Is Psalm 82 depicting actual gods?

God posteth himself in the assembly of God,
      In the inwards of the gods he judgeth:
2 Until when shall ye judge unjustly,
      And the face of the wicked bear?
3 Judge for the small and the fatherless,
      The wretched and poor, do them righteousness,
4 Rescue the poor and the wanting,
      From the hand of the bad deliver them.
5 They know not and do not distinguish,
      In darkness they go on;
      Tottered, all the foundations of the land.
6 I—I have said, gods are ye,
      And sons of the Most-Ascended, all of you,
7 Yet surely as Adam ye shall die,
      And as one of the principals fall.
8 Rise, God, judge the land,
      For thou shalt inherit in all the nations. Psalm 82 ❋ See my translation notes here: https://www.bnonn.com/blt/psalm-82.

Some Christians are unwilling—put mildly—to interpret this psalm as referring to spiritual beings that pagans would worship. They claim that the elohim (“gods”) here are actually human judges or kings, and that the description of them is merely metaphorical or appellative.

Let me first give the general form of the objection, and then suggest a number of ways to respond. Here is how one Reformed correspondent put it to me:

These verses (and remember they are poetry) must be and are saying: “You men have been exercising God-like functions—judging and ruling, you think of yourselves as gods, and I agree that you are behaving as though you were gods, but ‘like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.’ ” This alone makes sense of the passage.

“Like gods” or just gods?

The first thing to note is the weaseling away from what the text actually says. This is not exegesis, which starts by analyzing the actual words; it is eisegesis, in which a pre-prepared interpretive gloss is quickly applied over the top of the actual words, to sanitize and neutralize them.

God does not merely agree that these rulers are behaving like gods; he declares that they are gods—and not merely gods, but sons:

6 I—I have said, gods are ye,
      And sons of the Most-Ascended, all of you.

Could this mean that Yahweh has assigned them the appellatives “gods” and “sons” owing to their ruling in his stead? Possibly. Could it mean that he is merely agreeing that they are acting like gods and sons? That is exceedingly awkward. Certainly neither interpretation is self-evident; quite the opposite. To make this case, divine council opponents have to actually argue; and to do that, they must shoulder a huge burden of proof:

i. They must show that the council of verse 1 is a council of men

There are several difficulties with this. First and most significantly, it defies the analogy of faith. The assembly of Psalm 82 is obviously the same as that depicted in Psalm 89:

The heavens shall celebrate thy wonders, Yahweh,
      Even thy faithfulness in the muster of the holy-ones,
6 For who in the sky compareth to Yahweh,
      Likeneth to Yahweh among the sons of God,
7 A god terrifying in the council of the holy-ones, abundantly,
      And feared over all around him? Psalm 89:5–7

What reason is there to doubt that the muster and council of the holy-ones, the sons of God, in Psalm 89 is different from the assembly of the gods, the sons of the Most-Ascended, in Psalm 82? Yet there can be no question that in Psalm 89 this is an assembly of angels—the heavenly court—for human rulers do not celebrate in the heavens or live in the sky.

This observation can be further strengthened by applying the analogy of faith within Psalm 82, where we discover that a council of men is baffling even on its own terms. Who are these men, and where do they assemble, given that this is explicitly an international council? “All the foundations of the land [erets]” are shaken by their terrible rulership—not just the land of Israel, but the whole earth, as it is written, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the land [erets]” (Gen 1:1). Hence most translations render erets in both places with “earth.” There is no question that this use is intended, for “land” is immediately paralleled with the nations:

8 Rise, God, judge the land,
      For thou shalt inherit in all the nations.

The purpose of calling God to rise and judge the land is to have him depose the “gods” whose rule is causing the foundations of that land to totter, so that he can become judge over this land. This is the promise of the gospel, fulfilled in Christ: “all authority hath been given me in heaven and on earth” (Mt 28:18). As in Hebrew, so in Greek, ges (“earth”) can be equally translated “land.”

