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October 14, 2026 · The Postil Team

The Divine Council: What Psalm 82 Says, What Heiser Taught, and Where Critics Push Back

A Verse That Changed a Scholar's Mind

Read this verse slowly:

"God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment." (Psalm 82:1)

If you grew up in church, that second line probably never registered. In the midst of the gods? Who are they? The Hebrew word translated "God" at the start of the verse and "gods" at the end is the same word, elohim. The first refers to the God of Israel. The second, plural, refers to a group He is standing among and judging.

That verse became the starting point for the life's work of the late Michael S. Heiser, who died in 2023, an Old Testament scholar who earned his PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and wrote his dissertation on this very idea. His 2015 book The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press), along with his Naked Bible Podcast, brought what scholars call the "divine council" to a huge popular audience. Heiser describes reading Psalm 82:1 in Hebrew as a turning point: one elohim standing among other divine beings in a heavenly assembly.

His argument, in short, is that the Bible assumes God rules over a real household of created spiritual beings; that some of them rebelled; that God placed the nations under some of these beings after Babel; and that the story of Jesus is, among other things, the story of God taking the nations back. He called this the "Deuteronomy 32 worldview." Many readers, pastors and scholars have found it eye-opening. Others think it builds more on a few difficult passages than those passages can carry.

This post tries to do justice to both. We'll lay out the key texts and the Hebrew behind them, explain Heiser's big picture as fairly as possible, and then give the strongest objections, along with how Heiser answered them. Along the way you'll see where the evidence clearly supports him, where it's genuinely debated, and where his conclusions go further than the text requires.

The Key Texts

Before weighing anyone's interpretation, it's worth reading the passages themselves. Here are the ones the whole discussion turns on.

The centerpiece is Psalm 82, quoted here in full:

"God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: 'How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.' They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.' Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!" (Psalm 82:1–8)

Notice the shape of it. God stands in an assembly. He charges its members with injustice. He sentences them to die "like men," which implies they weren't men to begin with. Then the psalmist asks God to take back "all the nations."

The second key text is a verse where the ESV made an unusual choice. Most older English Bibles say God divided the nations "according to the number of the sons of Israel." The ESV reads differently:

"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." (Deuteronomy 32:8–9)

We'll look at why the wording differs below. A few chapters earlier, Moses tells Israel not to worship the sun, moon and stars, "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" (Deuteronomy 4:19–20). And later in the same song, Israel is accused of turning to other powers: "They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known" (Deuteronomy 32:17).

Other passages describe a heavenly assembly in action. Psalm 89 praises God's faithfulness "in the assembly of the holy ones! For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD? Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?" (Psalm 89:5–7).

The prophet Micaiah describes actually seeing a council meeting:

"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; and 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. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, 'I will entice him.'" (1 Kings 22:19–21)

Job opens with the same kind of scene: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them" (Job 1:6). Later, God reminds Job that these beings were present at creation, "when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7).

And Jeremiah makes access to this council the test of a true prophet: "For who among them has stood in the council of the LORD to see and to hear his word?... But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people" (Jeremiah 23:18, 22).

Almost no one disputes that the Bible describes God surrounded by heavenly beings. The debate is over who exactly the "gods" of Psalm 82 are, what Deuteronomy 32 originally said, and how much should be built on those answers.

The Words Behind the Debate

Most of this discussion comes down to a handful of Hebrew words, so let's define them.

Elohim is the most common Hebrew word for God, appearing well over two thousand times. It's plural in form, but when it refers to the God of Israel it takes singular verbs, the way we might say "the United States is." The same word can also refer to other beings. God says of the Exodus, "on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD" (Exodus 12:12). When the medium at En-dor sees the dead prophet Samuel, she says, "I see a god coming up out of the earth" (1 Samuel 28:13); the word is elohim. In a couple of legal passages, the ESV adds a footnote that elohim may mean human judges: "then his master shall bring him to God" (Exodus 21:6, footnote: "Or to the judges").

