On the OT Divine Council
The Nephalim are small potatoes compared to the Council of the Gods, which I'm just unearthing via the explanation of Divine Council scholarship by Dan McClellan (Insta: @makelan). From Genesis 1:26's "our image" to Psalm 82's "divine council" (NRSV, Anglicized) to Jeremiah 23's rhetorical question about standing "in the council of the Lord," it's a pretty interesting subject. Anyone here ever gone very far down this OT rabbit hole?
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It's worth remembering that Dan is a Mormon and his reading of the Bible is to some extent through that lens (though in most respects his scholarship is excellent, particularly in regard to pushing back on the myth of univocality in the Bible). The Divine Council is very much a Mormon hobby horse.
This is true, but equally true in the opposite direction re evangelical scholars harmonising away traces of polytheism or henotheism.
I think Martin's observation is largely apt, it was just a common enough idea in the ancient world. Christians see it as a figuration of the Trinity, of course.
The Lord is referring to Elohim, literally God of Gods. The though was the sons of God was considered the lower deities. Note. Satan was among those sons. Satan had yet to have fallen from grace, it appears. Satan is not yet linked to the sly snake of Genesis, or the devil of the NT. Satan, literally means, the tester or adversary.
Job is considered one of the earliest written books in the Bible. Its setting is in Edom. It uses words not normally found in Hebrew. There had been some thought it was not written by a Hebrew, but this is in dispute.
Have I ever considered this? In passing. Oh, I do not think this is a precursor to the doctrine of the Trinity. It does show an evolution from a polytheism of the early Hebrews to a monotheism portrayed in the Abrahamic story.
Similarly on the protestant side; Michael Heiser most prominently, and Peter Enns less so (although being a student of Kugel, that's probably not surprising).
This is right, I was too hasty in jumping to the Trinity.
But, again, Kugel has a neat take on this as he works through some of the latent thinking about angels and the like in both of the books I mentioned.
The possibility of stars and planets being members of the Divine Council isn’t one that I’ve seen before, but I know thinking of the celestial objects as living beings was quite commonplace in the ancient world. Origen, in particular, seems to have been enamored of the idea. He mentions Paul’s line about stars having their own glory regularly and in odd places. This always makes me think of the relative paucity of our contemporary metaphysics. Sure, we have subtle and sophisticated ideas about constitutive parts of nature, but we no longer think that planets and stars are alive. A pity.
That feels like a category error - preferences as opposed to objective questions of fact. I mean, both Jaguars and Hondas are real; non-living stars and living stars aren't both real.
Quite a departure from what I learned growing up, I’ll confess, and undoubtedly blasphemy to most American Evangelicals today, albeit unknown.
Which illuminates why the Israelites couldn’t sing their songs by the waters of Babylon — they were physically removed from Yahweh’s apportionment, and within another god’s dominion.
The whole thing is worth a read, and not that long.
And it is for me when I grew up. But I did grow up. I was first exposed to this concept in Seminary. I also know archeological digs of early Hebrew villiages find households with Canaanite idols in their family altars. It was not until the prophetic era that we find a definite reduction to a monotheistic God.
Another book I can point you too is The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Mr. Wright has been a visiting professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary.
BTW, in Later Day Saints, they do have a concept that a true follower of their faith will become gods ruling over their own solar system in the afterlife. Where they get that belief, I do not know.
You caught my interest with this. In my younger days and even now to some extent, I have a sense of inanimate things being in some sense "alive"--though I freely admit this may be imagination. But how would we know?
In my case, it mainly affects me by making me much more careful with objects--not wasting them or damaging them carelessly. I'm also aware from random encounters in the past that I'm not the only person who has this variety of, um, animism. If that's the word for it. I don't know if it ties up with the neurological weirdnesses that run in my family.
YouTube has a video called "Cartoon explaining Mormonism", featuring a short fundamentalist film attacking Mormonism. It includes a scene portraying the council of the gods where the brothers Jesus and Satan fought.