There can be no doubt, therefore, that what is depicted here is an international council. But such a thing does not even exist today in the way described, let alone during the time of Israel! If it’s a poetic device, it is an opaque one without parallel in Hebrew thought. By contrast, a council of divine beings who ruled the nations is attested repeatedly in the Hebrew thought-world, and directly mentioned in scripture, with the most obvious places being Daniel 4:13–17; 10:13, 20. The alternative offered by opponents of divine coucil theology is like saying that a news report about the president speaking from the White House isn’t referring to Donald Trump speaking from his residence in D.C., but to another unknown, possibly metaphorical president speaking from an unknown, possibly poetic house that also happens to be white.

Finally, linguistically, the Hebrew adat el is cognate with the Ugaritic dt ilm, the term used in Cana’an of the assembly of the gods; not of human rulers. If Psalm 82 is seeking to correct this usage, rather than polemically invoke it, we should find clear evidence in the rest of the text to overturn the identification of these “gods” (elohim) as divine beings, and present them instead as human rulers—which we do not.

ii. They must show scripture using the terms elohim and beney elohim to refer to men

Again, all I’m doing is applying the scriptural hermeneutic: the analogy of faith. Is there anywhere in the Hebrew Bible—or even the wider contemporary literature of the ancient near East—where the various forms of elohim (“gods”) and beney elohim (“sons of god”) refer to men? There is not.

Divine council opponents will sometimes appeal to Exodus 21:6; 22:8, but there is no compelling reason to translate elohim as semantically plural in these instances. “God” is the simplest reading, and indeed the only obvious one—aside from a circular requirement to find precedent for Psalm 82. The consistent usage of the Hebrew Bible is that elohim refers (exclusively, and with some diversity) to residents of the spirit world; never to living human beings.

The plural beney elohim and its variations (“sons of God”) is a term of art in scripture, also never used of human beings. True—people are sometimes called God’s sons (e.g., 2 Sam 7:14), but the specific plural wording, beney elohim, is not used on those occasions—precisely because it was a term of art, a religious “meme” if you will, referring to the divine council. Some would argue that it is used of human spirits in Job 1 and 2, but even if we grant that in the teeth of the evidence, that interpretation runs aground when it hits Psalm 82. Consider the implications:

1. Deceased human spirits are rulers over the nations from heaven. This is an awkward position for someone to take while simultaneously objecting to angelic spirits being rulers over the nations from heaven!
2. Deceased human spirits judge wickedly from heaven. Needless to say, this is incoherent on any orthodox soteriology—humans in heaven do not sin, because they are like God (1 Jn 3:2 etc). You cannot enter heaven, but then lose it again.
3. Deceased human spirits are sentenced to die. This is again embarrassing nonsense. How can God say, “you will die like men” when they are already men who have died?

iii. They must make sense of Jesus’ appeal to Psalm 82 in John 10:34–39

Seeing the losing case here, divine council opponents will typically try to short-circuit the exegetical problems by appealing to Jesus’ own interpretation of Psalm 82 in John 10. But this fumbles the clear reading of what Jesus, and his audience, actually think:

31 The Jews took up stones again to stone him. 32 Jesus answered them, Many good works have I showed you from the Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? 33 The Jews answered him, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. 34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? 35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), 36 say ye of him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? 37 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. 38 But if I do them, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. 39 They sought again to take him: and he went forth out of their hand. John 10:31–39, ASV

Jesus’ argument here is an a fortiori one—probably his favorite form of inference. If we lay it out syllogistically, it would look roughly like this:

1. God himself calls lesser divine beings gods and makes them adoptive sons (Ps 82:6);
2. Jesus is not merely an adopted son; he is in the Father, and the Father is in him (Jn 10:38);
3. Therefore, how much more a son and how much more equal with God is he.

On the other hand, if you take the word of God to have come to human beings in Psalm 82, then the argument runs aground:

4. God himself calls human rulers gods and makes them adoptive sons;
5. Jesus is not merely an adopted son; he is in the Father, and the Father is in him;
6. Therefore, how much more a son and how much more equal with God is he.

The problem here is that the connection between (4) to (5) is fatally equivocal. Under this interpretation, the term “gods” is honorific; it is an appellative that doesn’t denote a divine role or non-human ontology. But the Jews’ outrage is prompted precisely because the claims Jesus is making are about role and ontology.

