it’s in some ways remarkably similar. Like you have to explain the scribal practice to explain the similarities between some of these copies. Okay, so that’s what, you know, when you’re reading an English translation, your translator is probably mainly working off of that text and then looking at variations in some of these other texts. So let’s talk about some of these other texts. ⁓ First, ⁓ in Hebrew, what are the other options available in the Hebrew language?
that we know now.
James Duguid (25:25)
Yes,
yes. Well, so I want to mention the Samaritan Pentateuch. So the Samaritan community has, they don’t believe in the rest of the, ⁓ of the ⁓ old, what we call the Old Testament, just the books of Moses, but they have their own version of it. And it has some changes that seem very theologically motivated.
Dru Johnson (25:30)
yeah.
James Duguid (25:50)
like they believe that the place to worship God should be in Gerizim and it just says that. ⁓ However, once you account for that, ⁓ it also has a lot of other variances that don’t seem at all theologically motivated, which we believe go way back. So this is another tradition separate from the Masoretic tradition. ⁓ And when we think about manuscript stuff, we often say that witnesses should be weighed not counted.
Dru Johnson (25:55)
Right. Yeah.
James Duguid (26:16)
⁓ Somebody could copy a Masoretic manuscript 15 times, but that wouldn’t be 15 new pieces of evidence. If you have a tradition that’s old, that branched off a long time ago, that’s more important. So that’s really cool. They’ve had this thing, it’s been separate for, we don’t really know exactly when or where it came from, but it seems to go way back. So that’s important. ⁓
Dru Johnson (26:17)
Thank you.
It’s in its own script
in dialect of Hebrew as well. Is it a dialect? Yeah. Is Samaritan a dialect? that according to philology, would it be considered a dialect?
James Duguid (26:39)
It is in its own script. What was that?
Yeah,
it’s interesting for Samaritan Hebrew. mean, definitely there’s Northern Israeli and Hebrew and there’s definitely Samaritan Aramaic. ⁓ I’m less certain about what kind of status Hebrew has as a living language. I mean, certainly for the Pentateuch, it’s pretty much the same as the classical biblical Hebrew we love and know. ⁓
Dru Johnson (27:02)
Okay.
And also interesting
about the Samaritans is they still give animal sacrifices on Mount Gerizim to Yahweh. And I’ve got to attend one of those once when I was living in Israel. ⁓ it was fascinating to see how they interpret the Torah’s sacrificial…
James Duguid (27:15)
Mm-hmm.
Dru Johnson (27:26)
teaching, which you ultimately realize, there’s hardly enough teaching in there to tell you anything to do when you sacrifice an animal. And most of it is improvisation or according to what everybody who sacrifices and slaughters animals. Okay, so they’re still practicing a tradition. We have this, comes from before the time of Jesus. We don’t know how early it is, but it branches off early and it has variations from the Masoretic texts that don’t seem to have any motivation for them. They just happen to be
⁓ Would that be in a lot of the ritual material or is it the narrative? Just a little things here.
James Duguid (28:00)
Just throughout, So it’s
what we think happened is that this is just a different text tradition than the one that got chosen and people decided was best in the Jewish community around the time of Jesus. They just picked a different one. Whatever changes they made were to that one. And so it goes way back. And ⁓ I will say overall, scholars say that there are a lot of easier reading changes. So like,
Dru Johnson (28:17)
Okay.
James Duguid (28:27)
If there’s something difficult or rough about the text, they’re more likely to fix it. So we’re a little careful, but some of the readings all in all are probably the original reading. There are probably many places where the Samaritan Pentateuch has the original reading and the one we have in the Masoretic text is the change.
Dru Johnson (28:32)
Okay.
Wow, interesting. Okay. And then we also have this probably the biggest contender in the room, which is the Septuagint or Septuagint. I don’t know what we should call it, but ⁓ the Greek translation, which I heard someone say one time, the actual oldest physical copies we have of any Old Testament text outside of the amulet is in Greek, not Hebrew. Is that correct? Have you heard that?
James Duguid (29:08)
that what will that like the oldest we have period or
Dru Johnson (29:12)
Yeah, the oldest fragments would be from the Septuagint, not actually from the Hebrew text. I don’t know. But yeah.
James Duguid (29:18)
I’ve never actually mapped that out, but
there are manuscripts of the Old Testament in Greek that predate ⁓ Jesus. So there’s some old ones.
Dru Johnson (29:28)
And this does not
mean that the Old Testament was actually written in Greek and it was a conspiracy to hide it. We’re just saying these are the texts that we have on hand.
