The Sean McDowell Show - Mind Reading, Demonic Possession: the Bible on Demons

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

The Bible says a lot about demons, but as you read a passage you might have more questions like: Can demons read your mind? What powers do they really have? The truth about demons is far stranger, and more fascinating, than many have been lead to believe. In this video, I interview scholar Michael Heiser, author of DEMONS: WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS ABOUT THE POWERS OF DARKNESS. We take live questions too. Read (Book): Demons (https://amzn.to/31OiQBu) Read (blog): What Powers Do Demons Have? https://bit.ly/2YUSUlK SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL (https://bit.ly/3fZ9mIw) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Can demons read your mind? Can Christians be demon possessed? Today we're going to take a look at some of the most common questions people ask about the supernatural realm and in particular demons. I am here with a friend, an Old Testament scholar. If you've studied in this world at all in terms of the unseen realm you'll recognize the name Dr. Michael Heiser. I have his book Demons right in front of me. I read it. And each time I walked away going, wow, how did I not understand that? Even though I've been to seminary and gotten a doctorate, how have I missed some of these things? Really, really eyeopening. Dr. Heiser, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, absolutely. I should tell your audience I had the very same experience. You know, just I was a doctoral student before I ran into things like Psalm 82 and the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. And I asked myself the exact same question. How in the world could I have never seen this stuff before? Now, and now I have a bit of an answer for that. But back then it was like I was kind of shell-shocked well it felt like reading your book you were kind of going on a journey a little bit and taking us with you in terms of the things that you discovered going back to the original language second temple literature just going deeper than even the english writings which loses some of the

nuance of understanding demons and angels, etc. We're going to unpack that. We're going to take some questions from all of you who are joining us, stuff you've wanted to know about demons. But before we get there, there's some groundwork we need to lay in terms of why so many Christians and also many non-Christians have some unbiblical ideas about demons. First, if you're new to the channel, make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other interviews coming up, including one with Billy Hallowell, who will be talking about the case for the demonic realm.

Today, we're going to look at theology. That's going to come up. We're going to look at the evidence that demons are real even outside of the Bible. And a special interview this Thursday with Richard Bachman, one of the leading New Testament scholars on the eyewitness accounts of Jesus. For now, Dr. Heiser, one of the first questions I thought is, you've written at least three books that I'm aware of on angels, demons, and unseen realm. Why would you write on this world of all the things that you could study? I was providentially poked in the eye by God. I mean, that's really the best answer I could give you.

You know, as I relate in Unseen Realm, that book preceded these other two. And Unseen Realm is sort of a Genesis to Revelation overview of biblical theology with an eye toward how the unseen world intersects with the human world intentionally in scripture. And that was provoked by an experience I had as a doctoral student. I'm just sitting in church, you know, one Sunday morning and killing some time with a friend who was also in the Hebrew department. And I don't know what the discussion was. I can't remember what we were talking about, but the way it ended was life changing. He just handed me his Hebrew Bible and said, you need to read Psalm 82 in Hebrew. And so I did.

You know, and you find out there that God Elohim is castigating, excoriating a group of gods, you know, other Elohim, Elohim Nitzav Ba'adot El, God stands in the divine assembly with care of Elohim Yishpot in the midst of the gods, midst of the Elohim, he passes judgment. And I read that and it's like, that sounds like a pantheon. I mean, I had no other word for it. And it was like, that sounds like a pantheon. I mean, I had no other word for it. And it was like, it was just shocking. It wasn't hard Hebrew. It's just right there.

And, you know, that took me down a certain path. You know, providentially, again, I was fortunate to, after I asked the initial question, how did I never see this before? I mean, I'm not a newbie. I'm a doctoral student, you know, in a Hebrew Bible program in a major university. I've taught 15 classes. I've taught five years on the Bible college level. I have two master's degrees. You know, how did I not see this?

I've been to seminary. I've been to Bible college. You know, and my second thought, again, providentially was, I'll bet Jesus knew this song. I'll bet the apostles knew it. Interesting. There must be a way to parse this. And that set me on a course. And now, you know, in hindsight, I'm not making this up.

This is not an exaggeration. Looking back, I had one clock hour, not credit hour, clock hour, 60 minutes in 15 years of undergraduate and graduate training, 60 minutes on angels and demons. Now with that kind of neglect, it teaches you something passively, like this stuff can't be important or else they'd spend more time on it. And here I was sitting in a church, looking at Psalm 82 in Hebrew, and frankly, just getting poked in the eye. You know, you get to a doctoral program, you've been in ministry for a while, you kind of get the sense that, okay, I got the lay of the land here. You know, I know most,

you know, I know more Bible than most people in church, I can navigate questions, you know, I feel called to do this. And, you know, I'm on the right path. And all of a sudden, it's like, you don't know, you don't know anything. It's like, you know, nothing, you know, this, this is so fundamental. God. Okay. And I remember sitting there thinking, I got a dissertation to write. You know, how, how in the world can I, I can't let my mind just get, get drawn by this, by questions like monotheism. I mean, you know, I'm supposed to have this figured

out and it was it was just it just stopped me in my tracks and so once i got into it i couldn't give it up i had the answer to this then i started to run into second temple period intertestamental period text it got into the into the supernatural world. And the fact that, well, we have the Satan figure, we've got Genesis 6, we've got what happened, three rebellions, not just one. Where did Judaism get this crazy idea that demons were the disembodied spirits of Nephilim? I mean, it's all over the Dead Sea Scrolls. And like, what are they thinking? You know, but I hadn't been exposed to any of it. Zero. Okay. And that just sort of sucked me down the rabbit hole or, you know,

got me into the, into the vortex and, and I couldn't give it up. So it became, you know, part of my dissertation, you know, my dissertation was on the divine assembly, the divine council in Second Temple Jewish literature and later texts in the Hebrew Bible. And now I look back on it and think this is so fundamental. What I now call the divine council worldview and the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. This is so fundamental to biblical theology that once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just shows up everywhere. And the wonderful thing is the Bible's filled with all these weird passages that we as moderns, whether we like to admit it or not, we are believing skeptics because we were raised in a modern world, post-enlightenment.

