The Unseen Realm

Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

Michael S. Heiser

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781577995579
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Over 175, 000 copies sold.

In The Unseen Realm, Dr. Michael Heiser examines the ancient context of Scripture, explaining how its supernatural worldview can help us grow in our understanding of God. He illuminates intriguing and amazing passages of the Bible that have been hiding in plain sight. You'll find yourself engaged in an enthusiastic pursuit of the truth, resulting in a new appreciation for God's Word.

• Why wasn't Eve surprised when the serpent spoke to her?
• How did descendants of the Nephilim survive the flood?
• Why did Jacob fuse Yahweh and his Angel together in his prayer?
• Who are the assembly of divine beings that God presides over?
• In what way do those beings participate in God's decisions?
• Why do Peter and Jude promote belief in imprisoned spirits?
• Why does Paul describe evil spirits in terms of geographical rulership?
• Who are the "glorious ones" that even angels dare not rebuke?

After reading this book, you may never read your Bible the same way again.

PART 1

FIRST THINGS

CHAPTER 1

Reading Your Bible Again—

for the First Time

WE ALL HAVE WATERSHED MOMENTS IN LIFE, CRITICAL TURNING POINTS where, from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same.

One such moment in my own life—the catalyst behind this book—came on a Sunday morning in church while I was in graduate school. I was chatting with a friend who, like me, was working on a PhD in Hebrew studies, killing a few minutes before the service started. I don’t recall much of the conversation, though I’m sure it was something about Old Testament theology. But I’ll never forget how it ended. My friend handed me his Hebrew Bible, open to Psalm 82. He said simply, “Here, read that … look at it closely.”

The first verse hit me like a bolt of lightning:

God [elohim] stands in the divine assembly;

he administers judgment in the midst of the gods [elohim].1

I’ve indicated the Hebrew wording that caught my eye and put my heart in my throat. The word elohim occurs twice in this short verse. Other than the covenant name, Yahweh, it’s the most common word in the Old Testament for God. And the first use of the word in this verse worked fine. But since I knew my Hebrew grammar, I saw immediately that the second instance needed to be translated as plural. There it was, plain as day: The God of the Old Testament was part of an assembly—a pantheon—of other gods.

Needless to say, I didn’t hear a word of the sermon. My mind was reeling.

How was it possible that I’d never seen that before? I’d read through the Bible seven or eight times. I’d been to seminary. I’d studied Hebrew. I’d taught for five years at a Bible college.

What did this do to my theology? I’d always thought—and had taught my students—that any other “gods” referenced in the Bible were just idols. As easy and comfortable as that explanation was, it didn’t make sense here. The God of Israel isn’t part of a group of idols. But I couldn’t picture him running around with other real gods, either. This was the Bible, not Greek mythology. But there it was in black and white. The text had me by the throat, and I couldn’t shake free.

I immediately set to work trying to find answers. I soon discovered that the ground I was exploring was a place where evangelicals had feared to tread. The explanations I found from evangelical scholars were disturbingly weak, mostly maintaining that the gods (elohim) in the verse were just men—Jewish elders—or that the verse was about the Trinity. I knew neither of those could be correct. Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth. The Bible nowhere teaches that God appointed a council of Jewish elders to rule over foreign nations, and God certainly wouldn’t be railing against the rest of the Trinity, Jesus and the Spirit, for being corrupt. Frankly, the answers just weren’t honest with the straightforward words in the text of Psalm 82.

When I looked beyond the world of evangelical scholarship, I discovered that other scholars had churned out dozens of articles and books on Psalm 82 and Israelite religion. They’d left no stone unturned in ferreting out parallels between the psalm and its ideas and the literature of other civilizations of the biblical world—in some cases, matching the psalm’s phrases word for word. Their research brought to light other biblical passages that echoed the content of Psalm 82. I came to realize that most of what I’d been taught about the unseen world in Bible college and seminary had been filtered by English translations or derived from sources like Milton’s Paradise Lost.

That Sunday morning and its fallout forced a decision. My conscience wouldn’t let me ignore my own Bible in order to retain the theology with which I was comfortable. Was my loyalty to the text or to Christian tradition? Did I really have to choose between the two? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that what I was reading in Psalm 82, taken at face value, simply didn’t fit the theological patterns I had always been taught. And yet there had to be answers. After all, the passages I had only now noticed had also been read by apostles like Paul—and by Jesus himself, for that matter. If I couldn’t find help in finding those answers, I would just have to put the pieces together myself.

That journey has taken fifteen years, and it has led to this book. The path has not been easy. It came with risk and discomfort. Friends, pastors, and colleagues at times misunderstood my questions and my rebuttals of their proposed answers. Conversations didn’t always end well. That sort of thing happens when you demand that creeds and traditions get in line behind the biblical text.

