Genesis 6.1-4 – spoiledmilks

What Do Demons Believe about God? (James 2.19)

James 2:19: “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” In his new book The Bible Unfiltered, Michael Heiser says this “verse doesn’t say what many readers presume it says” (214). Is James merely saying that “the demons believe in God, and that doesn’t get them to heaven” (214)? Yes, they believe in God, but James’ point is that just as his reader believe God is one, so do the demons believe that too. “The demons believe something specific about God—and that specific belief is what makes them shudder” (215). “God is one” echoes the Shema of Deuteronomy 6.4, “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” [shema’ is a transliteration of the Hebrew command () which means “Hear!”]. But why would this be scary?

God offered redemption to Israel who came from Israel. Abraham was chosen out of the nations (Gen 10) who were dispersed at the Tower of Babel (11.1-9). Deuteronomy 32:8–9 gives us another perspective on what happened at the Tower of Babel, saying, “When 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. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.” God called Abraham, “established his ‘portion’—the nation of Israel—[and] he set aside all other nations” and allotted them to divine beings, sons of God (Job 38.7), which are referred to in Deuteronomy (4.19; 17.3) as the “host of heaven” (216). They are also referred to as gods (elohim) and demons (shedim) in Deuteronomy (4:19–20; 17:3; 29:24–26; 32:17). Heiser says that At some point “these sons of God… became corrupt and abused their authority (Ps 82) by seducing the Israelites to worship them instead of the true God (Deut 29:24–26; 32:17)” (216).

The demons (32.17; Jam 2.19) know “God is one.” Salvation was not, is not, and will not be extended to them. God chose to save Israel, and he will never save the demons. “Only the Israelites had the truth about the Most High God: God had become incarnate in Christ. By embracing Jesus, James’ audience was embracing the ultimate outcome of their ancient covenant faith” (217).

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The Father of Lights (James 1.17)

James 1.17 says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.“ What does James then mean when he says “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change”? In his new book The Bible Unfiltered, Michael Heiser says, “‘Father of lights’ points to God’s role as creator of the stars and other celestial objects” as seen in the original creation account and in the Psalms (Gen 1:14–18; Pss 136:7–9; 148:1–5—(p. 211)). In Genesis 1.14-18, the sun, moon, and stars were to “be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” They marked the changing of the seasons. Heiser remarks that the Greek word (tropē) for the word “change” in James 1.17 is used in Greek literature “to describe the movement and positioning of stars, seasonal changes and their effect on the land, and the two annual solstices” (212). James’ use of “change” and “shadow” connotes an eclipse. So whereas the sun, moon, and stars change positions, the Father does not change.

But God is more than Creator. Ancient Near Eastern cultures, including the OT biblical authors, believed that the stars were heavenly beings.

Deuteronomy 4.19 says, “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.”

Deuteronomy 17.3 says, “and [if someone] has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden….”

Job 38.7 says, “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

James, referring to God as the creator of all heavenly beings, is “emphasizing that they are created and are therefore inferior. God alone is uncreated” (212). There is no darkness in God at all (cf. 1 John 1.5). Though some of his creation fell (see ch. 28 of The Bible Unfiltered, along with Ps 82; Gen 3 and 6), God does not change. He does not fail.

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Yahweh Divides the Nations

Last time we started to look at what Heiser, in his book The Unseen Realm, calls the Deuteronomy 32 Worldview. What we see in Genesis 11 about the tower of Babel has to do with more than dispersing the people. They were “apportioned as an inheritance according to the number of the sons of God” (113).

If It’s Weird…

If you’re wondering about all of this, why it’s important, you should be applauded for making it this far. Heiser’s mentality is this: “If it’s weird, it’s important.” There are many strange things we see in the Scripture and, rather than look into it, we hear some normal, unsupernatural teaching that calms the Bible down. It keeps it from sounding too weird. But Heiser is looking at what the text says and where that brings the reader.

(I will make another post with some of the bizarre texts of the Bible).

Allotment

What happened to the other nations? Heiser tells us, “As odd as it sounds, the rest of the nations were placed under the authority of members of Yahweh’s divine council. The other nations were assigned to lesser elohim as a judgment from the Most High, Yahweh” (114).

We can see this is so in Deuteronomy 4.19-20,

“And beware lest you raise your eyes toward 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 of the peoples under all of 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.”

In Deuteronomy 32.8-9 God gives the nations over to the sons of God. Here, God allotted the gods to those nations.