And so we don't readily, we're not predisposed to a full supernatural worldview. As Christians, we tend to be very selective about this. And I'm not talking about charismatic, you know, charismania stuff. I'm not charismatic. You know, I don't stuff. I'm not charismatic. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't have any background in that. What I'm talking about here is we find it somehow intellectually respectable to believe in things like a Trinity and the incarnation and the hypostatic union and the deity of Christ. But we can't believe in things like Genesis 6 or like real principalities,

and we can't like affirm Daniel 10's theology, you know. We walk at all these passages, and it's like, look, look, fellows, they come from the same book, okay? How can this be intellectually coherent to embrace this set of things and reject this set of things? And I was confronted by that question. That's just, I was. You know, again, I took a good poke in the eye, actually a few pokes in the eye, again, by providence that I had to cross the Rubicon, so to speak. And this is going to sound so simple, maybe even simplistic,

but I remember just sitting there as a doctoral student thinking, you know, I have to make a decision whether I'm going to read the Bible through the eyes of the people that God prompted to produce the thing, their worldview, and the worldview of the people they were writing to that were alive at the same time. I have to decide to either do that or be content with filtering the Bible through my own tradition.

And I liked my tradition. There was nothing wrong with it. But it was like, and I knew that if you go down this road. It's it's going to cost you some friendships. It's going to cost you, you know, maybe a job. It's going to it's not the norm, just the simple idea. I mean, Christians talk about interpreting the Bible in context all the time.

Oh, look, they use lamps back in Israel. Oh, they had pots and pans and, you know, they had cisterns. Okay, I get it. But worldview is a huge deal. Okay, the biblical writers, they were not us. They are not us. They don't look at the world the way we do. They are predisposed to a supernaturalistic worldview. And they confront us in scripture. To me, this has become an issue of biblical authority. You know, am I going to submit my post-enlightenment, 21st century intellectual worldview to the worldview of the biblical writers? Can I do that? And it was a little scary. That's a great question because I sense in the book there's a real honesty and

willingness to say, hey, where does this lead? Even if it makes us uncomfortable, and I appreciate that. Let's jump into the beginning. You mentioned a whole lot of things I kind of want to unpack a little bit for our viewers here. And one is it seems like we read back stuff from the New Testament into the Old Testament that probably wasn't there at that time. And one of the distinctions you make early in the book is that the word demons only appears three times in the Old Testament, depending on how we translate certain words. Why is that important to understand what's going on in the Old Testament? And what are some of the different ways that these evil spirits are described? Yeah, we have a significant problem with terminology. I mean, I do this out of the gate in the angels book, and I do a little

bit of it in the demons book as well. But the Old Testament has a very rich vocabulary for what's going on, both the good guys and the bad guys that we lack almost entirely. Because of the flow of history and things like the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible getting translated into Greek, and then the New Testament also being in Greek. So most of the time they quote the Old Testament, they're using that translation. A lot of the nuancing is just lost. And this is a classic example. Shedim is the word you're referring to in the Old Testament. It's not a demon like you would think in the Gospels.

It doesn't describe that. It's rather, it can be, and I think it is in those contexts in the Old Testament, a territorial entity. And the reason that makes the best sense is it's used in Deuteronomy 32 in the context of, again, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview that we can talk about. But that's just one example. What do you do with that? I mean, how do you know unless you look? You're a reader of the English Bible. And even if you are, let's just go down that trajectory. Let's say you're just a reader of the English Bible, and you run across the word demons a few times, but they don't possess anybody. They're never cast out of anybody. It's a very logical question to ask, hey, if there's no possessions in the Old Testament and exorcisms, why in the world when Jesus showed up and he starts doing this, do they consider this a sign of his messiahship? Where did that come from?

There's no Old Testament precedent for it, or so we think. Again, because we're steered in one direction by, again, the way English translations are what they are, but there's just a lot of terminology that's lost. And in the end, what I try to articulate in the books is that just generally you have three buckets, three terminology buckets. You've got terms for the heavenly host that describe what a member of the heavenly host is. Those would be your ontological terms. Okay. What it is. Things like spirits. Elohim is actually one of these terms. It's a generic term to describe any disembodied member of the spiritual world. Okay, so there's lots of Elohim. We don't have polytheism

in Psalm 82. We have a spiritual world populated with lots of spiritual beings. Sometimes they're called rukot spirits. Sometimes they're called Elohim. Sometimes they're called holy ones, you know, whatever. There's this vocabulary that tells you what it is. You know, and in that world, only Yahweh is distinct. He's what I call species unique. Only he has certain attributes that are assigned to him by biblical writers and denied to all other Elohim. You know, that's important. But then you have another bucket. There you have terms of rank and hierarchy. Sons of God is one of these. You know, it's important. But then you have another bucket. You have terms of rank and hierarchy. Sons of God is one of these. You know, it's language drawn from the royal court that, you know, the kings would give their relatives the best jobs. You know, family members, you know, the most important, significant positions.

This is all it is. You know, then you have a third bucket that describes role or function. This is where you actually get angel. It's a messenger. Cherub, a throne guardian, guards sacred space. Same thing for seraphim. Seraphim and cherubim are not angels. They're just job descriptions of any given member of the heavenly host. This is why angels really are never depicted with wings, because cherubim and seraphim are not angels in an Israelite world.

But in our world, we smash all this vocabulary together and the white hats are angels and the black hats are demons because that's the way we're taught in in church that's the way we're taught you know in church tradition you know throughout church history uh so a lot of it gets lost because of language a lot of it gets lost because of language. A lot of it gets lost because of worldview. When you get to the bad guys, you realize that, okay, we've got one rebellion in Genesis 3, a supernatural being, you know, we know the story of the garden. Genesis 6, you've got another set. Okay, now you've got a set, sons of God that transgress, you know, the boundary of heaven and earth. They produce Nephilim. When they die, then

their spirits, you know, one of the terms that are referred, used in the Old Testament of the descendants of the Nephilim is Rephaim. You actually see them in Sheol, in the underworld, in various Old Testament passages. That's actually where the second temple Jews that you thought were crazy, where they get this notion that demons are the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim, giant clans. That's where you get it in a few passages in the prophets. And then you got a third set. Okay, what happens at Babel, when the earth is divided up according to the number of the sons of God, according to Deuteronomy 32, 8, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. So you got three sets

of bad guys. and the middle set actually breaks into two i mean you you know it's like it's a whole taxonomy that we are completely unfamiliar with completely and the reason it matters is when is you if you have this worldview as a jew in the first century you expect the messiah to show up and be master and corrector and reverser of all three. And Jesus is. What Jesus says and what he does in certain places at certain times in his ministry, those places and the terminology, they have backstories to them that run deep into the Old Testament. And in some of these, you know, he actually picks very specifically certain groups of these to say a certain thing or be at a certain place and do something. We have lost all of that. Again,

because we don't live in this world, we're taught as moderns to not see anything supernatural going on in Genesis 6. We never see what's going on at Babel because most of our Bibles at Deuteronomy 32.8 do not follow the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we miss two out of the three rebellions. We have an incomplete and confused taxonomy. We don't know the vocabulary but here we are here we are here we are with my 60 minute my one clock hour of exposure to this in 15 years of higher education and i look back and now it's no wonder it's no wonder and and you know again what i what i try to do in these books is scholars you know the text geeks.