James Duguid (29:37)
⁓ Cool kids call it the old Greek rather than the Septuagint. ⁓ And the reason for that is, first of all, we do think one main authoritative translation of all the books happened at first, is what we usually mean by the old Greek. We are reconstructing that text critically, right? We don’t, you know, have that. ⁓ When you find the, it’s interesting, when you find the oldest copies we have,
Dru Johnson (29:42)
Yeah.
James Duguid (30:06)
many of them are actually after that. Many of those old copies we have are already different from what we reconstruct as the original translation. And what’s interesting is that most of the differences correct it towards the Masoretic text where it veered off. what we think is Jews, yeah, Jews in Alexandria, maybe starting third century or so, start translating probably with the, start with the Pentateuch, translate this thing into Greek. ⁓
Dru Johnson (30:09)
Hmm.
Oh, I understand. Yeah, go ahead.
James Duguid (30:35)
They do very, it’s often very nice literary Greek. ⁓ Sometimes it’s more literal, sometimes it’s less. ⁓ And then the trend from that point on is that people will come back and correct it. And the two big driving things for a lot of the corrections are we want it to be more literal. ⁓ And so they’ll correct it, make it more literal. And ⁓ it seems to be, we want it to look like the Masoretic text. So there are three great translators who are
couple centuries after the time of Christ that we know about, but when we get these brief little windows ⁓ into the Old Ones, it’s evidence to other attempts to correct the translation that we don’t really know where those came from and what they’re about. That’s, by the way, some of the evidence for the idea that around the time of Jesus, every solidified on the Masoretic text is the Septuagint is using something different from the Masoretic text. I should probably unpack that a bit. So it’s in Greek.
Dru Johnson (31:17)
Hmm.
Hmm.
James Duguid (31:31)
but they translated it from a Hebrew original. And so our interest in it is not just for how they translated it, but if their Hebrew original looked different than the Masoretic text. Are they reading something different? Which means we have to guess by back translating it what they’re reading. There is a wrinkle there. We might mistake something the translator is doing.
Dru Johnson (31:42)
Right.
James Duguid (31:58)
for a difference in the text when it’s really just the translator stuck with as bad a text as we have doing their best.
Dru Johnson (32:04)
Hmm. Yeah, these reconstructions are, ⁓ well, anybody who grades papers knows something about this. mean, it’s essentially you’re looking at different texts that have variations between them and you’re trying to figure out how do they arrive at these variations. ⁓ And same thing when you have two students papers that look exactly like and you’re like, I wonder who copied off of who, right? And then you use a couple of techniques to figure out, okay, this person copied off of this person. ⁓
Okay, so that’s the, you’re trying to reconstruct. We have a Greek translation, the old Greek, ⁓ that helps.
James Duguid (32:40)
and some later Greek translators sticking their art or in as well, and we’ll put them on the table.
Dru Johnson (32:45)
Yeah,
and like you said, can both kind of work backwards towards maybe what Hebrew was sitting in front of them. you also, know, translations are interpretations, so you also get a window into like what they thought the text was saying as well. ⁓ And sometimes it’s very helpful, sometimes it’s wild and perplexing. I can’t figure out what they’re doing. I’m sure there’s an explanation, but it’s difficult to figure out sometimes.
Okay, how does that come to bear on this issue of the sons of God and Michael Heiser?
James Duguid (33:18)
Okay, well there’s one more big elephant to bring in, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls. ⁓ So I keep assuring everybody that the Greek is based off of a different Hebrew manuscript and that the Samaritan tradition is old and things like that. What really nails this down is the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we find a bunch of Hebrew manuscripts ⁓ in the desert, in jars in a cave. ⁓ Some of them are here in DC, by the way. ⁓
Dru Johnson (33:21)
Okay. yeah, yeah, we didn’t even talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah, we should talk about those.
Okay.
Yeah,
at the Museum of the Bible now. Yeah, they’re also, they’re found in caves right next to the largest collection of desiccant in the world, the Dead Sea, right? Yeah.
James Duguid (33:48)
If you’re in town, you should do that. ⁓
Yes. So I mean,
these things have surprised, you know, sometimes you get grumpy because the worm has eaten the one part of the scroll you cared about, but these things have survived for like two over 2000 years really well. ⁓ and there’s a bunch of biblical manuscripts. And even if there were people at the time who thought they just wanted the Masoretic texts, that doesn’t describe this community. They have a diversity of biblical manuscripts. And some of those look like the Masoretic text. Some of them look like the Septuagint, like you’ll look at it and be like, ⁓
Dru Johnson (34:03)
Right. Yeah.