The fact that the Jews again seek to stone him after hearing this argument is ample demonstration that they did not interpret Psalm 82 as referring to human beings, nor Jesus as saying, in effect, “Cool it guys, we’re all gods here.” Rather, they see him as doubling down on what they suppose is blasphemy. The repeated emphasis in John is on Jesus’ divinity as the Word of God, so we should expect Jesus to amplify, rather than downplay or backpedal, his claim to divinity. Which is more likely in view of Jesus’ mission and John’s theological focus: that we should understand him to be emptying the term gods of so much import that it can be applied even to his unbelieving audience—or using its import to expand and justify his own claim to godhood? The former is obviously 180 degrees from what we should expect. It is unsurprising, then, that the human interpretation makes no sense of Jesus’ argument, nor his opponents’ response.

iv. They must make sense of men dying like men

A final rejoinder at this point, as the lines of argument run dry, is that gods cannot die—so even if the human council interpretation of Psalm 82 is poor, the divine council alternative is incoherent in light of verse 7:

7 Yet surely as Adam ye shall die,
      And as one of the principals fall.

I think this objection arises only on the spur of the moment, because if you take the time to think it through, it actually obliterates the human council interpretation. Consider: what does it mean to die “as Adam”? Most translations, over-eager to explain the text rather than represent it, accurately convey its meaning with something like:

Nevertheless ye shall die like men (ASV)

However, you will die like men (LEB)

But you shall die like men (NKJV)

God says that, despite his declaring these beings to be gods, they will nonetheless die like men and fall like any prince. This contrast only works if there is a contrast; i.e., if these gods are greater than the typical prince, and if they should not be expected to die like men. In other words, if they are not men. What possible sense does it make to tell men that they will die like men, or princes that they will fall like princes? Such an interpretation turns the psalmist into a rhetorical dunce with no competence in his craft, and renders God’s word incoherent.

While men dying like men makes no sense at all, gods dying like men certainly does. Confusion only arises if we ignore the theology of death articulated in scripture, and think of it in purely biological terms. But in the Bible, death is not primarily a biological event; it is a relational one. Biology is incidental: death itself is separation from God’s benevolence, and exposure to his wrath. The very first time we see death, in Genesis 2:16–17, God solemnly promises it to Adam and Eve should they eat from the tree. He neither lied nor changed his mind—they did die on the day they ate, as presupposed by Paul in Ephesians 2:1; Colossians 2:13 etc. Death simply isn’t biological at root.

The first death was in Eden; the second death is in the lake of fire (Rev 21:8)—which Jesus explicitly states is prepared for the devil and his angels (Mt 25:41). These are the very beings addressed in Psalm 82. If the lake of fire is explicitly described as (i) death, and (ii) originally for wicked spiritual beings, then the judgment of Psalm 82 makes explicit sense when applied to wicked spiritual beings!

So Psalm 82:7 does not require us think that biological death is in view; rather, it is establishing a contrast between these gods’ status (v. 6) and their punishment (v. 7). The parallelism emphasizes that their fate will be the same as that of men. It is an ironic reversal—indeed, an allusion to the original ironic reversal in Genesis 3:14–15. By failing to fulfill the role of divinity, these beings are made lower than the men they were supposed to rule. Just as Satan does not eat literal dirt in Genesis 3:14, and just as he is not brought down into a literal pit in Isaiah 14:15, so these gods are not literally killed in Psalm 82:6–7. The point is much like that in Isaiah 14—indeed, the language of “falling” is even the same:

How hast thou fallen from the heavens,
      Shining one, son of dawn…
13 And thou saidst in thy heart:
      “I shall ascend the heavens,
      above the stars of God I raise my throne,
      And sit in the mount of meeting in the sides of the north.
14 I ascend upon the heights of the thick-cloud,
      I shall be like the Most-Ascended.”
15 Only, unto Sheol thou art descended,
      Unto the farthest part of the pit. Isaiah 14:12–15

To be brought down to Sheol, of course, is to be brought down to the grave, to the underworld. It is a metaphor for biological death when applied to human beings. Yet we do not think that Isaiah is therefore teaching that Satan dies in that sense; nor do we suppose the passage can only be speaking of a human king, and not of Satan. For the same reason, it strains Psalm 82:7 to take the judgment of death as strictly biological. It is referring, rather, to the gods faring no better than human rulers who are weak and mortal, who cannot rule forever.

