Troublesome Topic: FATAL FLAWS IN MICHAEL HEISER’S WORLDVIEW

Most of the things Michael Heiser presents as evidence for his theory about the worldview of the Bible fall into the category of things that cannot be totally proven true or false. They require a bit of interpretation and therefore, they can be understood in more than one way. There is at least a little bit of validity to each option.

However, there are just a few things that Heiser presents that have fatal flaws. I can say with complete confidence that the following thing are absolutely false. Most of these are discussed with greater detail further into this series of lessons.

HEISER IS ABSOLUTELY WRONG REGARDING SOME BIG PICTURE ISSUES

The first fatal flaw is that he ignores God’s instructions to reject what foreign religions taught.

Michael Heiser relies on the very worldview the Israelites and the Christians were told to reject. Heiser puts more stock in everything pagan than he does in the Law God gave through Moses. God was clear that He would not tolerate meddling with things pertaining to other gods. Here is one example – the Israelites were taught to not mix things that do not belong together, and among the regulations that taught this was the one that said, “don’t marry foreigners”. The reason the Israelites could not marry foreigners without them becoming proselytes was to avoid the introduction of pagan thoughts and practices.

The second fatal flaw is that he ignores monotheism.

Page 39 of Unseen Realm is one example among many in which Heiser says that the Israelites would have readily accepted the presence of a council of gods. On this page he says they would have seen it in the creation narrative because of the plural pronounces, “Let us make mankind in our image”. However, he goes on to say that only one God, the most powerful God, did the creating – “So God created humankind in his image, in the likeness of God He created him, male and female he created them.” His conclusion is that only one God did the creating, but the council of gods was present with Him.

Monotheism was the interpretive method the Israelites used to understand the passages in the Old Testament that Heiser cites. Heiser rejects their interpretive method and accepts that of pagan religions instead. Then he tries to convince us that the Israelites used the same method he does. Several times he says that ancient Israelites would have understood things using the same worldview he is promoting. That is preposterous. They did know about the polytheistic worldview of the religions around them, and they were commanded to reject what those religions taught.

Elsewhere Heiser says members of the council of gods were present at the giving of the Law. For this he interprets the phrase “holy ones” as gods rather than the standard interpretation which is angels.

These assumptions must be wrong because the Israelites were strict monotheists; they believed that only one God existed, there were no other gods in existence. That is the definition of monotheism.

If these statements about the worldview the ancient Israelites held are wrong, then that calls into question every other time in his book that Heiser says they would have seen things through the same lens he uses.

The third Fatal flaw is that Heiser offers a view of sin, Jesus and salvation that is different enough from the Bible as to become a major problem.

Regarding sin – Heiser seems to agree with the statement in 1 Enoch 8 that the corruption of mankind came because the watchers used secret knowledge to deceive the people (see pg 108). If some of the gods of the divine council, possibly the spirits of the Nephilim, caused corruption in the nations they governed, where does that leave mankind when it comes to culpability for sin? How much responsibility does man have and how much do the spirits of the Nephilim have?

Jesus – Heiser presents a different picture of Jesus; for him, Jesus was just another one of the sons of God and another member of the council of gods, although a special one. He does not say it, but he implies that Jesus was created, just the other sons of God.

Salvation: For Heiser, salvation has more to do with the Nephilim and other rebellious members of the council of gods than it does the ones for whom Jesus died – us.

HEISER IS TOTALLY WRONG ABOUT SOME DETAILS

Fatal flaw number four is his disingenuous description of where the Aramaic equivalent for Nephilim came from. When discussing the Hebrew word Nephilim, he takes the reader, as he should, back to the verb from which it came – NPHL. However, when discussing the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew Nephilim, he tries to make the case that it came from a different root word, for which he cites the singular noun in Aramaic. But every first year Hebrew student should be taught that the nouns come from the verb form because the verb is the most basic form of the word. Aramaic is similar with most nouns coming from a verb. What does the singular Aramaic noun Heiser indicates come from? It was derived from a verb with the radicals NPHL, a verb whose meaning mirrors the meaning of its cousin in Hebrew – NPHL. Therefore, the Hebrew noun and the Aramaic noun came from the same root verb.

Fatal flaw number five is that he ignores the prohibitions against divination. All of Exodus chapter 18, as well as Ex 21:22 and Ex 22:8 & 9, deal with the issue of Moses assigning judges or magistrates. When a person had a certain type of problem, they should go to “the Elohim.” That can mean: They should go to God. They did this by going to the judges God had placed over them for this purpose; they were His representatives in such matters. Secondly it can mean they should go to the judges who will make a decision on God’s behalf based on the Laws God had given his people. Notice that options one and two look the same in human action; the only difference is whether the translator chooses to render it as “go to God,” or “go to the judges”.  Thirdly, as Heiser suggests, they should go to the gods who were members of Yahweh’s council. Going to the gods of the council would require going to a medium who would then perform divination to see what those gods decreed. But divination was strictly prohibited for the Israelites. Therefore, Heiser must be wrong! In these chapters Elohim cannot mean the other gods, as he supposes.