James Duguid (34:26)
If you had that Hebrew, you would translate the way the Septuagint did, which is different than that big text. So now you’re like, at least it’s not all in my head when I the Septuagint had a better text. In certain instances, I can prove it. And some of them look like the Samaritan tradition, which presumably, and these are not Samaritans, right? So presumably they have that version of the Samaritan tradition without the Samaritan edits.
Dru Johnson (34:29)
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
James Duguid (34:52)
And then some of them are what we call non-aligned, which means they’re completely out in a different direction. ⁓ beyond just giving us a bunch of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we have, ⁓ these texts also give us a very wide ⁓ look at different textual traditions. So they’re more likely to have interesting differences.
Dru Johnson (35:17)
Yeah, okay. So now lest people think that their Bible is completely untrustworthy and they should throw it in the trash, ⁓ let’s look at a variation here. So, Sons of God in ⁓ Deuteronomy 32 verse 8, what is the width of variation here? How flexible is what’s going on in these translations?
James Duguid (35:39)
Yeah, so what we have is a variation on whether it’s sons of God or sons of Israel, ⁓ according to whom, you know, the nations are divided. So the Masoretic text says sons of Israel. So do ⁓ the later Greek translators, who we think are using the Masoretic, a proto Masoretic text. ⁓ So does, you know, Jerome and the Syriac. ⁓
and the Targums, the Aramaic translations, but we also think they’re using proto-Masoretic texts. So the Masoretic texts and the things based upon it all go in this ⁓ Sons of Israel direction. So does the Samaritan Pentateuch, but the Greek, the Old Greek is hanging out here saying Sons of God. Actually, I should ⁓ be more specific. ⁓ It might say Sons of God, it might say Angels of God.
We actually have both of those readings in the tradition, which we could debate about exactly. It’s actually not clear which is earlier than which. We have one of those early Greek manuscripts, Papyrus Faoud, has sons of, and then it’s broken. Didn’t have sons of God, didn’t have sons of Israel, but it didn’t have angels. ⁓
Dru Johnson (36:36)
Right. I’m Deloy and we are right. We are.
That’s the worm you were talking about. Yeah. Yeah.
James Duguid (37:04)
If whichever reading is earlier, the other ones probably sons or angels, they’re both pretty old. So there’s the Greek. mean, the Greek so far, the old Greek is standing alone against everybody else. In comes the Dead Sea Scrolls. The only extant copy of this that we have at the Dead Sea Scrolls says, Sons of God, B’nai Elohim. ⁓ And so now that’s now though, we have the Proto Masoretic text and all of its followers and the Samaritan Pentateuch on one side.
And we have the old Greek and we have the Dead Sea Scrolls on the other side, which kind of looks like a tie. I mean, really it’s, I mean, we can’t just do the vote here and get an answer.
Dru Johnson (37:43)
Right. this was soccer, we would just go home. Yeah,
yeah. Yeah, so we’re talking about the difference between sons of God versus sons of Israel. So that would kind of denaturalize it into maybe divided up between the 12 or something. ⁓ Or angels of God. Is it angels of God or angels? It can’t be angels of Israel. It be angels of God or…
James Duguid (38:09)
So it would probably be Sons of God and Angels of God would be following a ⁓ or Angels, sorry just Angels simpliciter I think in the the the in I’m not sure if it’s Angels. I should should I should I think I actually I have it here. ⁓
Dru Johnson (38:20)
Yeah. okay. Just angels. Okay.
Well, the other thing that comes
to mind is just because I’ve been working on an article on the Dead Sea Scroll, and I was working particularly on Hoda Yot and ⁓ the songs of the Sabbath sacrifice. You notice there’s a lot of like spirit, angel. There’s a lot of swapping going on in these terms. ⁓
James Duguid (38:50)
Yes, so
it’s sons of God or angels of God in the Greek. ⁓ But we know the Greek translators, sometimes they just translated sons of God dead on ⁓ in various, like in Psalm 29 or Genesis 6, but sometimes like in Job, they did angels instead.
Dru Johnson (38:54)
Okay.
Okay.
James Duguid (39:13)
angels
of God. yeah, like you mentioned, there’s that variation that come around. There’s that variation in the different Greek, maybe it’s different translators or different contextual reasons why, but they’ll do it either way.
Dru Johnson (39:23)
Yeah.
And they are… ⁓ And I think it’s fair to say, and I think this is Rick’s point, is that when you get into the Dead Sea Scroll community, now that’s the big question of the biblical text versus what the community is writing, they have a highly developed angiology compared to anything in the Hebrew Bible, or at least they’re talking about it more explicitly. And so… ⁓
And so, yeah, they are probably going to think more in terms of angels and spirits than they do in this kind more naturalized language of, I don’t even know if it’s naturalized, the sons of God language, right? ⁓ And so, he’s saying maybe there’s a bias towards their angiology in these traditions. What would be the problem with that claim?