OK, let's just be honest with who I am and who these kind of people are. OK, you know, the Hebrew people and the Greek people. Everything I just described is like, yeah, we all know that because we study the primary sources. There's nothing new here and there isn't. But it's almost entirely new to the average person in church or someone who really wants to get in into the text of scripture and so i view my task as trying to take this content this high peer-reviewed academic content and making it decipherable you know to people with an eye you know toward for how the supernatural and the natural world

intersect intentionally in biblical theology. Well, I think you do that well. Let me jump to some questions because it relates to the broader picture of what you're talking about. Kay Stevenson says, why is there demon possession in the New Testament but not in the Old Testament? It seems mysterious. Why does that pop up in the New, but we don't see it ever in the Old Testament? It's a mystery by omission. In other words, there's two ways to answer this. One is the reality that the Old Testament itself is a very selective book. Okay. We don't get the episodes of everybody's life, even the biblical

character's life, like Moses. Okay. We get little episodes in his life. We don't get the full, you know, what happens every day. And we certainly don't get that with every people or every person. So it's an assumption and a flawed one to think that demons were not around possessing people in the Old Testament period and in the Second Temple period. Okay. That's the first problem. Okay. period and in the second temple period okay okay that's the first problem okay the second problem is again going back to my why would they expect messiah to cast out demons when there are no examples and that actually that actually really takes us into you know just some fascinating stuff

i i i i'm a host of a podcast naked bible podcast and we did a full episode on Psalm 91, I don't know, a month or two ago. And again, I just try to take scholarship and make it decipherable. So I said, you know, we don't realize that Psalm 91 was actually one of the Psalms discovered at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it was in a jar. And it was it was lumped in with four other Psalms that we don't have in the Hebrew Bible. Those four other Psalms are exorcistic Psalms, you know, casting out demons. And so, A, well, there's evidence that, you know, they know about it and it's going on. And the neat thing is, is a lot of the vocabulary from those other four are found in psalm 91 oh that's interesting if you read psalm 91 as as again a first century person or an israelite you would realize that words in english like pestilence plague the arrow that flies you know in midday and all this stuff there's four or five terms there in hebrew that

are actually names of canine deities that the Septuagint calls daimonion, demons. Wow. Okay. So, you know, we did a whole episode on this, basically showing that in the intertestamental period, there was a very strong tradition that David and Solomon, in the Septuagint, by the way, Psalm 91 is called the Psalm of David, but it's not in the Masoretic text. There's another angle, you know. But there was a very strong tradition that David and Solomon both had power to cast out demons.

And so when Jesus comes along, you know, I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a first century Jew. You know, oh, there's Jesus again. That's the carpenter's son. What nutty thing is he going to say today? You know, another fruit loop, you know, another one claiming to be the Messiah. And so let's go out and listen. You know, we don't, you know, I don't want to watch CNN. So let's go watch Jesus.

You know, so you go out there and Jesus starts saying this stuff that you're not buying. And then all of a sudden he starts casting out demons. And you look at that and you think, well, maybe we should listen to him. It might be a good idea because the son of David, the Messiah, we were taught to expect this based on the precedent of David and Solomon. And that runs very deeply through their culture. And here we got a guy that's saying, I'm the son of David, and he's doing this. And it's like, okay, that's different.

Let's pay attention. You know, I mean, there's a lot. This Psalm 91 is actually the Psalm that Satan quotes to Jesus. Oh, that's interesting. In the middle one. I mean, he picks that Psalm. I mean, there's a lot going on here. I don't want to rabbit trail. Yeah. But there's some really cool stuff in the temptation going on there with that specific. There's a reason he picks that Psalm. Now, I'm going to go to, in a minute, I'm going to go to your question, Ben. This is great. But you mentioned the temptation.

And one of the things you talk about in the book is that the ancients, in particular the Jews, would see natural disasters, that there was kind of spiritual forces behind them. So the desert was a place that was outside of kind of the kingdom and space of God. And it was a dangerous place, which helps us understand the temptation in a unique way. That's where Jesus went to be tempted by, by Satan. So how did the ancients in particular, the Bible,

when they looked at natural disasters, flood, forest fires, uh, you name it, did they think demons caused all that? Some of that? How did they view that intersection between the natural world and the supernatural world? Yeah, there's a couple of ways to approach this. On the one hand, it was very common, again, to

take things like meteorological phenomena and attribute it to divine activity. Because again, you know, this is a pre-modern world. So that's very common in Canaanite. You see this in Canaanite religion and other ancient Near Eastern religions all the time. And some of the deities that were perceived or believed to be behind these things from other pantheons do show up in the Hebrew Bible. But you have certain passages where those, you know, the usual suspects are sort of subservient to Yahweh. There's a passage in Habakkuk, for instance, where some of these deities behind the forces are sort of just kind of in a retinue that they're like puppies on leashes, you know, it's that kind of thing. And so for the Israelite, the biblical writer,

the whole point was that no, God is in charge, you know, of all of this. We don't have other deities running around here causing this stuff. God is behind what we experience in life, including, you know, natural phenomenon. And, you know, we, you know, we still think that today, we don't think that when it rains, you know, God's up there shaking a cloud, okay. But ultimately, we do assign, we do have a big enough view of God's sovereignty, that he could do something like that. In other words, it's not really that far from where we're at. But it was more or less you know chaos and the forces of chaos were under the thumb of the god of israel he was ultimately in control of these things

it wasn't just something running amok you know among like that now that the interesting you know thing as well as forces of chaos is is a term that scholars like to use to describe anything that is life-threatening or anything that just makes life really difficult for the ancient person. Think of it this way. Things like floods and earthquakes and the desert are tied in. They are the desert are high. They are the opposite of Eden. They are the opposite of the perfection that God created specifically for humans, that the habitable world that he made. And so once Eden erupts and chaos becomes, you know,

unrestrained, all the things that make life miserable or life threatening get sort of cast as oppositional to God's original design and intent. And so you have this what God wants and the opposite, anti-Eden. And the desert was thrown into this bucket because there's not enough water. You can't live in a desert. You don't have enough to eat. You don't have enough water. Yeah, you can go there for a while, but you hope you find an oasis. And, oh, incidentally, doesn't that remind you of Eden, a paradise garden?