As for where Mormons get their cosmological soteriology, honestly, I think Joseph Smith just had a really active imagination. Though I've also heard he cribbed a bit from a sci-fi novel that he had come across. Don't know all the details there.
Amen. And I am also of a similar worldview as @Lamb Chopped regarding “inanimate” objects having a kind of life of their own.
@Lamb Chopped and @ChastMastr, I know this as 'object sentience' and it is quite a widespread notion, sometimes thought to begin with object attachments in childhood. There are long traditions (folklore, literary and philosophical) of representing everyday objects in the language of sentience, along with degrees of sentience ascribed to plant life and newer theories on self-awareness and interspecies communication in animals (I hold to sentience strongly with plants and trees). Some of the AI debates right now focus on synthetic sentience, the point at which certain forms of developed linguistic or logic capacities enter consciousness, be it transhuman or post-human.
Not as idiosyncratic a concept as it once was thought to be.
Dawkins' joke about believing in one less god than you do actually works for Mormonism, at least as I understand it.
On the other hand, I think the number of popular SF/ fantasy authors who are Mormons is disproportionately high.
Orson Scott Card being probably the most famous. Never read him myself.
I HAVE seen the movie Knowing, which I believe was written by people from a Mormon background, and ends with
I recommend that movie. Suspenseful and atmospheric, but with a light touch.
EDIT: Forewarning, just checked wiki, and most critics disliked Knowing. Peter Bradshaw and Roger Ebert did, though the latter was notorious for being over generous with his reviews.
Just to clarify, I meant that Bradshaw and Ebert liked Knowing.
There's an interaction between their view of the 'Godhead' - which in their theology consists of three separate and distinct beings - contra Nicene Christianity - and their theology of 'Exaltation' in which human beings can evolve into a (small-g) god (which is which the video above, and the South Park extract refers to).
And now you have Object-Oriented Ontology to provide some further philosophical weight to this position, although they also do other stuff.
I was initially being fun, as I mentioned above, but as I've mulled it over I've wondered a bit more. Perhaps the physical processes stars undergo is a kind of life? It certainly seems more active and lifelike than, say, a rock. And planets? Well the incredibly complex amalgamation of systems and processes that make up our world, at any rate, seem to speak to something more than just brute rock existence. Why not call it life? What do we gain by restricting 'life' to plants and people and bacteria and whatever else is routinely classed as such, and what do we lose? Conversely, what is gained by stretching the understanding of life to include planets and stars and whatnot?
Science describes physical processes that we have come to classify as denoting life, but that's open to revision, as indeed it has been revised several times in the past.
Checked a few others, and the Living Bible was the only one that doesn't call the attendees of the council "gods". So I'm gonna assume that's wrong.
(Plus, it's a goofy name for a bible. Or is that the idea? The bible is "living", so the meaning can change over time?)
Meanwhile, @stetson, the Living Bible is a paraphrase, not a translation. It is based on earlier English translations, not on the original languages. It was called the “Living” Bible because it was written in “living” English—English as currently written and spoken—not in the dead or archaic English of, say, the KJV. The name made sense in that regard in the early 1970s, when it was published.
Dan wrote this response on his blog re: his involvement with the LDS way back in 2010:
"I think there’s some truth to the notion that people try religious beliefs out and stick with them if they fit, whatever that may mean to each person. I can’t say that everything about Mormonism is a perfect fit for me (for instance, I don’t oppose gay marriage), but I’ve found that it makes me a better person and that, in short, it works."
As well as this a short time later:
"I joined the church because of experiences I’ve had with living the gospel’s principles, and I remain a member because those experience continue to be confirmed and because it improves my life and the lives of those around me. I recognize that from a purely academic point of view ours is the weaker position, but I also recognize the methodological limitations of the academic approach and the scientific method, especially when it comes to questions of the supernatural. I operate professionally within those methodological boundaries, and I understand their purpose and value, so I leave my religious beliefs out of it."
Personally, I find his scholarship engaging and compelling.