Like any good story, we are going to start at the beginning., so get tucked into bed and pull your covers up.

Treat this like a feature film.

Once upon a time there was something which we modern thinkers have dubbed "The Divine Council."…

Let Zeke wax theological for a moment..

Before we just jump right in and talk about the world of supernatural beings and what their role and function is in the world, we need to pause and take a few steps back. Actually, we need to take a plethora of steps back. Like way back to the Ancient Near East. Why?

Here’s why:

When studying the the bible, it is always important for us to keep in our mind a distinction: “though it was written for us, it was not written to us.”

What do I mean by that statement?

God and the biblical authors had a specific audience they were addressing their writings to. Both these authors and audience lived in cultures very different and far removed from our modern day, 21st century western culture. This means if we really want to understand the depths of what God is communicating, it is going to take some background work.

We need to investigate the culture of the biblical writers and audience to see how they viewed certain things. We must remember that though the Word of God is timeless and transcends, it was delivered in a time-sensitive, culturally bound capsule.

With that said, I want to help us look at the Old Testament with ancient eyes. This means we must pay attention to its Ancient Near East cultural context and understand that God has accommodated his communication to the Israelite audience- an Ancient Near East (from now on ANE) culture. God accommodates Himself to certain things that were seen as normative to those societies.

One of those commonalities was the divine council.

Before we go any farther, I want to reiterate the obvious: the surrounding cultures of Israel were polytheistic. However, this polytheism was a nuanced polytheism.

What?

Nuanced polytheism.

Yeah.

Nuanced polytheism.

In the cosmogonies stories of the ANE (cosmogony- theories of the origin of the universe), the gods are traced back to one, singular deity. This is something that is never brought up or taught when discussing the Old Testament or the polytheism of the surrounding cultures. I never knew this, and didn’t learn about it until years ago while digging in deep to ANE study.

Why hasn’t anyone ever talked about this?

I don’t know, but I'm talking about it now.

Probably because most people just don’t know, or haven’t looked into it deep enough. So, now you know something many other people do not.

Be sure to share your knowledge so you can come off as smarter than everyone else at the bar, or little league games, or the grocery line, or talking to your online gamer friends...or whatever.

Back to my point.

This supreme deity, however, is not what you think. It is largely inactive. As John Walton points out, “This primordial, singular, divine entity is not represented in the head of the pantheon, and indeed is largely inactive.” (John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, pg 94).

Other scholars, such as Jan Assman (the sarcasm in me is dying to make fun of this name, but I would be an ass, man) have noted that the very distance and inactivity of this singular deity is what necessitates the other gods to become active in the destinies of mankind. (Jan Assman, Search for God, pg. 10-13). This means that for the surrounding ANE cultures, polytheism was a secondary construct.

Then why does it dominate their thinking? The ontology (ontology-the nature of being or nature of existence of something) of the ANE was one of functionality, not material. A god who does not function or acts basically fades into nonexistence.

In the ANE, major decisions among the gods were a group act. The divine council functioned as an assembly, deliberating and governing the affairs of mankind. We see this divine council in many Ugaritic and Mesopotamian text. In Mesopotamia, the assembly carried the highest authority, since it represented all the gods. This assembly was made of the great gods, whose number was fifty. Among these gods, seven were chosen to determine the destinies (T. Jacobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Toward the Image of Tammuz, ed. W.L. Moran, pg 404 n. 50)

In Sumerian literature, it is the deity Anu who is the head of the pantheon, while Enlil most often takes the active lead (Walton, Ancient Near East Thought and the Old Testament, pg 96). In the Ugaritic text, the head of the pantheon is El, and in the assembly of the gods, El plays the most dominant role, while the others seem to be lesser deities (Walton, 96). There are numerous other examples, but I think you’ve got the picture.

In closing, the role of the divine council in the ANE culture was the decreeing of destinies in both the divine and human realm, along with making decisions and coming up with solutions for things that would arise in the process of governing the world. It also bears mentioning that in the ANE, every aspect of what we would term “the natural world” was connected with a deity. This means that not only did the gods make the decisions, but they also were responsible for the workings of the cosmos.

In my next post, we will look at how the divine council motif plays itself out in the Old Testament.