Okay, so you've got this oppositional stuff going on. And God tends, in the patriarchal era, God tends to have encounters with people like trees and oases. Why? Because it's an Edenic image. Okay, this is why. This is how it originally was. This is where God's presence originally was. So you have these two things played off against each other.

And part of that in the wilderness wanderings you know when when they do leviticus 16 with the scapegoats okay the two goats yep the one that's killed the blood is applied to the sanctuary you know sprinkled on the ark and all that kind of stuff you know it it decontaminates the sanctuary it's never applied to people but i could go we could go for a couple hours on how we misunderstand the sacrificial system, okay? Sure. The Day of Atonement was like hitting the reset button. Like, think of your computer analogy.

Okay, hit the button. Now it's restored to its pristine condition like when it was made, ready for another year of use, okay? So it decontaminates sacred space. And then the other goat is not killed. But the high priest lays his hands on the head of the goat and they send it out of the camp into the wilderness. Well, of course, you'd send it into the wilderness because that's where all the anti-Eden stuff is. Sin doesn't have a place in Yahweh's sacred domain. So, of course, you send it out. And there's a lot of crime and punishment

and certain laws that are in Leviticus that illustrate the same concept. And this is not a ransom to Satan. Leviticus 16 says the second goat was for Azazel, which is a, it's not only a name of a demon in Second Temple literature, it's a Satan figure in of a demon in second temple literature it's a satan figure in second temple intertestamental literature but even before that it was a demonic you know figure

that that term okay it's not a it's not a ransom or a sacrifice to this other deity because it's not killed okay it's just driven away to where that that where the bad things are. Okay, the bad things are outside of Yahweh's sacred space. Where his presence is, there's life, there's abundance, it's wonderful. You know, we're on the way to a land that flows with milk and honey. Again, it's supposed to make you think of Eden, all right? There's this wonderful place.

And on the way, you know, we're all together collectively in the camp of Israel, but outside the camp, we don't want to be outside the camp. Because that territory is not sacred space to Yahweh, is it? You know, and again, they get defined, it gets defined as the opposite, all this oppositional, you know, kind of thinking. So, of course, they drive it out, you know, because that's where sin belongs. It doesn't belong here. And, of course, when Satan, when Jesus encounters Satan, the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness.

Well, where else would you expect to find Satan? Of course, he's out there. You know, he's not, again, in sacred space, the holy, you know, Jerusalem, you know, again, it's oppositional binary kind of thinking. It's there to illustrate Eden and anti-Eden. And this is so interesting. It transforms the way you read the New Testament, because I've taught Old Testament for years to high school students before I came to Biola, and I would teach the scapegoat. They'd sacrifice one to decontaminate or cleanse them of sins, send the other one away from the people with the blame, but where they go in the desert and what that represented changes everything in terms of our understanding that Azazel was there, a demon type being

would get his due. That's, that's fascinating. So tell me, I started this 10 part series on like Twitter, Instagram of like the strangest passages in the Bible. And I sent out like one, one minute answers, which is impossible. But I asked people, I said, which ones do you want me to address? And one of the top ones was Genesis six, the sons of God who impregnate these women are these angels. Like what on earth is going on? Now I know we can spend two hours unpacking this, but like kind of as simply as we can, you explain this Mesopotamian background. What is going on in Genesis chapter six? Yeah, well, let's start with the familiar material. So we have

Genesis 6, and I'm going to loop verse 5 in here, because it's important, not just 1 through 4, but 1 through 5. And it's the sons of God cohabiting with the daughters of men, and they have Nephilim, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then somehow, all that stuff leads to verse 5, and God saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth. And every thought of the imagination of his heart was only evil. Like, how do you get from the first four verses to verse five? So that's one question. And what about all this weird stuff?

Again, that's the other question. Well, if you go to the New Testament, Peter in 2 Peter 2 refers to the angels, plural, that sinned at the time of the flood. Okay, let's, you know, final Jeopardy question. You know, what could that possibly refer to? Okay, there's only one candidate, and that's Genesis 6. Now, in Christian theology, which sometimes veers into Christian mythology, we have this teaching. I personally think this is paradise lost. John Milton, we need to blame him, but that's probably saying too much. This idea of, well, when Satan fell, when he became corrupt, he took a third of the angels with him. And that's what Peter's referring to. Well, really, can you show me a verse that says that?

Okay, surprise, surprise. There isn't a single verse in the Bible that says a third of the angels fell when Satan fell or before Adam and Eve or anything like that. In fact, if you use your Bible software and you look up three or third and the word angel in the same verse, it happens one time. And that's the last book of the Bible, book of Revelation, Revelation 12. And if you read that, the war in heaven erupts in response to the birth of the Messiah, which makes a lot of sense. Satan's not happy. Okay, we got to kill the child. All right.

There's nothing in the Bible about a third of the angels rebelling with Satan. So you've got one candidate. Now, Peter uses a very important term. He says that these beings, these angels are kept in chains of gloomy darkness. They're sent to your English translations probably have hell or Hades. Okay. Verb in Greek is tartarao. They're sent to Tartarus.

It's an important term because that is the classical Greek term for where the titans are punished and sent and imprisoned. Again, and there's a giant story in there and all this stuff. So Peter's acquainted with that. He also says kept in chains of gloomy darkness. You don't get that in Genesis 6, do you? No, you don't. Where does he get that detail? Well, he might get it from the Greek story, but he probably gets it from Second Temple material, books like Enoch or the Genesis Apocryphon, that's what we call it, some of the Dead Sea

Scrolls. They have these details in them, some of them actually refer to gilgamesh while they're doing it which is very interesting because if you go back and you actually search and somebody did this in 2010 his name is amar anus he's in helsinki he's a cuneiform scholar can you can we can we find specific mesopotamian information because we all know that mesopotamia had these flood stories i mean that's everybody kind of knows that you know from even youtube and the internet all right okay you find can you find specific elements about divine beings and then there's a flood and on the other side of the flood they're they're like quasi divine they're like you know not really divine but only partially divine and giants, all this,

all this weird Genesis six one through four stuff. And the answer is yeah. Yeah, you can. It's the Mesopotamian, the Apkallu story and the bad guys in that story are imprisoned by Marduk and the higher gods who wanted to destroy humanity with a flood. The Apkallu said, this is terrible. We've invested a lot of time in these people. You know, we've got to teach, you know, preserve the knowledge that we gave them and blah, blah, blah. They're the heroes in the Mesopotamian story.

They're the villains, of course, in Genesis. You know, but there is a Mesopotamian backstory that accounts for every point of Genesis 6, 1 through 4 and 5, because knowledge corrupts humanity. You know, if you're a Mesopotamian, you'd say, no, it doesn't. It's why we're great. It's why Babylon's great. Astrology, idolatry, you know, all this, you know, all the stuff that, you know, Babylon would be associated with. And the biblical writers are, no, that just helps us destroy ourselves more efficiently. It's evil. It's wicked.

