A Risky Move THE UNSEEN REALM Could Have Avoided and Still Made the Same Point

For sure Michael S. Heiser's The Unseen Realm is an eye opener and a thought-provoking book since almost none of us has been taught what is argued in the book: first, that God regularly holds councils—attended by the sons of God—to decide what will happen on earth (Ps. 82:1, 89:7); second, that God assigned them to govern the seventy nations that emerged from his judgment of the builders of the tower of Babel; and third, that these sons of God, after turning rogue against God, became the gods of the nations. Heiser backs up these claims with a masterful handling of several strange scriptures that most of us have never bothered to consider.

But here lies a potentially significant problem. Heiser's approach can leave the impression that many of Israel's central theological concepts were not received by divine revelation but were adapted from surrounding pagan cultures. While Heiser rejects that conclusion, some of his arguments seem to move uncomfortably close to it.
This observation hinges on his repeated claims that major ideas, if not exact wordings, of the Hebrew biblical writers were "taken out of [the] literature" of the Ugaritic people, their pagan neighbors to the north, whose texts were produced in the 13-12th century BC.
The list includes the very concept of divine council, which for Ugarit, was led by its chief deity El, whereas for Israel, it was Yahweh. The number of the sons of El in Ugaritic literature was 70, matching the number of nations listed in Genesis 10, the exact number needed for Yahweh to assign His sons to rule the newly christened nations numbering 70. In describing where El dwelt, one Ugaritic text speaks of the “height of the north,” a phrase that also appears in Psalm 48:2 in reference to Yahweh. The expression “Yahweh is riding on a swift cloud” in Isaiah 19:1 is not original either: it is drawn from Ugaritic texts in which the god Baal (coruler of El)  is called “the one who rides the clouds,” which eventually became an official title of Baal.  

Now, what Heiser, who upholds, in his own words, “the uniqueness of the God of the Bible” and “the deity of Christ,” claims here is not new.  Theological liberals, who uphold neither, have long embraced an evolutionary view of religion. In the case of Israel, they argue that Israel absorbed religious ideas and motifs from its pagan neighbors and then recast them as revelations from Yahweh, ultimately going from polytheism to a distinct monotheistic identity — one true God above all other gods.

Yet despite rejecting the evolutionary model, Heiser's explanation can overlap with it when Israel's biblical authors are said to appropriate pagan concepts in order to “steal glory from Baal” and restore it to Yahweh. In fairness, Heiser’s assertion of Israel “siphoning off” pagan sources is methodologically similar to the apostle Paul quoting pagan writers. Paul openly acknowledged doing this, writing, “one of their own prophets has said” (Tit. 1:12) and “as some of your own poets have said” (Acts 17:28). At first glance, if we accept the latter as part of what Inspiration entailed, should we not accept the former?

Ultimately, however, what Paul does to contextualize his gospel message with pagan audiences in mind and what Heiser says Israel's writers did in producing sacred Scripture is not the same. With Heiser’s claim, two larger issues loom: when was the Pentateuch first written and, depending on your answer, Mosaic authorship may no longer be tenable. Well aware of this, Heiser says, “The issue of the Mesopotamian contexts for much of Gen 1-11 naturally relates to the debate over Mosaic authorship of the Torah.”  

Note that responses to these matters are tied to when the Exodus took place. “While conservative scholars debate an ‘early’ and ‘late’ date for Exodus (fifteenth century or thirteenth century B.C.), all but the most skeptical scholars agree that the Israelites were in Canaan by the year 1208 B.C.” (Miller 1998:48-49). Mosaic authorship of the Torah fits more naturally with an early date for the Exodus than with a later one.

But if the assertion that Israel was excerpting material from Ugaritic texts—however lofty the motive—is correct, then someone other than Moses likely wrote much of the Pentateuch, including Genesis 10–11, where, as said earlier, the seventy nations correspond remarkably to the seventy sons of El in Ugaritic literature, since Moses could not have drawn from texts composed after his death.

This doesn’t seem to bother Heiser, who asserts that the Hebrew writers “put the finishing touches on the Old Testament during the exile in Babylon” in the 6th century BC. But connecting Og, the giant king defeated by Israel, with Marduk, Babylon's chief deity, strikes me as more than a mere editorial finishing touch. If such interpretive moves are necessary to understand the final form of the text, they suggest a significant theological contribution by later writers.
This is to say, challenging Mosaic authorship is not a claim that should be accepted lightly, especially since Jesus appears to have assumed Mosaic authorship of the Torah (Jn. 5:46–47; Mk. 7:10).

That said, I am going to propose an alternative way of understanding who or what came first, and I am going to use one story found in Genesis, the flood account, which Heiser does accept as historical, albeit as a local, not universal phenomenon.

Biblical commentators have long noted that flood stories appear not only in the ancient Near East but all over the world. In the Akkadian Empire, a millennium before Israel, Enlil sends a flood because humanity is too noisy.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim survives a flood by building a boat and releasing birds to test whether the waters have receded. The parallels to Noah are obvious.
Similar traditions appear worldwide. The Chickasaw people in Oklahoma preserve a story of a great flood in which one family survives alongside representative animals. When the waters recede, a raven brings part of an ear of corn, and the Great Spirit instructs them to plant it. The similarities are striking.

So how do such stories arise in cultures with no contact with one another?
My answer is simple: as Scripture indicates, humanity was once centrally located. A catastrophic flood occurred, leaving such an impression that survivors retold it in different cultural forms as they spread out. Notably, the Tower of Babel — the dispersal of the nations — comes after the flood. It makes sense that the flood story traveled outward with the people and took on various expressions over time. We see similar patterns in other cultural motifs across unrelated nations.

If this explanation is plausible for flood traditions, it may also be plausible for other shared motifs in the ancient world like divine council.

I share this to say: why should we assume Israel borrowed these ideas from its pagan neighbors? The direction of influence may just as plausibly have run the other way, or both traditions may preserve memories inherited from a common source—perhaps an oral tradition dating back to before the dispersion of the nations.

Understood this way, Heiser's insights can enrich our understanding of the biblical text without requiring us to weaken the integrity, originality, or divine inspiration of Scripture.