Unit 10 · The Gods of the Nations

Before printing presses, every book was copied by hand. A copy written by hand is called a manuscript. The word comes from Latin words for "hand" and "written." The people who made copies were called scribes. They wrote with ink on animal skin or on papyrus, a paper made from reeds.

No one has the first copy of any book of the Bible. Those first copies wore out long ago. What survives are later copies, made from earlier copies. Scribes worked very carefully. Still, a tired eye could skip a line or swap one word for a similar one. Sometimes a scribe changed a word on purpose to make the meaning clearer.

A place where manuscripts do not agree is called a variant. Most variants are tiny, like a spelling change. A few change the meaning. Scholars who compare manuscripts to learn what a text first said practice textual criticism. Here "criticism" means careful judging, not complaining. Every modern Bible translation depends on this kind of study.

Open almost any printed Hebrew Bible today and you are reading the Masoretic Text. It is named for the Masoretes. They were Jewish scribes and scholars who worked from about 500 to 1000 CE, mostly in Tiberias, a town in Galilee, and in Babylonia.

The Masoretes did not write a new text. They guarded an older one. Hebrew was written with consonants only. The Masoretes added small dots and marks for vowels, so readers would say each word the traditional way. They also added notes in the margins that counted letters and words, to help later scribes copy exactly.

Two famous copies come from this work. The Aleppo Codex was written in about 930 CE. The Leningrad Codex was finished in 1008 CE and is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible that survives. A codex is a book with pages, not a scroll. Most modern translations, Jewish and Christian, use the Masoretic Text as their main base.

In the 200s BCE, many Jews lived in Alexandria, a large city in Egypt. Their daily language was Greek. Jewish scholars there began translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. They started with the Torah, the first five books. Other books followed over the next two centuries or so.

This Greek translation is called the Septuagint. The name comes from the Latin word for seventy. An old story, told in a text called the Letter of Aristeas, says about seventy scholars made the translation. Scholars often write it with the Roman numerals LXX, which means seventy.

The Septuagint matters for two reasons. First, it was the Bible of many Greek-speaking Jews, and later of the early church. Writers of the New Testament often quote it. Second, the translators worked from Hebrew copies much older than the Masoretic codices. Where the Greek differs from the Masoretic Text, it can be a clue that the translators’ Hebrew copy read differently. In 1844 Lancelot Brenton published an English translation of the Septuagint, so English readers can compare the Greek too.

After the first scrolls reached scholars in 1947, the search spread. Bedouin searchers and archaeologists combed the cliffs near Qumran, an ancient site by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 they had found writings in eleven caves. Cave 4, found in 1952, held the most, but mostly in small, broken pieces.

Together these finds are called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars count roughly 900 different manuscripts, though exact counts vary. They were copied between about 250 BCE and 70 CE. The dry desert air kept the leather and papyrus from rotting away.

About a quarter of the manuscripts are books of the Hebrew Bible. Every book appears except Esther, at least in pieces. Other scrolls are rules for a Jewish community, prayers, commentaries, and books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Many scholars link the scrolls to a Jewish group called the Essenes, but others think the scrolls came from several places.

Scholars first compared the Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1 with the Masoretic Text of Isaiah. The two were about a thousand years apart. Yet they matched closely, apart from spelling and small differences. This showed how carefully scribes had copied the text.

Other scrolls surprised scholars. Some biblical scrolls agree with the Masoretic Text. Some agree with the Hebrew text the Septuagint translators seem to have used. Some agree with neither. So before about 100 CE, more than one form of some books was in use. The Hebrew text had not yet settled into a single form.

This gave textual critics new evidence. When the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text, a Hebrew scroll sometimes sides with the Greek. That shows the Greek was not just a loose translation. It was following a real Hebrew reading. Deuteronomy 32:8 is one well-known example.

Deuteronomy 32 is a long poem called the Song of Moses. In the story, Moses teaches it to Israel near the end of his life. The poem looks back over Israel’s history. It praises God as faithful and warns the people not to turn to other gods.