And so Genesis 6, 1 through 5 is written as pushback against a Mesopotamian worldview, which lots of things in Genesis 1 through 11 are. They are pushback against the pagan pantheons of other civilizations. This is no different. Now, I will throw this out to your audience. Now, I worked at Lagos for 14 years. This is probably not a secret, but I got everything free. So when I came across Anas' article in 2010 about the Apkall first thought was how did I miss that well I did a search through all the commentaries that logos has all the books every the whole library I found two commentaries that mentioned the word they don't discuss the data. Literally, all they do is mention the word.

I could only find two publications before 2010. This became a mission of mine, okay? Wow. Kvonvig's book on the primeval genesis and Ann Kilmer's article in a Feshrift deal with the material. It wasn't until 2010 that somebody published all this stuff. And what that means is that if you're using a Genesis commentary that doesn't say anything about what I just said, it is by definition obsolete. Okay. It is obsolete.

Wow. So there's a truckload of data here that needs to be dealt with. And it's not adequate just to say, well, that's just freaky. I don't want to believe that. Mike, how does Genesis 6 work? How does it explain that to me scientifically? And my answer is, I don't know. I don't know how it works. Can you explain to me scientifically how the virgin birth works? How the resurrection works? How the hypostatic union works? You know, here we are back to the selective supernaturalism. Yeah, that's the the point earlier as soon as you tell me how you can rationally explain that in a scientific worldview

then you'll have me but until then it's an issue that i think we need to struggle with my again my answer is i don't know because i'm not a deity all right confession i'm not a deity okay so i don't really know what deities can or cannot do. Let me jump in and ask that just so I understand. So people who try to understand Genesis six from a natural standpoint, like it's say the lineage of Seth or kings on the earth during that day, that's out something supernatural is going on all of those views fundamentally ignore the mesopotamian context for genesis 6 1 through 5 they don't deal with it at all and not only that but they have their own internal contradictions so the sons of god are the sethites got it does that mean that no women were godly and the daughters of men were evil or or i guess that's that's the line of cain so so like they're all the women are evil and the sethites are good guys

come on it falls apart when you look at the details but did did somebody tell peter like could somebody have please told peter you know like like so that peter didn't get this wrong you know everybody in the ancient world i can only think of one exception prior one text prior to the fourth century a.d that did not take the supernatural view. This is in church history. Irenaeus is all over this. Tertullian is all over this stuff. The Jewish traditions are all lockstep, okay? It isn't until the time, you know, Augustine's the one that really changed the tide and championed the Sethite view. There was a guy before him, a few years before him, Julius Africanus,

rejected the supernatural view of Genesis 6, but its champion was Augustine. And I personally think that part of his resistance to it was his own distaste for the Manichaeans. When he was originally converted, he was part of the Manichean sect, and then he left them, and they reviewed books like Enoch. So I think he had a bit of an axe to grind there, but for whatever reason, he was the champion of the Sapphite view.

So just so I understand, when Mesopotamian understanding is brought in, they're not saying this is a fictional story and critiquing it. They're saying something to do with these kind of gods or demonic beings came down, became embodied, had sex with these women, and he's critiquing the Mesopotamian version of it. But something like that really did happen supernaturally, and we may not know exactly what it is. Right. That's what's in the text. Okay. Again, this event, it's really fascinating.

If you go back, people can find the Amar Anus. Just Google drmsh.com and put in A-M-A-R-A-N-N-U-S, and you'll find his article because it's publicly accessible. If you go back and look at that, the catalog of things that these supernatural beings in the Enoch story teach humans at the time of the flood as part of this Genesis 6 story, the Enoch's retelling of the story that list of things that that they teach humans to corrupt them you know and again to more efficiently destroy themselves and turn humanity toward idolatry you can find all of those things in the mesopotamian

material yeah of teachings the op column interesting you know again there's just it's just point for point it's all the way across the board uh you know in mesopotamia archaeologists have found figurines of the op column again in mesopotamia they they were they were good guys okay they were good good spirits all right and they would they would bury these figurines in building you know in like kind of like not headstones but uh like cornerstones they would bury them in building, you know, kind of like, not headstones, but like cornerstones. They would bury them in building foundations. And the Akkadian term for them is matzareh. Guess what that means?

It means watcher, which is the term he uses for the sons of God in Genesis 6. It's just bang, bang, bang, you know, just right on down the road. So again, what I'm saying is, if you want to understand Genesis six, one through five, you must read it against what it's shooting at. And it's shooting at Babylonian version of these pre flood events. It is trying to say this was a disaster. This is This is part of the chaos that is Babylon. Here it is again. You know, and so I think it's an important thing because it does leak out into the New Testament. It does.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It leaks out in the New Testament in some interest. I'll give you just one. Why are demons, again, if you're thinking like a first century Jew, demons are disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim. Okay. Why are demons called unclean spirits in the Gospels and in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in Second Temple literature? There's a whole dissertation on this.

It's by a guy named Wallen, W-A-H-L-E-N. I footnote him in the Demon's Book. It's because in the Levitical worldview, unclean is defined by forbidden mixture. That's what they are. The term absolute, it's not because they're icky. Oh, I've got to wash my hands now. No, it's because they're the product of a forbidden mixture. Why do the Dead Sea Scrolls call them bastard spirits? Well, because that's what they are. You know, I mean, they have this terminology that we never sort of,

like with unclean spirits, we never really think about it. You know, like, why this term and not some other term? And again, in the context of its wider worldview, it makes really good sense, you know, why they would use that term. You know, there are other things, passages it leaks into. I think the Watcher shows up in Revelation 9. I can't prove that, but I suspect that the beings unleashed from the pit in Revelation 9, that this is what it's referring to, their final release before the day of the Lord. You know, there's just stuff like that. That is so interesting. I feel like we could do a whole show or two just on the Genesis 6 passage, because this is really a revolution in scholarship

in the past decade, which is a short period of time when it comes to scholarship that's changing how we understand this. Let me ask you one, Ben, I mentioned I was going to ask this a while ago, and then we're going to go to the real kind of quick answer, some of these practical questions people would have about demons. But he says in Psalm 72, it talks about the divine counsel and God pronouncing judgment over them. Would these beings be considered demons in our modern lens? And he's asking about Psalms 82. You also have this divine counsel in Genesis 1. It seems to be in Genesis 6, Genesis 11. What is this divine counsel where it says, let us make man in our image, I think is related to this.

