand, to declare to man what is right for him,
    - There is a heavenly court of judgement, as well.
        - Daniel 7:10 (ESV)
        10A stream of fire issued and came out from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.
    - They apparently have something to do with writing down books of life or remembrance
        - Malachi 3:16 (ESV)
        16Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name.
    - If we take Gen 1:26 to be God speaking to his host, they also participate in the imaging task.  We will get much more into what that means, but for now I’d point out that heavenly messengers appear as men.
    - The council also rules the nations.  Let’s read Psalm 82.  Remember when we talked about the term *elohim*?  That’s translated as gods here in the ESV:
    - Psalm 82:1–8 (ESV)
    1God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods [*elohim*] he holds judgment:
    2“How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
    3Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
    4Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
    5They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
    6I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;
    7nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”
    8Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!
    - God is going to inherit the nations.  That tells us who these members of the council are.  They are the lesser created gods who rule the pagan nations, being judged because they did not rule as God would have them rule.
    - The question now is…how did they get there?  How did these lower gods come to be over the nations?
- For that, we are going to turn to Deut 32:8.  I’m only going to briefly overview this…for the full explanation, I highly, highly recommend reading *The Unseen Realm* by Dr. Michael Heiser.  Deut 32:8-9 says:
    - Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (ESV)
    8When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
    9But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
    - The reference to the division of mankind…this is speaking of the time of the Tower of Babel.
    - Genesis 11:1–4 (ESV)
    1Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
    2And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
    3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
    4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
    - Of course, that’s exactly what happened.  God divided mankind into nations (”fixing the borders of the peoples”) amongst the “sons of God,” whom we know are created spiritual beings.  Let’s read
    - Deut 4:19-20
    - And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.
    But the LORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.
    - God has decreed that the other nations will have other gods to worship.
        - Is this weird?  Yes.  But keep in mind that if these other gods image God the way they are supposed to, then they are expected to be his representatives, just as we are.  This corresponds to the way God works throughout Scripture—allowing participation from his imagers to accomplish his goal of bringing all of humanity to himself.
    - Psalm 82 tells us that these gods were not obedient.  Rather than leading mankind to the true creator, the sons of God who were allotted to the nations usurped God’s authority.

## “Deuteronomy 32 World View”

- In response to the people once again ignoring God and doing what they want, making a name for themselves, God said, fine, you want to do that?  We can do that.
- He gave the people over to their desires, giving them leave to worship other created beings, keeping a remnant of humanity for himself.
- The other *elohim* which he appointed got greedy and took the worship of the people to themselves, guiding the people toward wickedness rather than toward the Creator of All.
- This is what Dr. Heiser and others call the “Deuteronomy 32 World View,” the idea that the lesser gods of the nations were appointed by God, that they rebelled, and this is the mess we are now in.  One of the many messes that are taken care of at the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

## What does God need with a council?

- Soooo…what does God need with a council?
- Well, he doesn’t.
- Why does God need humans?  The church?
- Does God having a council mean that he’s giving over decisions and authority to other people?  Not any more than he does in relation to the body of Christ.  The idea is that we are to be in agreement with God’s will, doing what God would have us do.
- Let’s turn again to the book of Daniel, this time to chapter 4:
- Daniel 4:13–17 (ESV)
13“I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven.
14He proclaimed aloud and said thus: ‘Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches.
15But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth.
16Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him.
17The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.’
- A watcher, a holy one, came from heaven and made a declaration.  The end of our passage says that this is by their decision.  Let’s move down to v 24:
- Daniel 4:24 (ESV)
24this is the interpretation, O king: It is a decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king,
- This verse says they are not working independently, away from God; the “decree of the watchers” is the ”decree of the Most High.”
    - God and his council are to work in harmony, according to God’s will.  When they do not, they are judged.