Verses 8 and 9 go back to the distant past. They say that the Most High divided the nations and gave them their inheritance. He set their borders. Then verse 9 says that the LORD’s own portion is his people, Jacob. Jacob is another name for Israel. The Most High is a title for God.

The key words come at the end of verse 8. In the Masoretic Text, the borders are set "according to the number of the sons of Israel." The King James Version (1611) followed this reading, as did many translations after it. Jewish readers long noticed a link here. Genesis 46:27 says seventy members of Jacob’s family went down to Egypt.

Now open the Septuagint to the same verse. The first part matches: the Most High divided the nations and set their borders. But the ending is different. Most Greek manuscripts say the borders were set according to the number of the "angels of God." A few Greek manuscripts say "sons of God."

Why would a translator write "angels of God"? Many scholars think the translators’ Hebrew copy said "sons of God." In the Hebrew Bible, "sons of God" can name heavenly beings, as in Job 1:6 and Job 38:7. So a translator might explain the phrase for Greek readers by writing "angels."

Now there are two readings. "Sons of Israel" points to a people on earth. "Angels" or "sons of God" points to beings in heaven. Those two ideas are very far apart. For a long time, some scholars thought the Greek was just a free translation. A small piece of leather from Cave 4 would change that discussion.

Scholars give each scroll a short label. The label 4QDeut-j means: Cave 4, Qumran, Deuteronomy, copy j. This copy is about two thousand years old. Only pieces survive. One piece holds part of Deuteronomy 32:8, and there the Hebrew reads "sons of God."

This reading matters. It is in Hebrew, not Greek. So it shows that a Hebrew copy of Deuteronomy really did say "sons of God." It supports the idea that the Septuagint translators had a Hebrew copy like this in front of them. Scholars of many different views agree that the scroll reads this way. They differ on what the reading means.

Many modern English translations now follow the scroll here, not the Masoretic Text. The English Standard Version (2001) reads "sons of God." The New Revised Standard Version (1989) reads "gods." Other translations, such as the King James Version and the Jewish Publication Society’s translations, keep "sons of Israel," often with a note.

How did one verse end up with different words? Many textual critics think "sons of God" came first. Later, they suggest, a scribe changed it to "sons of Israel." The phrase "sons of God" might have seemed to give other heavenly beings too much honor. Changing it would protect belief in one God. This idea is a scribal change made on purpose.

Other readers defend the Masoretic reading. They point to a pattern of seventy. Genesis 10 lists about seventy nations after the flood. Genesis 46:27 says seventy of Jacob’s family went down to Egypt. So the nations’ number matches Israel’s family. Early Jewish teachers and the medieval commentator Rashi read the verse this way.

Researchers who favor "sons of God" often point to Ugarit, an ancient city in Syria. Its clay tablets speak of the seventy sons of the god El and his wife Athirat. Mark S. Smith, in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001), read verses 8–9 as an old picture: the Most High gives each of his sons a nation, and the LORD receives Israel. Michael Heiser also accepted the scroll reading. But he argued that the Most High and the LORD are the same God in these verses. The debate is still active.

Genesis 11 tells of the tower of Babel. People build a tower to reach the heavens. God scatters them and confuses their language. Genesis 10, placed just before it, lists the nations that spread across the earth. Deuteronomy 32:8 also speaks of the Most High dividing the nations. Many readers, ancient and modern, link the two passages.

Deuteronomy 4:19–20 adds a second clue. There Moses says the sun, moon and stars were allotted to all the other peoples. But the LORD took Israel out of Egypt to be his own people. Some scholars read this as the same picture as 32:8–9. Others read 4:19 simply as a warning against star worship. Later Jewish writings speak of seventy angels for seventy nations.

Michael Heiser gave this picture a name: the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. A worldview is a set of big ideas people use to make sense of everything. In The Unseen Realm (2015), he argued that at Babel God handed the nations to lesser heavenly beings, the sons of God. Then God began again with Abraham in Genesis 12. Other scholars accept parts of this picture and question other parts.