James Duguid (40:11)
was certainly worth considering. love, because we have this big group of texts from Jews who lived at the same time of Jesus, we love the Dead Sea Scrolls. But we do have to remember this is a sectarian group. that’s sometimes they’ll say something that’s like word for word almost something you find in pole or something you’re like, that’s interesting. I want to think about that. ⁓ But yeah.
Dru Johnson (40:31)
Right. Yeah.
James Duguid (40:35)
Other times they’ll say something like, you know, to join the community, have to love everybody inside the community, hate everybody outside of it. And you’re like, oh, okay, wow. So, you know, and you’re right that they are super interested in the book of Enoch. They’re super interested in the, they love to use the language of sons of God or just gods in reference to angelic or demonic powers. And they do that a lot. So,
There’s a reason to think the community might be interested in this textual reading. However, it’s also worth saying that the fact that it shows up in the Old Greek, now that’s a very influential, that’s not a sectarian group. It’s still a group of Jews in Alexandria, but the translation they wrote gets very widely adopted. ⁓ So I think we need to be a little careful. The fact that so many things in the Dead Sea Scrolls link out to say the Samaritan Pentateuch or
Dru Johnson (41:08)
Hmm.
James Duguid (41:32)
⁓ the greek mean that their bible that they have is probably in many cases the same sort of bible other people are reading
Dru Johnson (41:40)
Yeah. And this is where it gets complicated. ⁓ Now we have most of the evidence on the table, and we’re just kind of looking and going, which one do we weight more heavily? ⁓ Oldest, the temptation is to say, well, which one’s the oldest? And that’s the one we go with. ⁓ But you’re saying there’s actually all these other factors that play in here. ⁓ You have the Dead Sea Scrolls community, and the biblical texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls don’t necessarily come from that community either.
So some of these scrolls are coming in from the outside and being stored there. ⁓ So we don’t necessarily know that they reflect the Dead Sea Scroll community’s extremist views, I think would be a fair statement. They do have some fairly extreme views. And the old Greek that’s being translated in what we call the Septuagint, or what you call the Septuagint, which I just can’t bring myself to do, ⁓ comes from one particular community in North Africa, in Alexandria of…
James Duguid (42:11)
Thank
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (42:40)
seemingly a very educated group of Jews who are basically writing the text that is going to be read probably by more Jews around the world than the Hebrew in any one of these Hebrew texts, right? Okay, you also mentioned
James Duguid (42:53)
They’re also on the
out that community. Alexandria is also on the inside track of this looking at different manuscripts thing, right? Like this discipline of looking at the text is invented to study Homer. And Alexandria is one of the centers of this. And so, you know, so like that’s what the folks in Alexandria are, you know, are, I think world-class textual scholars. So that’s one thing to say for them.
Dru Johnson (42:59)
Okay. okay. Yeah, nice.
Right. It’s
not just a random group of ⁓ rabbis who got to see. It’s good. Good to know. You also mentioned the Syriac translation. So can you put that one in context for us?
James Duguid (43:25)
Sure. So some of the translations we find in the early church just take the Greek and translate it. Right. So if I’m reading like the Coptic, the Egyptian Coptic translation or some or then it’s not telling me about the Hebrew text is telling me about the Greek text. But it’s a little mysterious who exactly made this translation. Some group of Syriac speaking people, probably Christians, they’ve been asked to it.
Dru Johnson (43:55)
Mm.
James Duguid (43:55)
make a
translation which again people debate on the date but some people put it very early ⁓ from and their translation of the old there’s a translation of the new testament but the translation of the old testament is actually based on the hebrew so that’s great that means that it’s giving us now it is a proto-masoretic form of the hebrew but you kind of put it alongside jerome is like i get this window into maybe second to sixth century i can sort of see what’s happening
Dru Johnson (44:11)
Okay.
James Duguid (44:25)
with the Masoretic Proto Masoretic text through these translations that are checking in on.
Dru Johnson (44:31)
Yeah, and Syriac is ⁓ a Western Semitic language. ⁓ It would be, yeah, yeah, a kind of Aramaic, which is also a kinship language to Hebrew, which is a kinship language to later Arabic, and these are all in the same language group, which is why everybody should learn Hebrew, because you can get a window into all these other languages, including Kiswahili, ⁓ just by learning a little bit of Hebrew. OK.
James Duguid (44:36)
It’s kind of aramaic, yeah.