Yeah. Divine counsel is a term that derives from Psalm 82 and Psalm 89, a few other places in the Hebrew Bible. It really, it's just, it refers to the heavenly host. Okay. That's a familiar terminology for us. I mean, there's rank distinction and all that stuff. We don't need to worry about that for the sake of this question. So it's the heavenly the heavenly host and again what's going on in psalm 82 is god is angry and he's specifically angry at this group of elohim well who are they if you go back to again you brought up genesis 11 with babel now you your listeners have heard me say that there was a supernatural rebellion at

Babel. And some of them, if they read, you know, everybody, if you read Genesis 11, where are the demons there? I don't see them. Well, you're not going to see them. If you go to Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, it says, when the Most High, we know who that is, again, that's not difficult, okay, when the Most High divided up the nations and he fixed their borders. And we know when that happened. That's Babel. Okay. Because we get the list of nations, Genesis 10, that go with the Genesis 11 story.

When the Most High divided the nations and he fixed their borders, he divided them up according to the number of the sons of God. There's that phrase again, sons of God. It's always divine beings in the Old Testament. And then verse nine says, but Israel is Yahweh's portion. You know, Jacob is going to be his allotted inheritance. And what it means is that at Babel, God is fed up. Okay, we had the fall, I forgave you. We had the flood. I'm never going to do that again. I thought that straightened everything out. You know, I told you to disperse. I repeated the Edenic mandate to you.

You know, go up, be fruitful, multiply. You know, we're going to kickstart Eden again here and look at what you're doing. The narrative actually says, it has people at Babel saying, let's build us a tower so that we don't have to disperse, like exactly opposite what they're supposed to do. And God has it so what he does is he divorces humanity i've had enough i refer to this as the romans one event of the old testament you don't want me to be your god you're not going

to listen to me let's see how that works and he assigns the nations these peoples that he creates at babel to other members of the heavenly host and he assigns members of, these peoples that he creates at Babel, to other members of the heavenly host. And he assigns members of the heavenly host to them. There's two sides of that same coin. And we know that's the case. Because if you go to Deuteronomy 4, 19 and 20, that's the parallel to Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9. It says the same thing that God allots, you know, the heavenly host to other nations, not Israel, other nations. Deututeronomy 17 deuteronomy 29 i mean you got this whole thing through deuteronomy and what that means is that after babel the entire world as they know it all the nations are under dominion of some deity other than yahweh

because he's had it and so what what god decides to, okay, they're your placeholders now. I'm going to go call this guy Abraham and his wife. And they can't have kids, so they're perfect. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to supernaturally give them a child. And I'm going to start over. This is my new humanity, Israel. And he makes a covenant with Abraham and says, now look, I know I just divorced all the nations. I was really ticked. But it's going to be through you and your seed that ultimately all of them are going to be blessed. So God wants the nations

governed according to his own character, according to his principles of justice. He still loves humanity because they're created in his image. They're his imagers. But what happens, we're not told when, we're just told by the time we get to Psalm 82, God is angry. And if you read why he's angry with the other gods, and he actually calls them sons of the most high in Psalm 82, verse 6. So it's a direct link back to Deuteronomy 32. He's charging them with showing chaos among their nations, enslaving their populations, and just treating people like garbage. And he's had it.

And at the end of the psalm, the psalmist rises up and exclaims, you know, oh God, you know, rise up and take back the nations. Okay, this is the vision. This is what's going on in Psalm 82. So God has had many dealings with his supernatural heavenly host. Some of them rebel. Some of them transgress, Genesisesis 6 some of them he gives jobs to and they either fail gloriously okay they fail what they're supposed to do after babel or they don't give a rip because we also learn from deuteronomy 32 17 that these shading again there's your territorial entity term it's not demon like in the gospels but it's a territorial entity term. It's not demon-like in the Gospels, but it's a territorial entity, which makes perfect sense because all the nations are under dominion. By the way, this is where Daniel gets his theology.

There's another question we'd ever ask. Oh, the Prince of Persia, Prince of Greece, supernatural beings over geopolitical nations. Yeah, I get it. I get it. Hey, where'd Daniel get that? I'll tell you where he got it. He got it in Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9. That's where he got it.

Okay, it's just biblical theology. I'll tell you where he got it. He got it in Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9. That's where he got it. Okay. It's just biblical theology. So, you know, God has had plenty of dealings with the heavenly host and they're not all good. We're told three times in Job that God doesn't trust his holy ones. Well, I guess not. I mean, he knows that they're not him. They're not perfect in their nature. He has given that he shared his attributes with them,

one of which is freedom, free will. And that goes all the way back to Genesis. You know what? I don't believe Genesis 1.26 has anything to do with the Trinity. You know, and that's the basic view in church tradition. And the reason I don't, I'm going to read you something in Genesis 11. This is the only place you get the let us language, you know, like in Genesis 1.26.

You see it in Genesis 11. 11 this is the only place you get the let us language you know like in genesis 126 you see it in genesis 11 it says then they said come let us build ourselves a city tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves okay you know lest we be dispersed we don't want to obey god boy that would be terrible let's just do this and then verse 5 it says the lord came down to see the city in the tower, which the children of men had built. And the Lord said, behold, they're one people, have all one language, so many beginning of what they're going to do, nothing they propose will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language. Now, wait a minute.

If the let us is the Trinity, I would suggest that the other two persons are already down. Okay, that's like standard Trinitarian thinking. The persons are not like some of them are here and some of them are there. We're not modalists, okay? You know, so if this passage shows you that we're not talking Trinity here, we're talking God is speaking to his heavenly host. And that makes the most sense in Genesis, you know, also because why would he have to announce, hey, let's create humanity. You know, if they all, if they're members of the Trinity,

they already know that they're not learning anything. Okay. I mean, because they're co-eternal and co-omniscient, you know, how can they learn anything? What's the point? So, you know, there's a number of obstacles to the traditional view. What I think's going on there is God had a supernatural family from the very beginning. That's Job 38. Sons of God witnessed the creation of the world. They're there watching. And God says, is my paraphrase, boy, this is cool. You know what? i like having a family i like creating beings like myself to be my children and to participate with me and doing stuff that i think needs to be done you know what i i'm going to try it again but i'm going to make them a little different i'm going to give them bodies

this time i'm going to create embodied beings and you know what if i do that they need a place to live because they're embodied. So let's create the world and we're going to create humans. We'll call them humans, you know, to live in this world and they can't come to us. So let's go down there and live with the humans. We'll take a little place of this earth and we'll call it Eden and we'll live there because where God is, his entourage is. This is standard theophany throne imagery, you know, in the Bible. You know, God goes down there with his supernatural family, his entourage, he creates humans. And in some way, the plurals in Genesis 126 telegraph now, in some way, the humans are like the members of the heavenly host,