I cannot overstate how important this point is in refuting of Michael Heiser’s book, Unseen Realm. Heiser cannot be right. God would not be telling them to do something that He clearly prohibits in other parts of the law.

This means that Heiser is also wrong when he says that “Elohim” is always a place of residence term and that place of residence is the heavens, not the earth. He uses that to persuade us that “Elohim” cannot ever refer to humans. But he is categorically wrong! Likewise his statement that “sons of Elohim” always refers to divine beings must be wrong.

If Heiser is wrong about the use of Elohim in Exodus 18, 21 and 22, and he clearly is, then the use of “Elohim” in Psalm 82 or the use of “sons of Elohim” in Genesis 6:2 & 4, and other places, can sometimes refer to humans as “mighty ones” if the context calls for it, which it sometimes does.

Fatal flaw number six is that he ignores the principle of reproduction according to its kind. On page 109 Heiser says that Genesis 6:1-4 “is one of two passages in the Old Testament that fundamentally frame the history of Israel…” He does indeed give that much credence to Genesis 6:1-4 where the idea of angels mating with human women and becoming the fathers of the Nephilim comes from if certain interpretive details are chosen and others ignored. If he is wrong about this passage, much of what he says in his book is wrong. But he never addresses the issue of reproduction according to one’s kind. That is a key principle of God’s creation and all living things in creation must follow it. The idea of the Nephilim being half human and half gods violates that key principle. In my opinion that is enough to derail that idea.

Fatal flaw number seven is calling members of the divine council “enforcers” of God’s covenant at Sinai. On page 168 Heiser writes, “The gods were ‘covenant enforcers’ in this worldview (the worldview of other religions of the ancient Near East). Israelites of course would not have recognized foreign gods in such a treaty… But the Elohim of Yahweh’s council were not foreign gods. They were Yahweh’s host and witness to the giving of the law, at least according to the Septuagint and the New Testament writers… They were Yahweh’s means of punishing covenant apostates.” Since he is so sure that (the good) members of the divine council were the witnesses of God’s covenant at Sinai, Heiser goes on to make another huge leap. He says on page 168 & 169, that, since the tablets of law are referred to by the term ‘edūt, which can mean “witness” and “since the tablets themselves occupy sacred space reserved only for Yahweh’s presence, the term appears to signify that the tablets of the law were also a sort of proxy for the divine council members who witnessed the event (the giving of the law).”

First of all, the Septuagint is not as clear as he pretends it to be, for the reference is clearly to angels, whether you read the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint. More importantly, for all his knowledge about pagan religions, Heiser is totally silent about important aspects of the religion given to the Hebrew people. In God’s covenant with Israel, He employed a pattern or formula for covenant-making which was indeed common in that part of the world. However, He also changed some of the components of that pattern. He used a series of witnesses that were markedly different than the witnesses used by pagan kings in their covenants with vassal states. God took the idea of covenant witnesses and gave it new meaning. He did not utilize witnesses as covenant enforcers, for He Himself was the enforcer. Instead, God used the witnesses of the covenant as reminders rather than enforcers, as encouragement rather than punishment. Some of the things God established as witnesses were: Standing stones (see Dt 27:4-13), the heavens and the earth (Dt 30:19), the song of Moses (Dt 31:19, the book of the Law itself (Dt 31:26), and the people themselves were witnesses to their own commitments (Josh 24:14-22). The Bible says nothing about other entities, such as other gods, being enforcers for His covenant. Heiser’s idea that the members of God’s council were the witness/enforcers of His covenant with Israel comes entirely from pagan practices and totally ignores what the Bible says about the witnesses of God’s covenant at Sinai.

Summary

There are a few ways in which the book Unseen Realm is flat out wrong.

I have said that Heiser’s book, Unseen Realm, has several pillars. I say that in order to clearly identify its key points. However, in reality, it is more like a house of cards. If you remove one or two of those cards, the whole thing falls down. Up till now I have shown weakness and cast doubt on all his pillars. But here I am showing that several of his pillars should be removed altogether because they cannot be right. I have also shown that some other details can also be proven wrong.

If we remove his narrow use of the term “Elohim” and allow for the use of that name in the ways that all the lexica and commentators have always allowed, there is no need to insert the pagan belief in a council of gods into the Bible. Likewise, the monotheism of the Israelites means they did not have the worldview that Heiser says they did; they did not accept the existence of a council of gods.

What’s more, one cannot ignore the clear regulations of the Torah, as Michael Heiser has done, and still try to claim his statements as biblical. Heiser violates this principle when he ignores the witnesses that God’s covenant presents for itself, and when he ignores the regulations against divination. Any statement about what the Israelites of the Old Testament believed or did not believe must also fit the teaching of the Law.

The subtitle of Heiser’s book is “Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible”. It is a misleading, deceitful subtitle. What Heiser presents has never been the worldview of Israel, nor of the Bible.

The next lesson in this series is THE PILLARS OF MICHAEL HEISER’S UNSEEN REALM