Dru Johnson (45:00)
⁓ So at the end of the day, what is, you weigh all of it, you’ve spent a lot, this is your area, textual studies, you weigh all of these things, what would be, if somebody was asking me like, just give me the beef here, what is it? How would you assess what’s going on in Deuteronomy 32?
James Duguid (45:06)
Yeah.
⁓ Well, just to… One other way that we can come at it is internal probabilities. So we ask which of these is most likely to be a result of the other one being changed. ⁓ I will say there’s a lot of stuff with other spiritual forces going on in Deuteronomy 32, so there’s already a little bit more of a sense to think that that’s what’s going on. It’s actually a little hard to spin out.
Dru Johnson (45:30)
Hmm.
James Duguid (45:46)
what it means for the nations to be numbered according to the sons of Israel. I mean, there’s roughly 70 nations and there ends up being roughly 70 people at the end of Genesis going down into Egypt. So we think that might be the connection, but then where do you go from there? Like, what does it mean? ⁓ So I think that like the sons of God reading just makes more sense textually. But the big thing that sways me towards Heiser view here is actually that there’s another, plot thickens, there’s another,
Dru Johnson (45:57)
Right.
James Duguid (46:16)
⁓ other gods issue in the same chapter at verse 43.
Dru Johnson (46:22)
Right.
Yeah, at very end there.
James Duguid (46:26)
⁓ so yeah, go for it.
Dru Johnson (46:27)
I’ll read this.
Rejoice with him, O heavens, bow down to him, all gods. I assume that’s Elohim there. For he avenges the blood of his children and takes the vengeance of his adversaries. He repays those who hate him and cleanses his people.
Okay, so that’s not obvious how that figures here, so help us out.
James Duguid (46:42)
Yeah. ⁓
And by the way, that’s an Advent text. Maybe I’ll come back and explain that in a sec. You may not know it, ⁓ yeah. if we were to… What you read didn’t give me the Masoretic text, by the way. Your English translation is… ⁓
Dru Johnson (46:50)
⁓ okay.
Yeah, no, I was sitting
there trying to think of what’s going on in the Hebrew here and it was not coming straight through.
James Duguid (47:05)
So
the Masoretic text has ⁓ rejoice or shout aloud, rejoice nations his people. ⁓ It’s as ungrammatical as I translated it there. Maybe the rejoice nations with his people or it could be with him. ⁓ There’s different suggestions for changing the pointing, but then it switches tack completely to the blood of his servants being avenged. ⁓
Dru Johnson (47:18)
Yes.
James Duguid (47:35)
So that’s what you have in the Masoretic text. If you go to the Greek, the old Greek, it’s fascinating. You have four clauses for the one at the beginning there. ⁓ And ⁓ two of them, like there’s two different repetitions of roughly the same thing. So you have ⁓ rejoice heavens with him.
and bow down to him all the sons of God, and then you have rejoice nations with his people and be strengthens ⁓ unto him or something like that. It’s a little hard to translate. All angels of God. ⁓ So what we have in the Greek is what we would call a conflate text. ⁓ And it’s not clear whether this is something that happened in the Greek, although my money is that the Hebrew manuscript he was translating may already have had this.
Dru Johnson (48:06)
Hmm.
James Duguid (48:33)
conflation. ⁓ Mark out the key differences for you. First of all, ⁓ in the Masoretic text, rejoice ye nations. ⁓ That is on its own. There’s not really a great Hebrew parallelism going on to match it. Feels very truncated. Whereas here you have it matched with this, you know, you have it matched with this parallel with the sons of God. Then you have a switch out, like one of the versions that the Greek preserves has heavens instead of nations.
⁓ which is pretty interesting. ⁓ And then, of course, one of the two versions has the with him and one of them has the with his people, which is already kind of like a guess you might have from the Masoretic text about like, it feels ungrammatical, like what does it mean? ⁓ But then the second two lines just read like different translations of the same Hebrew, which is why I think that was already in the Hebrew. And when he gets to that second line,
the translator has to come up with different Greek words. So he does sons of God first and he does angels of God. What could be behind? Now this is actually a good example of how we can get the Greek back translation into Hebrew wrong. You might look at that and think, oh, this must be B’nai Elohim. He must have sons of God sitting in front of him. But you would be wrong about that if you thought it, because when you go and then you look at the dead sea scrolls we find in the one copy we have,
Dru Johnson (49:45)
Right.
James Duguid (49:58)
Rejoice heavens. ⁓ This could be with him or his people. It’s not pointed so we don’t know. ⁓ And then you have, and bow down to him, all gods, Elohim, no sons of God, just gods. So since we have the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it’s likely that that is also what the Greek translator is looking at, that he sees Elohim, gods. He doesn’t translate gods. He translates sons of God. And then, you know, when he has it again, he does sons of angels.