Clarity eventually prevailed. Psalm 82 became a focal point of my doctoral dissertation, which also examined the nature of Israelite monotheism and how the biblical writers really thought about the unseen spiritual realm. I wish I could say that I was just smart enough to figure things out on my own. But in reality, even though I believe I was providentially prepared for the academic task I faced, there were times in the process when the best description I can give is that I was led to answers.

I still believe in the uniqueness of the God of the Bible. I still embrace the deity of Christ. But if we’re being honest when we affirm inspiration, then how we talk about those and other doctrines must take into account the biblical text.

What you’ll read in this book won’t overturn the important applecarts of Christian doctrine, but you’ll come across plenty of mind grenades. Have no fear—it will be a fascinating, faith-building exercise. What you’ll learn is that a theology of the unseen world that derives exclusively from the text understood through the lens of the ancient, premodern worldview of the authors informs every Bible doctrine in significant ways. If it sounds like I’m overpromising, just withhold judgment till you’ve read the rest of the book.

What you’ll read in this book will change you. You’ll never be able to look at your Bible the same way again. Hundreds of people who read the early drafts of this book over the past decade have told me so—and appreciated the experience deeply. I know they’re right because I’m living that experience, too.

My goal is simple. When you open your Bible, I want you to be able to see it like ancient Israelites or first-century Jews saw it, to perceive and consider it as they would have. I want their supernatural worldview in your head.

You might find that experience uncomfortable in places. But it would be dishonest of us to claim that the biblical writers read and understood the text the way we do as modern people, or intended meanings that conform to theological systems created centuries after the text was written. Our context is not their context.

Seeing the Bible through the eyes of an ancient reader requires shedding the filters of our traditions and presumptions. They processed life in supernatural terms. Today’s Christian processes it by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism. I want to help you recover the supernatural worldview of the biblical writers—the people who produced the Bible. Obtaining and retaining that ancient mind-set requires observing a few ground rules, which we’ll examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

Rules of Engagement

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN ANYTHING OLD AND WEIRD. I WAS GOOD at school, too. When I became a Christian in high school I felt like I’d been born for Bible study. I know—that level of interest in the Bible wasn’t normal for a teenager. It was a bit of an obsession. I spent hours studying the Bible, as well as theology books. I took commentaries to study hall.

Since there was no 12-step program for my addiction, I went to Bible college to feed it. After that it was off to seminary. I wanted to be a biblical studies professor, so the next step was graduate school, where I finally focused on the Hebrew Bible and lots of dead ancient languages. I’d found biblical nerdvana, at least until that Sunday morning when I saw Psalm 82 without English camouflage.

Looking back, I can explain all my study, education, and learning before and after my Psalm 82 moment using two metaphors: a filter and a mosaic.

FILTERING THE TEXT

Filters are used to eliminate things in order to achieve a desired result. When we use them in cooking, the unwanted elements are dredged, strained, and discarded. When used in our cars, they prevent particles from interfering with performance. When we use them in email, they weed out what (or whom) we don’t want to read. What’s left is what we use—what contributes to our meal, our engine, or our sanity.

Most of my education was conducted in this way—using filters. It was no sinister plot. It was just what it was. The content I learned was filtered through certain presumptions and traditions that ordered the material for me, that put it into a system that made sense to my modern mind. Verses that didn’t quite work with my tradition were “problem passages” that were either filtered out or consigned to the periphery of unimportance.

I understand that a lot of well-meaning Bible students, pastors, and professors don’t look at how they approach the Bible that way. I know I didn’t. But it’s what happens. We view the Bible through the lens of what we know and what’s familiar. Psalm 82 broke my filter. More importantly, it alerted me to the fact that I’d been using one. Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible. They are artificial. They are filters.

Once I’d been awakened to this, it struck me as faithless to use a filter. But throwing away my filters cost me the systems with which I’d ordered Scripture and doctrine in my mind. I was left with lots of fragments. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but that was the best thing that could have happened.

THE MOSAIC

The facts of the Bible are just pieces—bits of scattered data. Our tendency is to impose order, and to do that we apply a filter. But we gain a perspective that is both broader and deeper if we allow ourselves to see the pieces in their own wider context. We need to see the mosaic created by the pieces.

The Bible is really a theological and literary mosaic. The pattern in a mosaic often isn’t clear up close. It may appear to be just a random assemblage of pieces. Only when you step back can you see the wondrous whole. Yes, the individual pieces are essential; without them there would be no mosaic. But the meaning of all the pieces is found in the completed mosaic. And a mosaic isn’t imposed on the pieces; it derives from them.

I now view Psalm 82 not as a passage that shredded my filter but rather as an important piece of a larger, mesmerizing mosaic. Psalm 82 has at its core the unsee...