Michael S. Heiser. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015. See here to purchase the book.
Michael S. Heiser has an M.A. in Ancient History (with a focus on
ancient Israel and Egyptology) from the University of Pennsylvania, as
well as a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is an academic powerhouse in
Hebrew Bible and Semitic studies.
To provide a rough summary of the story that Heiser tells, let’s
start with Adam and Eve. According to Heiser, God created Adam and Eve
to reproduce and fill the earth with people made in God’s image,
extending the influence of God throughout the world (Genesis 1:28). The
Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were to receive revelations from
God, was the earthy location of the divine council, God’s council of
divine beings that is mentioned in Scripture (i.e., Psalm 82; I Kings
22:19ff.). In the ancient Near East, gods met or dwelt on mountains and
in gardens, so Heiser believes that the Garden of Eden was a meeting
place for the divine council. Among the divine council was the serpent,
who was part of the divine retinue, as serpents were in ancient Near
Eastern imagery of gods, and perhaps also in Isaiah 6:2. This serpent
rebels against God and tempts Adam and Eve to sin, with the result that
the serpent is cast to the underworld, as Heiser reads Genesis 2 in
light of the rebellious beings in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28.
Years later, after the Flood, human beings have failed to heed God’s
desire for them to scatter throughout the earth and spread God’s
influence. They want to recapture the access to the divine council that
Adam and Eve had, so they attempt to build a tower to the heavens, the
Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). God scatters the people over the face of
the earth by confusing their languages. As God divides up the nations,
God assigns each nation to a particular god, who would rule the nation
(Deuteronomy 4:19-20; 32:8-9). Israel, however, would belong to God
God-self. Other gods try to thwart God’s plan to rule Israel and, in
turn, to spread God’s influence throughout the world through Israel. As
they did prior to the Flood (Genesis 6), the gods mate with human
beings and produce giant offspring, and this offspring inhabits the
Promised Land, where God intends the Israelites to dwell. The Israelite
Conquest of the Promised Land is about ridding the land of this giant
offspring, even though Heiser states that there were many Canaanites who
were not giants.
For Heiser, the work of Jesus was about freeing the nations from the
rule of the gods, so that God and exalted believers would rule the
nations instead. The gods are not eager to relinquish their reign,
however, and that is why Christians are in a battle against
principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:12). The Kingdom of God is
already and not yet.
This is the overall picture that Heiser presents, but there are other
arguments that Heiser makes, as well. Like a number of Christians,
Heiser contends that there are two YHWHs in the Old Testament, one of
them being a YHWH who appears to people in a visible form. For Heiser,
that particular YHWH is Jesus Christ. Heiser states that, “in some of
the oldest manuscripts of Jude (e.g., Alexandrinus and Vaticanus),” Jude
5 states that Jesus led the Israelites out of Egypt at the Exodus (page
270).
Another prominent topic in this book is Bashan and Mount Hermon, in
the north. Both were part of Og’s dominion. Og was one of the Rephaim,
an offspring of a divine-human union (Deuteronomy 3:13; Joshua 12:5).
For Heiser, Bashan was a spiritually evil place. Heiser regards it as a
gate to hell, since Ugaritic literature presents Rephaim in the
underworld, plus Bashan can mean serpent, and the serpent of Genesis 3
was in the underworld. I Enoch 6:1-6 states that Mount Hermon was where
the divine beings of Genesis 6 came when they cohabited with women,
producing the giant Nephilim. In Jesus’ time, Mount Hermon was a
prominent site of pagan temples, and Heiser argues that Jesus is
alluding to it when he states, near that very site, that the gates of
hell will not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18). Bashan
appears in the context of Scriptural passages that the New Testament
quotes (Psalm 22; Psalm 68), and Heiser deems that to be significant.
Heiser also maintains that Bashan has eschatological significance, as he
interprets eschatological danger from the north in reference to the
evil spiritual forces of Bashan. Most interestingly, Heiser speculates
that the maligned cows of Bashan in Amos 4:1-2 are not rich women but
rather supernatural beings!