⁓ so yeah, go ahead.
Dru Johnson (50:29)
Okay.
So let me clarify or make sure I’m understanding here. Bow down to him all gods, which is actually what it looks like the ESV is doing there. By the way, if you go look at this in your own Bible, you will realize there are notes all over the place here. And then in the Hebrew, there’s lots of text critical notes all over this verse for these reasons we’re saying. ⁓ That to me, like my gut reaction to that is…
okay, bow down to them all gods, you’re suggesting that could be an original ⁓ reading or an original text. That feels very much in the line of the rhetoric of like ⁓ Exodus 14 or Exodus 15, ⁓ kind of the rhetoric of gods with no real intent for you to understand that there are actual gods there, or the rhetoric of anti-god in the sense of what your culture counts as a god.
James Duguid (51:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (51:24)
especially because in Deuteronomy, for the first time that I know of, you have the phrase loel or loel ohim, like these are no gods, right? These gods may work. Yeah, in Deuteronomy 32 here, right? Yeah, yeah. So you have the rhetoric that these aren’t really gods. And so for me, this would actually go against the view that there’s some other divine beings involved here at the end, but actually kind of saying, almost like even if there were gods, they would bow down to God kind of a…
James Duguid (51:33)
in Deuteronomy 32. The same song, yeah.
Dru Johnson (51:54)
I’m sure I’m projecting all over the place here, but how do you take that?
James Duguid (51:57)
You’re
reading it very reasonably. It’s a very reasonable way to read it. No, mean, in fact, think you’re reading it rather similar to the the prophet in Isaiah 43, 55, which I keep saying, we’ll come back to that. So I can’t really, I can’t really come down on you too hard for that. However, I think what Heiser would push back on here is, first of all, you mentioned the not gods.
Dru Johnson (52:00)
Thank you. I take that as a high compliment from you.
I was going to say, I’m probably taking notes from Isaiah here, right?
James Duguid (52:27)
verse, which, you know, this is a big poem. Let me see if I can find it.
Dru Johnson (52:31)
Where is that?
James Duguid (52:40)
By the way, there’s a lot going on in Deuteronomy 32. It’s very fun. We have,
Dru Johnson (52:43)
There is a lot. I
always have my class when I come up to this, I’m like, okay, we’ve talked a lot about Deuteronomy, all these repetitions from the rest of the Pentateuch. Here’s the song. What do you think is going to be in the song? Just guess what’s going to be in the song. Man, they never get it. I wouldn’t either if I were them.
James Duguid (52:58)
Hahaha
Okay, so this part that deals with other gods is up in 16. They stirred him to jealousy with strange… Actually, just to be clear, gods isn’t… It says strange gods in ESV, but it’s just strange ones. It doesn’t add gods there. Just a sense that we’re focused on it, I’m gonna be very focused. With abominations, they provoked him to anger. They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded.
So there’s kind of a question here, like, are they gods or are they not? know? Is it calling them gods because they think that they’re gods? ⁓
Dru Johnson (53:38)
Well, the offense there too, check me before I wreck me, the offense is gods they haven’t, you know me, you don’t know these gods, right? And you get this in the prophets as well in several places. You don’t know these people. ⁓ So there’s this kind of the foreignness of the God that is actually the offense here and also their God.
James Duguid (53:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it doesn’t
it doesn’t say you gods who don’t exist. It says, you know, gods you don’t know foreign gods, other gods. And it comes back to this theme in verse 21. made me jealous with what is no God, provoked me to anger with their idols. Now here’s where Heiser is gonna step in. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people. I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. Okay. The no people there, which is exactly parallel Hebrew construction to the no gods.
Do they really exist in the world or not?
Dru Johnson (54:30)
yeah, yeah.
James Duguid (54:31)
So it’s just rhetorical, Heiser would say. It’s just rhetorical. This is use of, a non-literal use of nothingness. ⁓ And so we’re saying that no gods means like worthless gods, trivial gods, but there’s, there’s still gods. And so then when we go out to these other parts of the passage and we find, not just sons of God, we just find gods right there in verse 43. Yeah, I mean, the author just is fine calling them gods. He doesn’t have this,
You know, thing we have, sure, like Yahweh is the high God, He’s on top, He’s way above, you know, there’s nobody like Him, you know, He’s special, not questioning any of that, but they’re fine using Elohim and applying it to these other beings. It’s just you shouldn’t worship them. You Israel, who Yahweh has picked for yourself, the other nations maybe are worshiping these folks because Yahweh has apportioned them to that, He’s given them over to that, but you should be worshiping this Elohim.
Yahweh.