Heiser's key claim about this word is that elohim doesn't describe a set of divine attributes like all-powerful or eternal. It describes where a being lives: the spiritual realm rather than the physical one. As one sympathetic critic summarizes him, Yahweh is an *elohim*, but no other *elohim* is Yahweh. The others are created; He alone is eternal and sovereign. So, Heiser insisted, calling them "gods" is not polytheism.

Bene elohim (or bene elim) means "sons of God." It's the phrase in Job 1:6 and 38:7, in the disputed reading of Deuteronomy 32:8, and in the much-debated Genesis 6:2: "the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose." The ESV renders bene elim as "heavenly beings" in Psalm 29:1: "Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength."

Adat El is the phrase the ESV translates "divine council" in Psalm 82:1. Literally it's "the assembly of El," using 'edah, a gathering or congregation, and El, a shorter Hebrew word for God.

Sod means a council, but with the sense of an inner circle where confidential decisions are made. It's the "council" in Psalm 89:7 and Jeremiah 23:18. Amos uses it too: "For the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). "Secret" there is sod: the prophets hear what the council decided.

Qedoshim, "holy ones," is another name for these beings (Psalm 89:5, 7). Daniel uses related terms when King Nebuchadnezzar hears, "The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones" (Daniel 4:17).

There's an important outside source behind all of this. In 1928 a farmer in Syria uncovered the ruins of Ugarit, a Canaanite city whose clay tablets describe the high god El presiding over an "assembly" of gods called the "sons of El." The vocabulary overlaps strikingly with the Hebrew Bible. Heiser and many scholars see the Bible taking over this familiar picture and correcting it: the council is real, but its head is Yahweh, and He alone is uncreated. Critics, as we'll see, worry about reading Canaanite religion into Scripture.

Heiser's Big Picture

Heiser didn't just argue that a divine council exists. He argued it explains the plot of the whole Bible. Here is his story, as fairly as it can be told in a few pages.

A family in two realms. God created two kinds of children: spiritual "sons of God" in the heavenly realm and humanity on earth. Heiser reads God's plural speech in Genesis as Him addressing His council: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'" (Genesis 1:26). He doesn't think the council helped create; the next verse switches to the singular, "So God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27). After the Fall, God says again, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:22).

Three rebellions. Heiser sees Genesis 3–11 as three successive rebellions in which spiritual beings drag humanity down. First, in Eden, the serpent, whom Heiser identifies as a divine being, deceives Eve. He links this to Ezekiel's lament over the king of Tyre, which uses Eden imagery: "You were in Eden, the garden of God... You were an anointed guardian cherub" (Ezekiel 28:13–14).

Second, in Genesis 6, some of the sons of God cross the boundary between heaven and earth: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown" (Genesis 6:4). Heiser points out that the New Testament seems to read it this way too: "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment" (2 Peter 2:4). The Greek verb there is tartaroo, "to cast into Tartarus," the deepest prison of Greek myth, a striking word choice. Jude adds that these "angels... did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling" (Jude 6).

Third, at Babel, humanity tried to build its own way to heaven, and God responded: "Come, let us go down and there confuse their language" (Genesis 11:7). Here is where Deuteronomy 32:8–9 becomes the hinge. Heiser reads it as describing what God did next: He scattered the seventy nations of Genesis 10, placed them under the authority of lesser sons of God, and kept one nation for Himself. "But the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage" (Deuteronomy 32:9). The other gods were meant to govern justly. Instead, as Psalm 82 says, they ruled corruptly and were sentenced to die.

Cosmic geography. If that's right, then the rest of the Old Testament makes a strange kind of sense. Land matters spiritually. When the Syrian general Naaman was healed, he asked to take Israelite soil home with him: "let there be given to your servant two mule loads of earth, for from now on your servant will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god but the LORD" (2 Kings 5:17). When David was driven out of Israel, he complained that his enemies were effectively telling him, "Go, serve other gods" (1 Samuel 26:19). And Daniel's angel describes heavenly opposition tied to nations: "The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me" (Daniel 10:13).