But isn’t this henotheism?

Is it henotheistic to believe that Psalm 82 calls spiritual beings gods? That is the objection that comes next.

It is a puzzling charge. If God calls men gods, this is OK—but if he calls angels gods, this is henotheism? Why should it be a problem to believe that Yahweh created mighty spiritual beings whom he consults with, as depicted in 2 Chronicles 18:18-22; to whom he delegates authority over earthly affairs, as depicted in Job 1:6-12 and Daniel 4:13–17; and under whom he placed the rebellious nations after Babel, as depicted in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (ESV) and Daniel 10:13, 20?

The only reason to bring up henotheism seems to be a rhetorical ploy, akin to a leftist suggesting that Christians are homophobes. It’s a scurrilous use of language calculated to refute by association, rather than by argumentation. And in the case of divine council theology, if you will permit me to mix my metaphors, it is a case of building a strawman to poison the well.

Narrow henotheism: obviously excluded

Properly, henotheism is the transitionary point between polytheism and monotheism, in the supposed evolution of religion invented around the turn of the nineteenth century by liberal text critics like Friedrich Schelling. It permits worship of other gods—at least within a given pantheon of ontologically similar deities—but reserves worship for a particular god who is considered supreme. ❋ Henotheism on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism.

This being the case, obviously henotheism is a flagrant mischaracterization of the divine council view. Yahweh is not a member of a pantheon, and he is not ontologically similar to other deities. Rather, there is a council of mostly unnamed deities who are created by Yahweh, and over whom he rules as the transcendent, uncreated I AM.

Broad henotheism: explicitly taught in the New Testament

On the other hand, you can say that henotheism is simply a general affirmation of other deities in some broad sense. “There are many gods, but only one to whom we must give allegiance.” ❋ Henotheism on SermonIndex Bible Encyclopedia. https://sermonindex.net/encyclopedia/h/henotheism. Arguably, this is actually monolatry rather than henotheism. But this loses all its rhetorical force, for if henotheism merely requires a basic affirmation of the existence of other gods, then Christianity is henotheistic even if you reject the divine council view:

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled in them that perish: 4 in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them. 2 Corinthians 4:3–4, ASV

I’m not aware of any divine council dissenter who disagrees that “the god of this world” is Satan. So what is the problem?!

Bickering over words is not theological debate

Often debates over important questions are swallowed up in pointless arguments about what terms mean. You used to see this constantly with atheists wanting to define atheism as a lack of belief in God—but I don’t really care how you define atheism; I care whether there is a God.

Similarly, I don’t really care how you define henotheism. I care whether there is a heavenly court that used to rule the nations before Christ—because this has enormous ramifications for the nature of the church and the telos of the gospel.

The terms monotheism and henotheism are not helpful here. They exclude the nuances of theology we find in the Bible, because they are Western Enlightenment religious categories invented by men thousands of years removed from the thought-world of scripture. The authors and original audiences of the Bible did not think about the spiritual realm in Western Enlightenment religious categories.

What we should be doing, instead of sticking labels to people’s backs and then squabbling about their meanings, is marking out the actual views in question. For instance, here are three basic distinctions to draw when it comes to understanding divine council theology:

1. The English term god is only broadly equivalent to the Hebrew term elohim. Following Michael Heiser, I would argue that elohim refers to residence and role, rather than to ontology. Thus, supposing the Bible teaches that other “gods” exist, the claim is that spiritual beings with certain authority exist; nothing more. If you don’t like calling them gods, call them elohim. That’s the word the Bible actually uses. (But pronounce it correctly: eh-lo-HEEM.)
2. Whatever you call them, these other gods are created beings. There is the strong possibility that the New Testament refers to at least some of them as archangels. God is the sole transcendent and uncreated being.
3. The divine council view explicitly denies that these beings are worthy of worship. Whatever you believe about the divine council view, it is unimpeachably biblical in its affirmation of God’s utter transcendence and “ontological peerlessness.”