Dru Johnson (55:32)
Yeah, so for those who conceive of the Israelite religion and Christianity that’s built upon it as a mainly monotheistic religion, that sounds very much like henotheism where you have one chief god and then you have sub gods under it, ⁓ or at least one worship god. So how is that not henotheism? Or will we just say it’s basically a henotheistic system, like polytheism plus a supreme god.
James Duguid (55:57)
I don’t think Heiser wants to say that. mean, at the end of the day, think what Heiser says makes the difference is once you have at least ⁓ these, the uniqueness of Yahweh is still important. He would say Yahweh is species unique. basically like it just, we maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on the word God. ⁓ Yeah, they have stuff in common with Yahweh. We do too, we’re in his image. But like we’re still elevating him so high that we are putting him, so it’s not just,
Dru Johnson (56:17)
Right.
Right.
James Duguid (56:28)
These are a bunch of equal options. Choose who you want to worship. But actually only Yahweh should be worshiped because he’s categorically different. It just doesn’t have to do with the Elohim or divine. However, a bunch of other scholars have just jumped on, now cite Heiser in this line of recent research. It’s just, yeah, it’s not monotheist. Bible’s not monotheist. Monotheist is an unhelpful term and we just need to chuck it. So I don’t think, you know,
Dru Johnson (56:30)
Right.
James Duguid (56:57)
Heiser doesn’t want to go all the way to where that line of research wants to go, but he did also sort of set it up.
Dru Johnson (57:02)
Yeah.
Yes. ⁓ Well, and I think what this really demands you to do is to reconceptualize deity and godhood, which ⁓ we have, most Christians have not spent a lot of time thinking about that. Ironically, they have with Jesus, not very many other places. ⁓ I think that, and this is where I will side with Rick Wadholm on the whole issue. And it really makes me nervous.
is I’m fine with all the… And when I teach this, I’m like, look, they are really not concerned about whether you believe there are other gods or not. Like you work your way through the Pentateuch and you’re freaking out about them talking about these other gods as if they’re real. They are not freaking out at all. They seem to be fine with this. ⁓ But what would seem to be incumbent, just the way the biblical authors lay things out and examine things, I would expect…
three sentences on these creatures, what they are, where they came from, a theogony we call it, right, the creation of these creatures themselves. One sentence in Genesis 1, know, and he created the gods, the Elohim ⁓ in the heavens on that day or whatever would do it. And I think it’s the silence issue, again, which drives a lot of the literature in Hellenistic Judaism, like the Book of Enoch and other, and Jubilees, where they’re really filling in the gaps because the biblical authors really…
James Duguid (58:04)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (58:31)
I don’t want to say refuse, but they almost refused to talk about this issue. And I take that silence to be instructive. And I feel like Heiser and many other people, and I don’t even know if it’s a wrong move, but I feel like they take that as an opportunity to explain to you, this is what they’re not talking about.
James Duguid (58:33)
Yeah.
Again, there may be a balance here because just coming back to the text criticism, one other thing I do want to say about these different manuscript readings. Usually when I teach text criticism, different manuscript readings, it’s typos, right? It’s like, this letter looks similar to this letter and the scribe wrote the wrong one. This does not look like that. And just to be clear to your audience, this is not an everyday garden variety text critical issue.
Dru Johnson (59:04)
Hmm.
Right. Yep. Or this word sounds this way. Yeah. Yeah.
James Duguid (59:16)
Don’t go away thinking, every chapter of the Hebrew Bible has something this, no, this is like, I, Heiser argues it’s intentional and he’s not the only one. So somebody shares the discomfort of many of us with this God language. ⁓ and they came along and they cut it out and they edited it. ⁓ and I have to find it very hard to argue that.
it was an accident. seems like too much of a coincidence. It’s part of why I think it is the original reading. So, I mean, my question is, is there a place of balance that we can stop before we’re cutting the verses out of the Bible?
Dru Johnson (59:56)
Right,
right, right, exactly. And that’s the part methodologically where I’m just not sure what to do with some of these things. ⁓ And quite honestly, the kind of stuff I work on doesn’t usually hang this narrowly on a few passages reading in a particular way. ⁓ Okay, well, this has been extremely helpful, and I’m sure that anybody who is still listening to us after an hour of working this out.
⁓ I’m sure this has been very helpful for you all as well. Jamie Duguid, thank you very much for taking the time to walk us through all this.
James Duguid (1:00:29)
It’s it.
Is it possible for me to throw something in there about Isaiah at the end?
Dru Johnson (1:00:36)
sure, yeah, go ahead.