The nations reclaimed. In Heiser's reading, the New Testament announces that God is taking back what He handed over. Psalm 82 ends with exactly that hope: "for you shall inherit all the nations!" (Psalm 82:8). At Pentecost, Heiser notes, Luke uses language that echoes the Greek Old Testament of Babel and Deuteronomy 32: the tongues are "divided" and the crowd is "bewildered" (Acts 2:3, 6), the very words of the scattering, now running in reverse. Paul tells the Athenians God "made from one man every nation of mankind... having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place" (Acts 17:26). And he describes the powers behind the nations in strikingly specific terms:

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12)

The Greek words are archai (rulers), exousiai (authorities) and kosmokratores (literally "world-rulers"). At the cross, Christ "disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him" (Colossians 2:15). Paul even echoes Deuteronomy 32:17 directly: "what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God" (1 Corinthians 10:20).

Believers in the council. Finally, Heiser argued that redeemed humans will take the place of the fallen gods, ruling with Christ. "Do you not know that we are to judge angels?" (1 Corinthians 6:3). "The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations" (Revelation 2:26). The story that began with God's family split between heaven and earth ends with that family reunited.

The Case Against

Heiser has thoughtful critics, and many of them respect him deeply. Their objections fall into a few groups. For each one, here is the strongest form of the objection and then the strongest form of Heiser's answer.

1. Who are the "gods" in Psalm 82?

The objection. For most of church history, many Christian interpreters read the "gods" of Psalm 82 as human rulers or judges. The psalm's charges are about earthly injustice: "Give justice to the weak and the fatherless... Rescue the weak and the needy" (Psalm 82:3–4). The word elohim can refer to human judges, as the ESV footnote at Exodus 21:6 allows. And when Jesus quoted this psalm, He seemed to apply it to humans:

"Jesus answered them, 'Is it not written in your Law, "I said, you are gods"? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, "You are blaspheming," because I said, "I am the Son of God"?'" (John 10:34–36)

The phrase "to whom the word of God came" sounds like people who received God's word. Some ancient Jewish interpreters read the psalm about Israel at Mount Sinai, the people who received the Torah. That reading fits Jesus' phrase well.

Heiser's response. The judges of Psalm 82 are sentenced to "die like men" (Psalm 82:7). That's a strange punishment for men. Psalm 89 places the same kind of council "in the skies" among "heavenly beings" (Psalm 89:6), and the setting of Psalm 82 is God standing in the adat El, the assembly of God. Heiser and others argue that Jesus' argument actually works better if the "gods" are divine beings: if Scripture can call created spiritual beings elohim without blasphemy, how much more can the One the Father sent call Himself God's Son? Honest readers land on both sides of this one.

2. What did Deuteronomy 32:8 originally say?

The objection. The traditional Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text, reads "according to the number of the sons of Israel." The "sons of God" reading comes from one fragmentary Dead Sea Scroll (known as 4QDeut-j) and is supported indirectly by the Greek Septuagint, which reads "angels of God," an interpretation rather than a word-for-word rendering. The Masoretic reading isn't nonsense either: Genesis 10 lists seventy nations, and "All the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were seventy" (Genesis 46:27). Building a worldview on a textual variant is risky.

Heiser's response. On this point, the scholarly majority has moved toward Heiser. Many textual critics, including Ronald Hendel, argue the Masoretic reading may reflect a scribal alteration made for theological reasons, changed by scribes uncomfortable with the original's apparent polytheism. Scribes are far more likely to soften "sons of God" into "sons of Israel" than the reverse. Heiser also points out that the Septuagint translators, working centuries before the Masoretic Text was standardized, clearly had "sons of God" in front of them. That's why the ESV, NRSV and others now print "sons of God" in the main text. In his scholarly article on the verse in Bibliotheca Sacra, Heiser made this case at length.

But notice the gap. Even granting "sons of God," the verse says God fixed the nations' borders according to their number. It doesn't explicitly say He handed the nations over to them to rule. That step comes from combining Deuteronomy 32:8 with Deuteronomy 4:19, Psalm 82 and Daniel 10. The combination is reasonable, but it is an inference.