“God decreed in the wake of Babel, that the other nations he had forsaken would have other gods besides himself to worship. It was as though God was saying, ‘If you don’t want to obey me, I’m not interested in being your god — I’ll match you up with some other god.’”

So other “gods,” (which were created by Yahweh, and thus, are lower than him), are now over the nations and they will be worshiped by the peoples of those nations. But their rule will be of corruption.

Psalm 82

Taken from the ESV

¹ God [elohim] 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

³ Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
⁴ Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

⁵ They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

⁶ I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;

⁷ nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”

⁸ Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!

God stands in the midst of his council and holds judgment against the gods, the elohim. They judge unjustly. Being wicked, they give favor to the wicked. Though sons of the Most High, they will all die like humans. In the end, the psalms as Yahweh to stand and “judge the earth” for He will be the one who will judge all the nations.

What’s the Connection?

Like the Nephilim who were men of renown (or “men of the name”), “[t]hose who built the tower of Babel wanted to do so to ‘make a name…’ for themselves” (115). What would this mean? Remember all that we’ve seen with Babel so far. Babylonian ideas about the Nephilim stemmed from thinking the gods gave Babylon their knowledge. Here, these Babylonians want to build a tower to the gods and make a name for themselves.

It meant “perpetuating Babylonian religious knowledge and substituting the rule of Babel’s gods for rule by Yahweh” (115). By now the message was pretty clear. “Humanity had shunned Yahweh and his plan to restore Eden through them, so he would shun them and start again” (115).

But the nations wouldn’t be completely forsaken. Once Abraham was chosen by Yahweh, he was given a promise. In Genesis 12.2-3, Yahweh tells Abraham, “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

What are these other elohim? Well, I can’t give everything away? You’ll just have to buy the book for that answer.

Outline

The Unseen Realm is Coming

The Nephilim

Dividing the Nations

The OT Trinity

Book Review

Buy it on Amazon!

And also Heiser’s more condensed version,

Buy it on Amazon!

The Tower of Babel

Last time we looked at Nimrod, the connections between him and the Nephilim, and we noted that he was a link in the chain to the tower of Babel. Heiser tells us this episode “is at the heart of the Old Testament worldview. It was at Babylon where people sought to ‘make a name (shem) for themselves’ by building a tower that reached to the heavens, the realm of the gods” (112).

The text in Genesis 11.1-9 says a few things I want to highlight.

In 11.5 “Yahweh came down to see the city….” How did he come down to see the city? We can look at this in a future post, but I want to make sure it catches your eye.
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In 11.7 Yahweh says, “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Like in Genesis 1.26, there is a plural “us” followed by “the actions of only one being, Yahweh” (112).
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11.8 tells us that it was Yahweh who scattered the people.

Deuteronomy 32

Up until recently I thought this was the end of the story. But there’s more to this than many translations let on. Deuteronomy 32.8-9 says, “When 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. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.”

This text “describes how Yahweh’s dispersal of the nations at Babel resulted in his disinheriting those nations as his people. This is the Old Testament equivalent of Romans 1:18-25, a familiar passage wherein God ‘gave [humankind] over’ to their persistent rebellion” (113).

God was going to start over, and as we see in Genesis 12, he chooses Abraham to begin a new people with. While the tower of Babel’s construction crew wanted to make a name for themselves (Gen 11.4), Yahweh would make Abraham’s name great (12.2). And it was through Abraham that Yahweh would make a people to bless the nations.

“According to the sons of…”

However, most English Bibles read “according to the sons of Israel” in Deuteronomy 32.8. This has to do with manuscripts, but “sons of God” is the correct reading, as some versions have it (ESV, NRSV, NET, LXX). We don’t really need to go into the minute details to see why the latter option is correct. The tower of Babel incident happened before Abraham was called by Yahweh, and thus before Israel was even a nation (Exod 19ff). “It would make no sense for God to divide up the nations of the earth ‘according to the sons of Israel’ if there was no Israel” (113).

Basically, rather than “filling the earth” (Gen 1.28; 9.1, 7), the people wanted to “make a name for themselves.” Regardless, they were “dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” They’re languages were changed, they were confused, and they split. The earth was divided (10.25). The people were disinherited from being God’s people. Instead, Yahweh “fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.”

Conclusion

What does this mean? Next time we’ll look at what Heiser calls the Deuteronomy 32 Worldview, which includes a look at Deuteronomy 4. Also we’ll see something called the divine council.