The word elohim occurs twice in this short verse. Other that the covenant name, Yahweh, it's the most common word in the Old Testament for God. And the first use of the word in this verse worked fine. But since I knew my Hebrew grammar, I saw immediately that the second instance needed to be translated in the plural. There it was, plain as day: The God of the Old Testament was part of an assembly - a pantheon - of other gods.
I'd always thought - and had taught my students - that any other "gods" referenced int he Bible were just idols. As easy and comfortable as that explanation was, it didn't make sense here. The God of Israel isn't part of a group of idols. But I couldn't picture him running around with other real gods, either. This was the Bible, not Greek mythology.
The explanations I found from evangelical scholars were disturbingly weak, mostly maintaining that the gods (elohim) in the verse were just men - Jewish elders - or that the verse was about the Trinity. I knew neither of those could be correct. Psalm 82 states that the gods were being condemned as corrupt in their administration of the nations of the earth. The bible nowhere teaches that God appointed a council of Jewish elders to rule over foreign nations, and God certainly wouldn't be railing against the rest of the Trinity, Jesus and the Spirit, for being corrupt. Frankly, the answers just weren't honest with the straightforward words in the text of Psalm 82.
I discovered that other scholars had churned out dozens of articles and books on Psalm 82 and Israelite religion. They'd left no stone unturned in ferreting out parallels between the psalm and its ideas and the literature of other civilizations of the biblical world - in some cases, matching the psalm's phrase word for word.
I came to realize that most of what I'd been taught about the unseen world in Bible college and seminary had been filtered by English translations or derived from sources like Milton's Paradise Lost.
- a theology of the unseen world that derives exclusively from the text understood through the lens of the ancient premodern worldview of the authors informs every Bible doctrine in significant ways.
My goal is simple. When you open your Bible, I want you to be able to see it like ancient Israelites or first-century Jews saw it, to perceive and consider it as they would have. I want their supernatural worldview in your head.
But it would be dishonest of us to claim that the biblical writers read and understood the text the way we do as modern people, or intend meanings that conform to theological systems created centuries after the text was written. Our contest is not their context.
Seeing the Bible through the eyes of an ancient reader requires shedding the filters of our tradition and presumptions. They processed life in supernatural terms. Today's Christians process it by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalisms. I want to help you recover the supernatural worldview of the biblical writers - the people who produced the Bible.
