Understanding Deuteronomy’s treatment of the Divine Council
The ways that the Tanakh (Old Testament) was read by followers of Yahweh (Jehovah) over the centuries leading up to the life of Jesus Christ changed over time. Because the early Israelites that wrote their sacred texts had a view of a divine council of heavenly beings, they wrote in such a way as to reflect this view. We read of multiple divine beings all over the Old Testament. We see this in the narrative of the creation with phrases such as “the man has become as one of us,” (Genesis 3.22) as well as in so many other Old Testament stories.
As changes took place in the religion of Israel, the matrix of ideas that dealt with divine beings on a heavenly council, multiple divine beings, a heavenly mother as well as a heavenly father and a divine son- all these ideas moved towards a strict monotheism. This monotheism was solidified in the changes made by what scholars call the Deuteronomist historian. This author reworked material that moved towards a strict monotheism, placing words in the mouth of Moses, “retrojecting” views that he had by placing theological concepts back into the life and character of Moses, Israel and the Exodus. This work is what is known today as the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy teaches a radically different theology, one in which God is not seen, where he is “one” – meaning only one person, where the temple is a single place where sacrifice is to take place and nowhere else. The text of Deuteronomy doesn’t say this, but the implication is that this one location of authorized sacrifice is Jerusalem. I have written about this in other posts. Suffice it to say that by the corrections made of the Deuteronomists came a whole new set of problems. What were later believers supposed to do with all of the texts that Deuteronomy contradicted? Are these texts to be jettisoned? If not, how do we read them?
The solution that scribes, priests, and religious leaders of Israel found was to keep these texts, but to read them differently. Genesis was so critical to the faith of Israel, and all of the passages about Gods, temples and sacred spaces located throughout the land and so forth were all retained, but were seen with a different view.
The “Elohim” and the “Bene Elohim” (Gods and sons of the Gods) were seen not as a multiplicity of divine beings or gods as much as God and his angels. All of the plural views of deity became God and angels. The Deuteronomist historian portrayed God’s wife in absolute negative ways, and their history was totally rewritten. In the words of the editors of the Jewish Study Bible we read the following:
As a broader model for understanding such issues, it would be helpful to view the religion of Israel reflected by Deuteronomy in the preexilic period as in many ways a “Near Eastern” religion. This applies preeminently to the original theology of the text, which, like all religions of its time and place, viewed its god as presiding over a “divine council” of lesser deities (5.7 n.; 6.4 n.). From this perspective, texts like the Shema called for exclusive loyalty to God, without thereby denying the existence of other deities, just as Near Eastern treaties required that a vassal swear allegiance to a single political monarch (6.4-g n.). But once radical monotheism became the Jewish norm in the Second Temple period, under the influence of exilic prophecy, the original “Israelite” view gradually became “foreign” and unintelligible. The Shema could only be understood as affirming the later “truth” of Jewish monotheism. This authentically Israelite religious language seems to have become so alien that the Hebrew text was “corrected” in several cases to bring it into conformity with later Jewish theology (32.8 n; 32.43 n.).
(The Jewish Study Bible, p. 360)