3. Doesn't the Bible say there are no other gods?

The objection. Isaiah is emphatic: "I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5). "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (Isaiah 43:10). Calling created spirits "gods" confuses readers and pulls against the Bible's clear monotheism. Andrew Moody of The Gospel Coalition Australia, writing a mostly appreciative review, put it this way: Heiser rightly reminds us of verses that speak of "gods" but doesn't stress enough the many verses that insist there is only one God.

Heiser's response. These verses deny that anything compares to Yahweh, not that other spiritual beings exist. Isaiah puts the same kind of phrase in the mouth of Babylon: "who say in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one besides me'" (Isaiah 47:8). Babylon wasn't claiming to be the only city on earth; she was claiming to be incomparable. And Paul holds both truths together: "'there is no God but one.' For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many 'gods' and many 'lords'—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:4–6).

4. Genesis 6 and the "sons of God"

The objection. Many Christians, following Augustine, have read the "sons of God" in Genesis 6 as the godly line of Seth marrying ungodly women, or as ancient kings taking harems. Jesus said, "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Matthew 22:30), which seems to rule out angels taking wives.

Heiser's response. The angelic reading is actually the oldest. It's the view of 1 Enoch, of the Jewish historian Josephus, and of many early church fathers, and 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 seem to assume it. Jesus said angels in heaven don't marry; Genesis 6 is about beings who left heaven. On this point, fairness cuts in Heiser's favor: the angelic view isn't fringe, it's ancient.

5. Too much weight on outside sources

The objection. Heiser leans on the Ugaritic texts and on 1 Enoch, a book Jude quotes (Jude 14–15) but that most churches don't consider Scripture. Church of Christ scholar John Mark Hicks, who learned a lot from Heiser, still calls it methodologically problematic to read the Old Testament through 1 Enoch. The "watchers" who dominate 1 Enoch appear in only one chapter of the Old Testament, Daniel 4. Hicks also raises a subtler point: biblical writers sometimes borrow pagan imagery to mock or dismantle it, not to affirm that the gods behind it are real. That has to be judged case by case.

Heiser's response. He never treated 1 Enoch as Scripture. His point was that New Testament writers clearly knew these traditions, as Jude and Peter show, so we need to know them too in order to hear the New Testament the way its first readers did. Understanding a writer's background isn't the same as adding to the canon.

6. A lens that sees too much

The objection. This may be the most common criticism. Once the divine council becomes "the" worldview, it starts showing up everywhere. Moody found Heiser's attempt to place believers in the heavenly council strained, and argued that the New Testament's hope is not joining the rule of the elohim but sharing in Christ's far greater reign, "far above all rule and authority, power and dominion" (Ephesians 1:21). He also noted that Heiser's treatment of sacrifice focused heavily on the scapegoat of Leviticus 16 while giving less attention to the sacrifices directed toward God Himself. Hicks thought some of Heiser's later readings, such as in Hebrews, found the council in texts that don't need it.

Heiser's response. Every reader has a lens; the question is whether it comes from the text. Heiser argued that the council isn't something he imported but something modern readers filtered out, and that once you see it in the clear passages, you notice how often the New Testament talks about "rulers," "authorities" and "powers." He also consistently affirmed the Trinity, Christ's full deity, and substitutionary atonement alongside his emphasis on Christ's victory over the powers.

Where It Adds Up, and Where It Doesn't

The fairest summary is that Heiser's foundation is solid, but the building he put on it is taller than the foundation strictly requires. Some of his claims rest on clear texts. Others are reasonable inferences. A few are educated guesses that became load-bearing parts of the system. Here's how the major claims stack up:

| Claim | How well supported | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | God presides over an assembly of created heavenly beings | Strong | Stated plainly in Psalm 89:5–7, 1 Kings 22:19–23, Job 1:6 and 38:7 | | Christ triumphed over hostile spiritual powers | Strong | Colossians 2:15, Ephesians 1:20–21 and 6:12 say so directly | | Deuteronomy 32:8 originally read "sons of God" | Strong | Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint; most textual critics agree; the ESV adopts it | | The "gods" of Psalm 82 are spiritual beings, not human judges | Debated | Verse 7 favors spiritual beings; John 10:34–36 and Jewish tradition leave room for human readings | | The "sons of God" in Genesis 6 are angelic beings | Debated, but ancient | The oldest Jewish and Christian view, echoed by 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6; the Sethite view also has a long history | | Pentecost deliberately reverses Babel | Plausible | Shared Greek vocabulary and the theme of nations are suggestive; whether Luke intended the link is debated | | God assigned each nation to a specific spiritual ruler after Babel | Inference | Built by combining Deuteronomy 4:19, 32:8 and Daniel 10; no single text states it outright | | Seventy nations matched to seventy council members | Speculative | Genesis 10 lists about seventy nations, but no text links them to a count of heavenly beings | | Redeemed humans will join and replace the council of elohim | Weakest | The New Testament promises we will reign with Christ; whether that means joining a council is disputed |

Read that list from top to bottom and you can see what critics mean when they say the system goes further than the evidence. Hicks, who calls Heiser's reading of the key texts credible, puts it this way: he is not sure we can extrapolate a "worldview" from passages that are ambiguous and debated. The danger isn't that the top of the list is wrong. It's that the confidence earned at the top gets quietly carried down to the bottom.

But it's equally fair to say that a lot of what Heiser taught isn't controversial at all once you get past the vocabulary. Both he and his evangelical critics affirm that Yahweh alone is eternal, uncreated and sovereign; that He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; that real spiritual beings exist, some loyal and some rebellious; that the nations' idolatry has a spiritual dimension; and that Christ's death and resurrection broke the power of every enemy. Moody, for all his criticism, admits that many Western Christians fall into the opposite error: ignoring the unseen realm entirely. As Paul says, we can't afford that: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood" (Ephesians 6:12).

Reading It Wisely

So what should a Christian do with all this?

First, take the clear texts seriously. Psalm 82, 1 Kings 22 and Job 1 are in your Bible for a reason. If they've never been explained to you, that's a gap worth filling, and Heiser deserves real credit for pushing a generation of readers to stop skipping them.

Second, hold the debated parts with an open hand. Moses drew a line every reader of the unseen realm needs: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law" (Deuteronomy 29:29). There's a difference between what Scripture says and what we can reasonably infer from it, and the further down that table we go, the more humility it calls for. Be like the Bereans, "examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11).

Third, keep Christ at the center. Paul warned the Colossians about people "insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions" (Colossians 2:18). Heiser wasn't calling anyone to that, but some popular teachers who borrow his ideas drift toward an obsession with territorial spirits, giants and hidden powers. Hebrews opens by putting every heavenly being in its place: Christ has become "as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs" (Hebrews 1:4). The council matters because of who sits at its head.

And finally, let it lead to worship. Whether or not every detail of Heiser's system is right, the picture Scripture paints is breathtaking: a God so great that heavenly beings bow before Him, who nonetheless came down to rescue rebels and seat them with His Son. Hebrews describes what every believer has already come to:

"But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant." (Hebrews 12:22–24)

That's a council worth belonging to, however we end up describing it.

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References and Further Reading

Scripture. Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Key passages: Genesis 1:26–27, 3:22, 6:1–4, 10, 11:7, 46:27; Exodus 12:12, 21:6; Deuteronomy 4:19–20, 29:29, 32:8–9, 32:17; 1 Samuel 26:19, 28:13; 1 Kings 22:19–23; 2 Kings 5:17; Job 1:6, 38:7; Psalms 29:1, 82, 89:5–7; Isaiah 43:10, 45:5, 47:8; Jeremiah 23:18–22; Ezekiel 28:13–14; Daniel 4:17, 10:13, 20; Amos 3:7; Matthew 22:30; John 10:34–36; Acts 2:1–13, 17:11, 17:26; 1 Corinthians 6:3, 8:4–6, 10:20; Ephesians 1:20–21, 6:12; Colossians 2:15, 2:18; Hebrews 1:4, 12:22–24; 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6, 14–15; Revelation 2:26.

Michael Heiser

  • The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015).
  • Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches About the Unseen World and Why It Matters (Lexham Press, 2015), a shorter popular version.
  • "Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God," Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001).
  • The Naked Bible Podcast.

Assessments and critiques

Background

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