James Duguid (1:00:38)
So, ⁓ you know, our time is going long, but let me leave you with something brief and that perhaps upends a lot of this. ⁓ So Deuteronomy 32, I said that it gets used a lot by Isaiah 40-55. Heiser in his article on monotheism marches through Deuteronomy and says, look, it talks about other gods. We shouldn’t call it monotheists. Great. And then he moves on to Isaiah 43-55.
And when he gets there, he is, in my opinion, completely unconvincing. In fact, Deuteronomy 40-55 are weird, comparatively speaking, because not only do they actually not call these beings gods, you even have an oracle in 41 where they’re introduced nameless. You only find out Yahweh’s even talking to the gods because he says, you know, predict something that’s going to happen if you are gods. Direct implication, they’re not.
Dru Johnson (1:01:28)
Right.
Right.
James Duguid (1:01:32)
And then you find these phrases that, you the scholars will jump on them. I am the Lord and there is no other. And the scholars will say, he’s just saying he’s unique, not that he’s the only God. It gets fixed in Isaiah 43, 55. And you find formulas like there is no other God except for me. And these formulas are more explicit than anything in the Hebrew Bible. They’re without parallel that I can find.
Dru Johnson (1:01:52)
In case you were wondering.
James Duguid (1:02:00)
anywhere in the context of Israel’s neighbor’s literature. ⁓ And yet, he’s reading Deuteronomy 32. So it seems like he wants to develop the idea of Deuteronomy 32, the prophet there, to say, actually, no, they’re not gods. Don’t call them gods. Don’t think of them like gods. ⁓ And so then what do do if that’s also in your Bible?
And this is the thing I think some of the new monotheist literature does not take seriously enough. It’s true that you still find, even after that point, you find Psalms using the God’s language. You’ll find, you know, people like Paul using the God’s language even. But then Paul will stop and say, well, they’re called gods. Right. So I actually think that one step we can make theologically here is say, well, what is happening in Isaiah 43-55? Let’s go back and look at that.
And should we have that prophet sitting on our shoulder when we go back to Deuteronomy 32? And maybe that’s going to have us read Deuteronomy 32 in a way that maybe we can still use that God language in some sense, but we’ll just have to clarify, well, it’s not literal or something like that. So I can say a lot more about that, but for the sake of time, I’ll leave it there.
Dru Johnson (1:03:21)
No, that’s a ⁓
very good commendation. ⁓ I should also mention before we leave, ⁓ and thank you for all your wisdom on this, we did not conspire to wear similar shirts today. This is completely by accident. We are not on the same team. I mean, we are as brothers in Christ, but we’re not trying to ⁓ team up on anybody. So ⁓ Jamie, one last thing. ⁓ For people who are looking for
James Duguid (1:03:35)
Hahaha.
Dru Johnson (1:03:50)
good critiques of Michael Heiser that will both, as I think Rick did, was try to appreciate what he’s done and also kind of get into this. Do you know of any ⁓ good, good, simple critiques that people can read out there?
James Duguid (1:04:04)
not really i’m hoping we’ll get we’ll get some more
Dru Johnson (1:04:05)
Okay, yeah. I think that’s why Rick
caught a lot of heat, is actually he was kind of the first one to come out and put it in somewhat plain terms.
James Duguid (1:04:14)
Yeah, so I mean, I think that it’s something that we We need to start interacting with more. There may be some some stuff out there. I just haven’t read, but it’s mostly been you can find extreme reactions against what Heiser is saying. People just, you know, very upset or retrenching into very into old traditional readings that don’t take into account some of the stuff he’s bringing up. But I don’t know a lot of very of careful balance. I will say, though. ⁓
Dru Johnson (1:04:28)
Right.
James Duguid (1:04:43)
Just specifically on the Genesis 6 issue, which we didn’t really talk about here, but I know it’s in a lot of people’s minds. ⁓ Doug Moos’ commentary on Jude and 2 Peter, where he deals with the places where Jude and 2 Peter are probably alluding to that text, he unwinds, well, theologically, how would we think about this as Christians? And what would be the different views we can take? I actually think it is a really good job. So that might be a good place to start a sort of palate cleanser to help us get our heads on.
you know, let Doug Moo balance us a little bit. I would just recommend that resource.
Dru Johnson (1:05:15)
And I think in a lot of the organizations that promote Heiser’s work, I’ve noticed they are trying to expose the people who love Heiser and he really opened the door for them to think about. They’re trying to expose them to wider biblical scholarship ⁓ as well so that it doesn’t become a cult of some sort, which is probably good. Okay, well, Jamie, thank you very much for your help again, for your wisdom. And we might have to call you back because I’m sure we’re going to get questions on this one.
James Duguid (1:05:43)
yeah, that would be fun. I’d love to do it.
