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Recently, I took a one-week vacation to Michigan on a Christian Retreat held by one of the online Christian groups I’m a member of. The retreat hosted speakers and did musical worship every day from 9:30 am to noon, not unlike a typical church service. The rest of the day, we’d mingle, have conversations, go swimming, play games, and lots of other fun stuff. During one of the pool conversations, Michael Heiser’s book “The Unseen Realm: Recovering The Supernatural Worldview Of The Bible” came up, and Omar said that while he thinks the biblical authors probably held to this worldview, that doesn’t mean that we are to hold to it.

For the uninitiated, The Divine Council Worldview is a framework for understanding the Bible that posits Yahweh (God) presides over an assembly of spiritual beings called the “divine council,” a concept reflected in passages like Psalm 82:1 and 1 Kings 22:19-22. This council is comprised of “gods” or “sons of God” (Hebrew: elohim or b’nei elohim)… [Psalm 82:6; Job 1:6]. The Deuteronomy 32 Worldview is a critical component of this, explaining the origin of polytheism and wicked nations. After humanity rebelled at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), God judged them by disinheriting the nations and assigning them to these seventy elohim of his council (Deuteronomy 32:8–9. These appointed divine beings subsequently became corrupt and turned the nations toward false worship and evil (Deuteronomy 32:16-17; Psalm 82:6–7). God then chose Israel as his own inheritance to redeem humanity and reclaim the disinherited nations, a mission ultimately fulfilled by Jesus Christ. (Isaiah 49:6; Colossians 2:15).

The view Omar expresses is that while The Bible contains The Divine Council Worldview, it does not intend to teach The Divine Council Worldview. Rather, God accommodated the pre-existing beliefs of the Israelites. This is more or less the position of biblical scholar John Walton that he expresses in “Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context” ^[1]John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), 311. In this blog post, I’ll rehash some of the answers I have to my friend as to why I think we are comitted to the Divine Council Theology found within the pages of the biblical text.

To evaluate how Scripture uses ancient Near Eastern (ANE) concepts, we must first get clear on the principle of divine accommodation. Broadly speaking, accommodation refers to God stooping down to human limitations—condescending to communicate absolute, eternal truths through the localized, finite language and cultural frameworks of a specific ancient audience. We see this principle naturally applied to ancient cosmology. When biblical texts depict a three-tiered universe (Exodus 20:4; Philippians 2:10) with a solid dome (raqia) holding back heavenly waters above (Genesis 1:6-8; Job 37:18; Psalm 148:4) and Sheol resting in the subterranean depths below (Numbers 16:31-33; Job 26:5-6; Psalm 86:13). God is not intending to teach scientific truths about the world. Indeed, those beliefs about what the cosmos already existed before The Holy Spirit inspired the writers of the biblical books (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Rather, God adopts the physical observation and scientific baseline of the ancient audience as a framework to communicate theological realities: His absolute sovereignty, His role as Creator, and the creation of order out of chaos (Genesis 1:1-3; Job 38:4-11; Psalm 104:5-9).

A similar dynamic of divine accommodation applies to how Scripture speaks about the gender of God. In His pure, transcendent divine essence, God is uncreated spirit. God is neither male nor female (John 4:24; Numbers 23:19). Yet, Scripture consistently reveals God using masculine pronouns and imagery (e.g., Gen 1:26–27; Matthew 6:9; Psalm 89:26). This accommodation operates on two levels: linguistic and cultural. Linguistically, Biblical Hebrew lacks gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns; every noun and pronoun is grammatically forced into a masculine or feminine frame. ^[2]For a more in-depth discussion on this, see Evan Minton, “The Gender Of God Explained”, Cerebral Faith Blog, October 24th 2024, — … Continue reading

However, a serious tension arises when theologians attempt to stretch the principle of divine accommodation to cover core spiritual and theological entities, such as the “Divine Council Worldview.” It is one thing for God to accommodate physical pre-scientific descriptions (like a flat Earth or a firmament) or to employ anthropomorphic metaphors (like male pronouns) to bridge the gap between divine infinity and human finitude. It is quite another to suggest that God accommodated false spiritual ontologies, essentially allowing His prophets to mistakenly believe and teach that a realm of regional gods (elohim) actually governs the nations (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; Psalm 82:1, 6; Daniel 10:13, 20) or participates in Yahweh’s heavenly court (1 Kings 22:19-23; Job 1:6; Ps 89:5-7) if no such beings exist.

If there are no actual spiritual beings who rule over the nations or deliberate in God’s cosmic court, then there is no discernable reason why God couldn’t just tell them that. Jesus routinely challenged false theological views of his religious opponents, such as the Sadducees’ mistaken beliefs about the resurrection (Matthew 22:23–32; Mark 12:18–27), or the disciples on the Road to Emmaus who did not realize that the Messiah had to die on the cross and rise from the dead (Luke 24:25–27). Jesus, who is God incarnate (John 1:1-3, 14; Philippians 2:4-10), did not “accommodate” mistaken theological beliefs. Given that God never changes (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17) and that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), it seems unlikely that He would tolerate mistaken views of the supernatural realm. Especially since no confusion would arise from simply setting the record straight. While we can easily imagine the Israelites scratching their heads and going “The Earth is round? What’s up with that? How do people avoid falling off the sides?” or “What do you mean humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor? That’s absurd!” (many Yahwists even today, such as those in the Young Earth Creationist camp, struggle with this concept TODAY! Can you imagine how a pre-scientific Israelite might struggle with it?), there wouldn’t seem to be anything baffling or absurd about saying “There is no divine council.” Setting the record straight on the spiritual realm (i.e clarifying who truly exists and who does not in the unseen world) falls directly within the domain of divine revelation.

In conclusion, I do think that while we aren’t obligated to believe in a three-tiered universe or think that God in His transcendent being is literally male, I do think we are beholden to the Divine Council Worldview. This discussion is a reminder that divine accommodation can easily become a convenient excuse to explain away or dismiss parts of Scripture we don’t like. Accommodation is clearly a feature of the text and should be part of anyone’s doctrine of Scripture. At the same time, there need to be guardrails to keep us from using this feature of inspiration to literally disagree with The Bible! I think a good rule of thumb would be to conclude accommodation has occurred if;

1: Overwhelming evidence about some feature of the physical cosmos exists, contradicting the picture found in The Bible (e.g round Earth instead of a flat three-tiered cosmos, the existence of a hydra-like creature named Leviathan).

2: If God corrected the Israelites, they most likely wouldn’t have understood, and would have been fixated on the incidental detail (e.g the firmament is not firm; cumulus clouds is how rain works) rather than the important theological point God is trying to convey (e.g God is the sole creator of the sky, God conquered the chaos).

We don’t have overwhelming evidence that the gods of the nations don’t exist, from scripture or from science. And their existence or lack thereof surely wouldn’t have been so complicated that Israelites would have been distracted from the main prophetic point in trying to figure it out.