Several months ago, a friend started reading Michael Heiser’s book, The Unseen Realm. It’s on the topic of angelology and she asked me if I had heard of the book or if I knew of any dangerous teachings therein. I had never heard of the book, nor the author, so I did a quick google search. I didn’t want my friend to get into some weird hyper-charismatic teaching on angels and demons, so when I saw that Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary endorsed the book, I assumed that it would be pretty safe.
Boy, was I wrong.
My friend sent me a copy to look over and I saw some really concerning stuff. I spoke with some other conservatives who are well researched in this doctrine and they confirmed some of the problems I was seeing. Now, there are some good things to be said about Heiser’s book, but we all notice a particularly dangerous thing about his approach that we should beware of.
The problem that we are seeing is that Heiser uses the religion of Baal, based on the discoveries in Ugarit, to reinterpret the Bible. He basically takes the errors of Baal and ascribes them to the Biblical authors. He says, for example:
Eden can only be properly understood in light of the worldview the biblical writers shared with other people of the ancient Near East. (44)
The discoveries [of the Baal tablets in 1928] at Ugarit put all of that Old Testament History in context… the divine council had three levels… The council of El met on a mountain or lush garden… Council meetings were held… All of this will sound familiar to someone who has read the Old Testament closely. The Hebrew Bible uses the same descriptions for the abode and throne room of Yahweh. (46)
An ancient Israelite would have thought of Eden as the dwelling of God and the place from which God and his council direct the affairs of humanity. The imagery is completely consistent with how Israel’s neighbors thought about their gods. (47)
Notice how he put Moses into the worldview of Baal. This is not the way we should read the Bible at all. Elijah’s reaction to Baal’s religion was actually to mock the false prophets of Baal. God endorsed Elijah’s message by miraculously consuming the burnt offering (1 Kings 18:20-40). Reinterpreting God’s holy writ in terms of what Baal’s prophets believed is shocking to me.
Heiser even accuses the Biblical authors have having a faulty view of cosmology:
The “morning star” phrase takes you back once more to the Old Testament, which at times uses astral terminology to describe divine beings… Stars were bright and, in the worldview of the ancients, living divine beings since they moved in the sky and were beyond the human realm. (312)
Obviously, stars are not actually rational beings. If you don’t assume that God’s Word is in error on points like these, then Heiser accuses you of “assigning a more ‘rational’ (i.e., nonsupernatural) meaning to it in order to make it more palatable” (386):
Most of our exegesis involves breaking up passages and verses into their constituent parts, whereas the biblical writers were creating connections between texts… the biblical writers weren’t obsessed with literalism the way we seem to be… Biblical writers regularly employ conceptual metaphor in their writing and thinking. That’s because they’re human. (386-387)
Heiser would say that this wrong cosmology does not stop in the Old Testament, but extends to Paul:
Paul’s writings reveal an awareness of the cosmic-geographical worldview that we’ve been discussing at length in this book. (328)
So, we are concerned that Heiser takes a lower view of Scripture than is appropriate.
I think that there is some value in studying the Baal tablets. The tablets from Ugarit give great insight to Baalism, but we must understand that it is directly against God’s will to merge Baalism and Biblicism – God brought much judgement onto Israel for doing that kind of thing. I wrote an article a few years ago about Elijah’s stand against the prophets of Baal in light of Baalic texts. When Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal, he mocks them for specific issues in Baalism. Similarly, people have studied the false gods of Egypt and concluded that each of the ten plagues that God brought on Egypt addressed a specific Egyptian false god. When we take this kind of approach, assuming the inerrancy of God’s Word and accepting the idiocy of the false religions of the ancient Near East, we can uncover some really neat information.
As for the similarities, we must keep something straight: God’s Word is truth. Assuming Yahweh’s religion is the true one, then it would make sense for parodies to emerge from the ancient Near East.
If we were to come across a railroad track, we wouldn’t be able to discern, from the track alone, which way the last train was going. Likewise, if we have two similar texts, and that’s all we have, then we can’t necessarily say if one copied the other or vice versa or if they came from a common source.
For example, there is Enuma Elish, which is an old Babylonian creation myth that bears some similarities to Genesis. The anti-biblical interpretation is that Moses copied from Enuma Elish (and/or other texts) and reframed it into a monotheistic perspective. Or one might see the flood mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh (or a host of other culture’s writings) and assume that Genesis took a popular flood story and reworded it. Or, as seen above, some would take Ugaritic tablets that treat the stars as rational beings and inflict this error on Biblical texts that refer to angels as stars (by the way, isn’t it interesting how we call celebrities ‘stars’ in modern speech without believing that stars of the sky are living creatures?).
But what if the train was going the other way down the track? What if, instead of assuming that Moses was copying from pagans, if we assumed that Moses was right? If one God really did create everything as in Genesis, and if there really was a flood as in Genesis, and if there really was a Tower of Babel, as in Genesis, then we would expect the world to appear just as it does today. We would anticipate that false religions would arise that would be parodies of the true religion. The truth about creation would have survived the flood and false teachers would have corrupted the truth to form Enuma Elish. Everyone would have known about the flood and taken this knowledge with them around the world, likely corrupting it along the way – this is why there are so many flood stories around the world.