Other fascinating topics that Heiser explores: the question of
whether the “god of this age” who blinds people in II Corinthians 4:4 is
Satan or God; the identity of Armageddon (for Heiser, it is not
Megiddo!); why Paul wanted to go to Spain (Romans 15:24, 28), and how
Isaiah 66:19 relates to that; themes from the Hebrew Bible that appear
in the story of Pentecost (Acts 2); and how the Old Testament
foreshadows (and does not foreshadow) Jesus. And there are many more
topics that Heiser discusses, not only in the text but also in the
in-depth footnotes.
Here are some thoughts:
A. I am slightly unclear about where Heiser believes the demons/gods,
specifically the demons/gods who ruled the nations, came to be located.
Obviously, these gods started out in heaven, but does Heiser believe
that the gods who rule the nations were cast from heaven into hell?
Heiser believes that there are evil spirits in hell: the serpent, and
the spirits of the giants. But what about the gods who rule the
nations? My impression was that, sometimes in this book, these evil
spirits got conflated, and that was where my confusion arose.
B. There may be something to Heiser’s arguments about Bashan, in
terms of Bashan being considered an evil place by ancient Israelites and
later Jews. I am not entirely convinced by Heiser’s argument that
Bashan was considered a gateway to the underworld, however. When
Deuteronomy refers to Rephaim in Bashan, it may simply mean that there
were giants who at one time lived in the land of Bashan, on earth, not
that Bashan was a gateway to the Rephaim in hell.
C. Heiser addressed questions that I have had. For example, why
would the ancients believe that gods dwelt on mountains, if they could
simply climb the mountains and see that the gods were not there? Why
would God tell Adam and Eve to fill the earth in Genesis 1, when Genesis
2 seems to presume that, had they not sinned, they would have stayed in
the Garden of Eden rather than filling the earth? Heiser’s answers
generate more questions in my head, but he did well to address them.
D. I am not saying this to be a heresy-hunter, but Heiser’s view on
the divine inspiration and historicity of the Bible was rather unclear
to me. Heiser seemed to argue that the divine-human unions in Genesis 6
and the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 were Jewish responses to
Babylonian or Mesopotamian claims. Does that imply that they were
stories created during the exilic period and did not actually happen in
history? Heiser also appears to argue that the Bible reflects some of
the limitations in knowledge of its time: for instance, Isaiah 66:19’s
reference to Tarshish and Paul’s desire to go to Spain reflect ancient
ideas about the extent of the earth. Would Heiser treat this as an
example of divine accommodation?
E. Although my point in (D.) may portray Heiser as somewhat of a
liberal, there were salient conservative elements in Heiser’s treatment
of the Bible. Source criticism was lacking in the book, as if the Bible
reflected one divine authorial intent. Heiser attempted to harmonize
apparent contradictions (i.e., statements that appear to suggest that
there are no other gods besides YHWH, and statements that acknowledge
the existence of other gods). Isaiah 53 is applied to the Davidic king,
without much argument (page 247). The Gospel of Mark is presumed to
see Jesus as God-incarnate, when there are many scholars who disagree.
Source criticism could have an impact on Heiser’s argument: is the
Bible’s message, for example, that humans and Israel are to fill the
world with God’s influence, when there are some exclusivist voices in
the Hebrew Bible? I doubt, though, that source criticism would
overthrow every argument that Heiser makes. Heiser’s approach may be a
reasonable canonical way to approach the text, as Heiser implies when he
refers to the divine inspiration of the text’s final form. Plus, there
is a possibility that New Testament authors and figures were influenced
by the Old Testament themes in the manner that Heiser discusses.
F. Heiser does well to refer to scholarly literature about Jewish
binitarianism. I question, though, whether Heiser’s interpretation of
the Angel of the Lord is the only way to account for that figure. Is
the Angel of the Lord a second YHWH, co-eternal with the other YHWH, or
is he simply a created being acting as God’s representative, carrying
divine privileges and authority as God’s representative? The view that a
created being could represent God and carry divine prerogatives was
present in ancient Judaism, as J.R. Daniel Kirk demonstrates in his
book, A Man Attested by God (Eerdmans, 2016).
My questions notwithstanding, I found The Unseen Realm to be an interesting, engaging, and well-argued book.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. My review is honest!