Later in the Song of Moses, Israel turns away from God. Deuteronomy 32:17 says they sacrificed to shedim, not to God. They were gods Israel had not known before, new ones that had come along recently. The King James Version translates shedim as "devils." Many modern translations say "demons."

The Hebrew word shedim is rare. It appears only here and in Psalm 106:37. It seems related to a word for protecting spirits in Akkadian, a language of ancient Mesopotamia. The Septuagint translates it daimonia, spirit beings. So many scholars think the writer meant real powers behind the nations’ worship, not just wood and stone.

Other readers take the passage differently. Isaiah 44 mocks idols as blocks of wood that a craftsman carved. Some readers think Deuteronomy 32 means the same thing: the gods were nothing. Other scholars answer that a text can mock the statues and still treat the powers behind them as real. Paul seems to hold both ideas in 1 Corinthians 8:4 and 10:19–20.

Psalm 96 calls on all the earth to sing to the LORD. Verse 5 says that all the gods of the nations are elilim, but the LORD made the heavens. Elilim is a Hebrew word that means worthless things or idols. It sounds a bit like elohim, a word for God or gods. The poet may be making a play on words.

The Septuagint translators chose a different word. In their Greek, the gods of the nations are daimonia, the word that later gives English "demons." So the translators read this verse as being about spirit beings. Scholars use choices like this to learn how Jewish translators read these texts before the time of Jesus.

The New Testament writer Paul used the same idea. In 1 Corinthians 10:20 he warns that sacrifices to idols are offered to daimonia, not to God. His words echo Deuteronomy 32:17. Many Christian readers see Paul as agreeing with the Song of Moses. Other readers think Paul was warning mainly about sharing in idol feasts, not teaching about spirits.

Daniel 10 opens in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia. Cyrus had taken Babylon in 539 BCE. In the story, Daniel is an old man by now. He has spent three weeks mourning and fasting. Then, standing by the Tigris River, he sees a man dressed in linen, shining like lightning. Daniel falls to the ground, but the messenger touches him and tells him not to be afraid.

The book of Daniel has two halves. Chapters 1 to 6 are stories about Daniel and his friends in Babylon. Chapters 7 to 12 are visions. A vision is a dream or sight full of symbols, here about kingdoms to come. Chapter 10 begins the last and longest vision, which runs to the end of the book.

Readers date the book in different ways. Many Jewish and Christian readers hold the traditional view that Daniel wrote it in the 500s BCE. Many modern scholars think the book was finished in about 165 BCE, when the Greek king Antiochus IV was persecuting Jews in Judea. Either way, the vision looks ahead from Persia to Greece. That matters for the princes in the next lesson.

The messenger explains why he is late. Daniel’s prayer was heard on the first day of his fasting. But "the prince of the kingdom of Persia" stood against the messenger for twenty-one days. Those twenty-one days match Daniel’s three weeks of mourning.

Then help arrived. Michael, "one of the chief princes," came to help the messenger. Michael is one of the few angels in the Hebrew Bible who has a name. In Daniel he is always shown on the side of Daniel’s people.

Who is the prince of Persia? He cannot be an ordinary human king. A human ruler could not block a heavenly messenger for three weeks. Also, the verse speaks of "the kings of Persia" as a separate group. So many readers, ancient and modern, think the prince is a heavenly being linked with the nation of Persia.

At the end of chapter 10, the messenger says he will go back to fight the prince of Persia. When he is done, he says, the prince of Greece will come. Greece is the next empire in the vision. In history, Alexander the Great conquered Persia in 331 BCE.

Then the messenger says that no one stands with him in this except Michael, "your prince." The word "your" is plural in Hebrew. It means the prince of Daniel’s people, Israel. Daniel 12:1 says it again. It calls Michael the great prince who stands up for Daniel’s people in a time of trouble.

Put the pieces together. Persia has a prince. Greece has a prince. Israel has Michael. The book never shows a human battlefield here. It shows a struggle in the heavenly realm that runs alongside the rise and fall of empires on earth. Readers have explained that struggle in several ways, as the next section shows.