## God, El, and the Divine Council

- Okay, so let’s go back and compare YHWH God and his council with the council that we see El has in the Baal Cycle.
- What are the similarities?
    - The name El, of course.
    - El created the lower gods.
    - Even though he is the head of the pantheon, El allows the lower gods to participate in decision making.
- Now, what are the differences?
    - The name El is most often appended to something else in the Bible.
        - El Elyon, for instance, means “God Most High.”
        - El Roi means “God Who Sees.”
        - El Olam means, “Eternal God”
        - El is used in names, as I described in a previous episode.
        - It might be the case that El is less a designated name than it is a title.  Especially when we realize that God revealed himself to Moses as YHWH.
    - In Ugarit, El doesn’t seem to care one way or another what happens when the lower gods battle.  Whether Yam or Baal win out in the end, it doesn’t matter to El.
    - In the end, Baal, one of the lower gods, assumes the title of “Most High.”  In the Bible, this is a title that is always held by YHWH.
    - El doesn’t seem all that essential to the storyline presented in the Baal Cycle.  He is a god who doesn’t seem very invested in his creation.  The God of the Bible, on the other hand, is invested to the point that he comes into creation himself in order to reconcile creation to himself.
        - It’s interesting to me that the nations surrounding Israel never seem to actually have the highest creator deity as the one they are to worship.…very interesting.
- As you can see, the differences between the Canaanite El and the God of the Bible are quite numerous and distinctive.  So let’s consider this.
    - Is it fair to suggest that the Israelites couldn’t have come up with their own god, so they “stole” the Canaanite one?
        - YHWH is definitely more awesome than Ugaritic El ever was.  If the Israelites indeed took the language, then this is clearly more of a polemic use of the language if it is not *simply* the use of a term that more or less meant, to the ANE people of the time, “high creator.”
    - Considering the distinctive differences, I don’t think it’s fair, either, to suggest that El and YHWH were merely competing deities of the time.  The investment that YHWH had with his people, the characterization of him in the text of the Hebrew Bible, the follow through of the narrative to the person of Christ…these are things that go far beyond what any of the other deities of the time were ever said to do.

## Summary

- So, to end…here’s a question.  How do we ultimately compare these parallels with other literature to the Bible?  What makes sense when we consider that the Bible is revelation whereas these other texts are not?
    - How can we be confident in the Bible?  The biggest reason is that it is the Bible that tells us of Christ—his life, death, resurrection, and ascension.  Even non-Christian scholars—not a few, but the vast majority—admit that the evidence points to Christ being a historical figure.  Hundreds of people—people who could have been talked to at the time and their stories examined—witnessed his resurrection.  The Bible is our source for information about the Savior.  It is the core message of our faith.
- Also…I don’t want you coming away from this episode thinking that we can’t understand the Bible without also reading other literature.  Is it better to steep ourselves in the culture of the biblical authors so that we can pick up with they are putting down in the text?  I think so.  Is it, however, *necessary* to understanding the Bible?  Does it fundamentally change the message of the gospel?  No.  It helps us draw a much more detailed picture of God’s redemption of humanity, which includes the defeat of not only human evil but evil that exists in the spiritual realm.  Understanding how there is some reality behind pagan belief or pagan gods can help us understand what Paul says when he says that our battle is “not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).  The story of creation and redemption is a vast and all-encompassing narrative of God’s sovereign triumph.

## Outro

- Once again, thank you for listening to this episode!  I encourage anyone interested in this topic to pick up Dr. Hesier’s book, *The Unseen Realm,* or if you don’t want footnotes, pick up his book *Supernatural,* which has the same content but doesn’t have all the sources that some might find get in the way of reading.
- If you want to find out the other sources I used to write this episode, check out my transcript or my website or come find me on fb at Genesis Marks the Spot.  You can always email me at genesismarksthespot@gmail.com, as well.  Next week we’re going to get more into comparative studies, talking about myth and why it doesn’t have to be the dirty word we use it as.
- Thanks for listening!