and they're also like god let us create humanity as our imagers okay but yet when the creation happens in the next verse it's singular so god created them male and female he created them every every verse in the hebrew bible right yeah if you have bible, every verb of creation with humanity as the object is singular. Okay, there's no ambiguity here. So what God's doing is he's announcing to his heavenly host, I got an awesome idea. Let's do this. And the reason it's plural is it telegraphs to the reader that somehow we are like them and like God. And how is that? Well, I'll tell you how it is. We have the same father and the same creator. He created them to be his proxy, his representatives,

his agents, to do things in that world that he wants done. And that's why he created humanity. So the image of God is not a thing put in us. Hey, we're very vulnerable ethically if we think the image of God is a quality. Gets you in all sorts of ethical problems, especially with abortion and all this kind of stuff. It's not a thing. It's not a quality. It's a status. To be human at any level of development, to be human is to be God's imager. This is the embodied form, the embodied extension. Okay. These are my kids and I want them to be my partners as well.

And it's democratized. It's every human. It's not just the divine kings. Okay. Not the ancient Near Eastern world. It's every human. It's not just the divine kings, okay, the ancient Near Eastern world. It's everybody. And, I mean, this is just fundamentally important stuff. And that's Genesis 1.

So what I do, like in Unseen Realm, is I say, look, here's where it starts. By design, what the Bible is going to do, the family and his children partner with his partners on earth because that's what god wanted to begin with and it blows up and god hasn't given up on it he's going to get what he wants he's going to get it back and he's going to look at humans again to to graft them back into this family and and you're going to have two tracks that follow each other through scripture you know why is it that holy ones in the old testament overwhelmingly used for

supernatural beings it's never used in the plural in the new testament for supernatural beings you know who it's used of holy ones hagioy in greek terrible translation. It's believers. Wow. Okay. In Hebrews 2, believers, that Jesus, who is our sibling, presents God to us and us to God. Where does he do it in Hebrews 2? In the congregation. It's in the council.

What's the cloud of witnesses? It's not just the people in Hebrews 11. You keep reading Hebrews 12. It's the innumerable festal gathering of angels. You know, why is it in 1 Corinthians 6, when Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to stop bickering with each other? He says, look, you people, don't you know, 1 Corinthians 6, 3,

that you're going to rule angels? You're going to judge angels. What's he talking about? Well, he's talking about the eschatological concept, which we read about in Revelation 2 and 3, that he that overcomes, I will put him over the nations. Well, who's over the nations now? That would be the fallen sons of God.

When they're destroyed, a la Psalm 82 and several other passages in the prophets, guess who replaces them? Guess who gets their jobs? That would be us. We are, we will be what God intended us to be from the beginning. We will be fully brought into his counsel, his host. Humanity was created to be fit for sacred space. I mean, just think of that concept.

It's the most natural thing in God's head, as it were, to look at humans and think they belong with me. You know, in the end, God is going to, he steers everything back to the new Eden. We're over the nations. We replace the rebellious members of the council. It's not a coincidence. I mean, there's all these things that just interconnect in Scripture.

And I have found, and look, I'm putting myself in the same bucket here. I'm no different than any of your listeners here. We have people who care about the Bible in our churches. They really do. And they have lots of data points in their head, but they have no framework for them. Wow. They don't know where to put them.

So again, I think what Unseen Realm and then Angels and Demons, Unseen Realm is the structure. It's the framework. I say it's building the matrix, okay? And then Angels and Dem you know unseen realm is the is the is the structure it's the framework i say it's building the matrix okay and then angels and demons are kind of drilling down what i'm trying to do fundamentally is give people a worldview structure to understand their bible i'm not going to protect them from their bible anymore okay that's just a i love it yeah okay i'm not going to do it anymore. This is your Bible, you know, walk in and read it and enjoy it. But you try to give them the structure and then try

to orient people with a simple thought that I had to, again, I had to have a poke in the eye. Read, you will get so much more out of it if you read the Bible, not thinking that it answers your questions, not thinking that it was written by modern post-enlightenment people. It wasn't written by us. They're not us. But read it with the Israelite in your head. Read it with the first century Jew in your head. How would they have thought about this passage?

And you can do it. You really can. I love that approach, and that's what you do in the book. I mean, you take me, and I have a doctorate and master's. I've studied the stuff, the languages, and I'm going.

It's amazing. So those of you watching this, there was a question that just came up that said, are we exploring the questions whether demons are real or not? a few weeks I have on Billy Halliwell he has a new book coming out with an investigation of the demonic realm we're gonna talk about the evidence for demons what we've been taught he interviewed me for that but I don't know if I made the book he

mentioned that he talked to you when I chatted with him. Today we're talking with Dr. Michael Heiser about his book, Demons. How do we theologically understand demons and put them together? Do you have time if I just throw out there and get like the tweet responses to the most common questions people ask? And I know it's painful because it's got to be fast but i would like to know these are the questions that people ask me all the time um are demons fallen angels no the the it's yes and no the terminology is wrong because angel is just a job description they are fallen supernatural beings in a sense they're actually second generation okay okay principalities

and powers that's paul's terminology for the third group the deuteronomy 32 babel group they are definitely fallen supernatural beings they are out of the world gone oh good good job that was quick and by the way angels are functional so that's why you see human beings operating as angels. Is that correct? Or did I miss that? Well, it's on the loss. It's a messenger. Okay.

In the angels book, I have this question. Do believers become angels? Like when we die? And the answer is no. But what happens is we become glorified and we have certain of the attributes in glorification that they also have. And so this is another good example where Christian tradition has smashed those things together. Gotcha. That's helpful. Can demons be redeemed or Satan be redeemed? I don't believe so. I think Hebrews 2 specifically addresses this, where basically God did what he did, the plan of salvation specifically for humans,

and the proof of that in Hebrews 2 is the incarnation. In other words, God became a man. He didn't become anything else. He became a man, and the focus of his redemptive plan is humanity, not any other created being. If demons and Satan know that they're going to lose in the end, why do they keep fighting now? Do they? It depends how you define victory. Okay. Okay. If you define victory as, oh, we're going to kill God someday. No, they're not idiots. Okay. They know that they're not morons. If you define victory a different way, then you do have a game plan. And here's what I mean by that. Paul linked specifically the return of the Lord and the day of the Lord with, quote, the fullness of the Gentiles. Again, Paul is informed by the Deuteronomy 32 worldview.