Start with Psalm 82. God stands in the divine council, the gathering of heavenly beings. He judges the gods for ruling unjustly. They defend the wicked and ignore the poor. In verse 6 God calls them gods and sons of the Most High. In verse 7 he says they will die like humans. Verse 8 ends: God will inherit all the nations.

Now set Psalm 82 beside Deuteronomy 32:8–9 and Daniel 10. If God set the nations under the sons of God, each nation would have a heavenly ruler. Daniel’s prince of Persia and prince of Greece fit that picture. Many scholars of Daniel read the princes as heavenly patrons of the nations. Michael Heiser linked all three passages in The Unseen Realm (2015) and Angels (2018).

One detail matters here. Michael is a prince for Israel, but he is on God’s side. So Israel’s case differs from the other nations. In Deuteronomy 32:9, the LORD himself takes Israel as his portion. Heiser understood Michael as serving God on Israel’s behalf, not as a rival god.

Deuteronomy 32 is not the only old text with rulers over the nations. Other ancient Jewish writers said something like it. Sirach is a book of wisdom written in Hebrew in about 180 BCE by a teacher in Jerusalem. It is in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, and Protestants place it in the Apocrypha.

Sirach 17:17 says that when God divided the nations of the whole earth, he set a ruler over every people, but Israel is the Lord’s portion. The wording sounds very much like Deuteronomy 32:8–9. The writer seems to have read Deuteronomy the way the Septuagint and the Qumran scroll do.

Jubilees is a retelling of Genesis and part of Exodus, written in about the 100s BCE. Copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jubilees 15:31–32 says God set spirits over the many nations to lead them astray. But over Israel God set no angel or spirit. God alone is Israel’s ruler. Books like these show how some Jewish readers understood Deuteronomy 32.

1 Enoch tells a history of Israel with animals in chapters 85–90. In 1 Enoch 89:59, the Lord of the sheep hands his flock to seventy shepherds for a time. Many scholars, such as George Nickelsburg in his commentary (2001), read these shepherds as angels set over Israel during the years of foreign rule.

Later Jewish tradition kept the idea of rulers over the nations. Rabbinic writings, the teachings of Jewish sages collected after about 200 CE, sometimes speak of each nation having a heavenly prince. In Jewish tradition, Michael is often called the guardian of Israel. Some later Jewish writers also count seventy nations with seventy angels.

Many Christians have linked Daniel’s princes to words in Paul’s letters. Ephesians 6:12 speaks of a struggle not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, authorities and powers in the heavenly places. Early church writers such as Origen spoke of angels set over nations. Clinton Arnold, in Powers of Darkness (1992), read Paul’s powers as personal spirit beings, as in Jewish tradition. Walter Wink, in Naming the Powers (1984), read them as the inner spirit of nations and institutions.

Other readers take a different path. Some interpreters have argued that the prince of Persia was a human ruler or official, since sar is a common word for officials. Some modern scholars read the princes as a symbol: a way of saying that history is not out of God’s hands. These readers agree the passage is about God’s care for his people. They differ on the princes.

In Exodus 3, Moses is caring for sheep near Horeb, the mountain of God. He sees a bush on fire that does not burn up. When he turns to look, God calls to him from the bush. God tells him to take off his sandals, because the place where he is standing is holy ground.

Holy means set apart for God. The ground is not special because of its rocks. It is holy because, in the story, God is present there. This idea is called sacred space. Many ancient peoples believed certain places, often mountains, were where gods lived or met people.

Later, in Exodus 19, the Israelites camp at Mount Sinai, which many readers take to be the same mountain as Horeb. The people must not touch the mountain. Moses sets limits around it. God comes down on the mountain with thunder, cloud and fire, and gives the covenant. The mountain becomes the LORD’s own ground, where the people meet him.

