Troublesome Topic: HOW FAR ON THE SLIDING SCALE SHOULD WE GO?

How much of Ancient Near Eastern culture and religion we should accept as relevant to the Bible?

Michael Heiser wentall the way to the furthest extreme position of accepting everything from the other cultures and religions of the Ancient Near East. That is the wrong point on the sliding scale to choose to position yourself. However, those who accept no connections at all between Israel and other cultures around them are also wrong. The correct place on that sliding scale is somewhere between its two extremes. Exactly where should probably be decided on a case-by-case basis and everyone will have a slightly different opinion of where that point should be.

The main problem I have with Michael Heiser is not that he pointed out connections to aspects of the languages and religions of other nations, but the extent to which he didthis. While it is hard to know exactly where to position oneself on that sliding scale, I am absolutely sure that both extremes are wrong, and Heiser was definitely on one extreme.

There are quite a few places in the book Unseen Realm where I agreed with Heiser as I read the book, but there were other places where I strongly disagreed with him regarding the level of pagan influence that he wanted to inject into the Bible.

He admittedon page 373 that the writers of the OT adopted and repurposed material from the literature of other (pagan) cultures. But there are other times in the book where he didnot see how God repurposed those concepts; instead Heiser used them the same way the pagan religions used them.

For example, God did indeed use the pattern for suzerain/vassal covenants that was extant in that part of the world at that time. The pattern that was used by all the nations around Israel is clearly visible in the law and to a lesser degree in the New Covenant. However, God changed things as well. He did not use all the aspects of that pattern in the same way that the other cultures used them. This is obviously clear regarding the witnesses of the covenant. Yet Heiser did not acknowledge the change. He placed the pagan interpretation above how the Bible interprets itself.

Here’s another example. I have no trouble with him saying that Bashan and Mount Hermon were often associated with evil; however, I strongly disagree with him when he assumed that the evil of those locations was directly connected to the members of the divine council that the “disinherited nations” found themselves under.

As I read and reread Unseen Realm, there were times that Heiser made an initial statement, and I thought, “OK, I don’t have a problem with that so far,” but how he used it later caused me grave concern. He often set the stage by saying something that sounds right, and then he came back to it later and took a turn with it and ended up in a different place than what it sounded like in the beginning. He reminded me of a young man I knew who joined a high school soccer team, never having played the game before. In practice or a scrimmage, when the ball came to him, he would kick it into the woods beside the practice field (I never figured out why). The ball went from one teammate to another teammate to another teammate then to the woods! Heiser did that to me several times in the book Unseen Realm. I would be reading along and suddenly find myself in the woods asking, “How did we get here?”

But once I learned to predict Heiser’s sharp turns I knew that he would always find a way to make everything fit his divine-council-worldview. For him, everything has to do with the Nephilim or the divine council or some other part of his worldview, a worldview I call “The Ancient Near Eastern Amalgamation Station”.

The next lesson in this series is PROBLEMS WITH THE ENOCHIC INTERPRETATION OF THE NEPHILIM