This is why he uses terms like principalities, powers, rulers, thrones, dominions, instead of demons, because these are all terms of geographical dominion. He knows who he's dealing with. His focus in his ministry, because he's dealing with the nations, is the third set of rebels okay and god says okay when when i have all extracted all of the people i want from the nations and bring them back into relationship to me bring them back into my family then the end will come the day of the lord and the lord will return well if i'm a principality and power and i and I know this, by now I do, before the crucifixion and resurrection, I don't think they knew certain things based on what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2.

But if I know this now, it's like, okay, what I'm hearing is all we need to do is keep the church from accomplishing, performing the Great Commission. We just blind people under our charge, under our influence to the gospel. Check, got that. We get the church distracted or lazy so that this doesn't happen. Check, check. I'm good with that because we'll just kick this can down the road forever. God has linked the return of his son and the day of the Lord to these people. Thank you. I mean, it's like that gives them a reason to continue because how do they define victory?

We're still here. Yes, we don't have authority. Yes, our authority was stripped away. Paul writes this and that. Okay, we get it. But you know what? We're not giving up our turf. And we hate humans. We're not giving up on blinding them and robbing Yahweh of his children. That's why we're here. So we're going to kick this can down the road for a very long time. If you define victory like that, they're not doing too bad. They're really not doing too bad. I think it was helpful you point out in the book that that is their nature and they act consistently with their nature and can't help it.

That's what they are. That's what they do as a piece of it as well. This is who they are. Last question. This is helpful. Pine Creek says that polytheism is defined as the belief that many gods exist. Would Heiser be a polytheist under that definition? No, because polytheism assumes an interchangeability and an equality of certain fundamental attributes that the Hebrew, the biblical writers do not presume. So that's also what's wrong with henotheism. In henotheistic systems, they assume that the lead deity can be displaced at certain, at some point, can be defeated, toppled by somebody

else in the pantheon or whatever competition. The biblical writers aren't thinking that way at all. Again, Elohim, let's just back up a little bit. We are trained by our culture and by church. When we see the letters G-O-N-D on a piece of paper or on a screen, we mentally, our brain assigns, and all these terms are important, our brain assigns a specific set of unique attributes to the letters G-O and D. And so if you put an S on it, oh, we can't have that because they're supposed to be unique attributes. That would be polytheism, okay? Well, the problem with that is that isn't how the biblical writers think about the word Elohim.

How do we know? Because they use Elohim of five or six different things that are not the God of Israel. That alone tells you they are not assigning a specific set of unique attributes to the term Elohim. So to have a multiplicity of Elohim is nowhere near polytheism like we think of it. But in the West, in the modern West, and scholars are no different. I mean, I was bucking the trend in my dissertation. This is essentially my dissertation stuff. We don't, there are very few exceptions.

We don't stop to wonder, well, maybe we shouldn't just a priori assign a specific set of unique attributes to a certain term. Maybe we shouldn't do that because the Hebrew Bible doesn't do that. Now, the theology that we have that Yahweh, the God of the Bible, is unique, that doesn't come from the term Elohim or any other specific term. What it comes from is that the biblical writers will say certain things about this Elohim that they won't say about any other, and they will, in fact, deny the things they say about this one Elohim to all the others. And here I am talking about attributes, omniscience, omnipotence, you know, eternality. Those things are assigned to one Elohim of the bunch. Again, Elohim is just a generic term for a spiritual being.

That's all it is. There are many Elohim, but only one of those Elohim is Yahweh. Yahweh is an Elohim, but no other Elohim is Yahweh. That is not polytheism. Okay. So there's other beings

with supernatural power from the divine realm, but not with the same attributes as God. And where we trip up is we think attributes are linked to terms because that's how we do it in the modern West. G-O-D equals this set of specific unique attributes. Well, that's wonderful because Elohim doesn't. So what, you know, instead of letting the biblical writer tell us what the term means, we impose what we think about the letters G-O-N-D on that term. And that's where we mess up. That's where we read Psalm 82 and get

freaked out, but we don't need to, because we bring our modern concept to the text we impose it and that's the problem That's one of the things was so helpful about your book as you said even the Septuagint the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament Loses some of the nuances and then into English it loses the nuances not inaccurate not Misrepresenting but not fully capturing some understandings of evil spirits in the demonic realm in the old testament and that's why look those of you who are tracking with this conversation enjoying this i couldn't more highly recommend a book on this topic than demons it's thorough it's honest uh it's a scholarly book but it's very understandable if you're willing to do the work so if you're looking for a book that just says,

hey, here's 20 questions on demons, one quick paragraph answer, this is not your book. If you're looking to say, okay, I want to go deeper, and I want to consider what actually the biblical worldview itself really teaches about demons, and I'm willing to go places that may not be comfortable, you are not going to find a better book. Now the question of are demons real? Where is the evidence? That's one we're going to look at in three weeks. We have Billy Halloway coming

on. He has a new book coming out. He takes a journalist approach to the existence of demons and asks, what's the proof? What's the evidence? Are these beings real? How do we know this? That's more of an apologetic question we're going to look at next time. For now, I really want to thank Dr. Heiser for coming on. I encourage you to pick up his book, Demons. He also has a book, Angels, and another book. The title is Unseen Realm. Did I get that correct? All three of these excellent, thoughtful, biblically focused books related to demons and the unseen realm. You rocked my world, I'm going to say by reading this. Honestly, I was sharing some with my wife. I'm like, check this out. This is so interesting. I know this took just a massive amount of research and

time on your part. Thanks for carving out some to join us here. If you are new to this, make sure you hit subscribe because we have some interviews coming up. In fact, Friday morning, a UK scholar, Richard Bauckham, is going to come on and talk about the evidence for Jesus and the eyewitnesses. And it's nine in the morning because that's five o'clock in Britain. And he makes one of the most powerful cases that the biblical writers in the New Testament, the Gospels in particular, are eyewitnesses. So believer or skeptic, we'd love to have you join us. And this channel is brought to you by Biola Apologetics. So if you're interested in getting a certificate program, to have somebody walk through formally with you how to study apologetics.

And part of it, we have theology on angels and demons, etc. Or if you thought, you know what, I'm interested in getting a master's, take a look at the description below. We would love to help partner with you to train you for your own understanding, if you want to be a writer, for your church, for your studies, to really learn and know apologetics better. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope as many of you as possible can join us Friday morning with Richard Backeman, another one of my favorite scholars. But again, Dr. Michael Heiser, can't thank you enough for coming on.

Don't disappear. I want to thank you personally. But to the rest of you, we will see you very, very soon. Thanks for joining us.