Israel could not stay at Sinai forever. So in Exodus 25:8, God tells Moses to have the people make a sanctuary so that he may dwell among them. This was the tabernacle, a large tent that could be taken down and carried. Its inner room held the ark of the covenant, a gold-covered chest.

Later, King David brought the ark to Jerusalem, and his son Solomon built the temple there. The hill of the temple was called Zion. Psalm 48:2 praises Mount Zion as beautiful and the joy of the whole earth. The same verse places Zion "on the sides of the north," in the King James wording.

Scholars have noticed something in that phrase. The Hebrew word for north is tsaphon. Zaphon was also the name of a mountain north of Ugarit. In Ugarit’s Baal poems, the god Baal’s palace stands there. Many scholars read Psalm 48 as giving Zion the honor those poems gave Zaphon: the true home of the true God. Some translations take the phrase simply as a direction.

Go back to Naaman from the chapter story. After he is healed in the Jordan, he says there is no God in all the earth except in Israel. Then, in 2 Kings 5:17, he asks for two mule-loads of earth. He promises to offer sacrifices from now on only to the LORD.

Why soil? Many scholars, Michael Heiser among them, answer that in the ancient world a land belonged to its god. Aram’s land, in this way of thinking, was the territory of other gods. So to worship Israel’s God back in Damascus, Naaman would bring a piece of Israel’s ground with him. He could stand on it, or build an altar on it, as many readers suggest.

Naaman also asks for pardon in 2 Kings 5:18. His king worships in the house of Rimmon, a god of Aram. When the king leans on Naaman’s arm there, Naaman must bow too. Elisha answers only, "Go in peace." Readers have long debated what Elisha meant by that. The story shows Naaman as a person working out how to be faithful far from Israel.

Before David became king, King Saul chased him through the wilderness. In 1 Samuel 26, David sneaks into Saul’s camp at night. He could harm Saul, but he does not. He takes Saul’s spear and water jug. Then from a hilltop he calls out to Saul.

In verse 19, David makes a strong complaint. People have driven him out of "the inheritance of the LORD," he says. It is as if they told him, "Go, serve other gods." David is not planning to worship other gods. He is saying that being forced out of Israel’s land cuts him off from Israel’s God.

Many scholars read this verse as another clue. The land of Israel was the LORD’s portion. Outside it lay lands linked to other gods. So exile from the land meant exile from the LORD’s worship. Other readers see David’s words as a figure of speech: a strong way of saying that he would lose his place at the altar and among God’s people.

In 587 or 586 BCE, the army of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. Many people of Judah were taken to Babylon. This time is called the Babylonian exile. It lasted until the Persian king Cyrus let exiles return, starting in 538 BCE.

Psalm 137 comes from that time of loss. It pictures the exiles sitting by the rivers of Babylon, weeping as they remember Zion. They have hung up their harps. Their captors ask them to sing one of the songs of Zion. Verse 4 answers with a question: how can they sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?

Some scholars read the question as more than sadness. For them, it fits the idea that the LORD’s worship was tied to his land and his temple. Other readers hear mainly grief and homesickness. Many also note that during and after the exile, Jewish life found new ways to pray and study away from the temple. The synagogue, a gathering place for prayer and reading, grew in later centuries.

One reading ties many passages together: Deuteronomy 32, Daniel 10, Naaman’s soil, David’s complaint and Psalm 137. In Michael Heiser’s version of it, the nations belonged to lesser heavenly rulers, while the land of Israel was the LORD’s portion. Holy places and holy ground marked where the LORD had placed his name.

Other readers see it differently. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. In Jeremiah 29:7, the prophet tells the exiles to seek the welfare of Babylon and pray for it. So some readers say the Bible never limits God to one land. To them, the land passages are figures of speech about where Israel’s worship and temple were.

Other scholars suggest a development over time. Mark S. Smith traced one such path in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001). In their view, early Israel’s language about gods and lands came from its neighbors. Over centuries, they suggest, Israel’s writers stressed more and more that there is only one God over all the earth. Heiser disagreed with parts of this view. Readers today can compare the passages and see how each reading handles them.