Turnabout is Fair Play

Having given Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible three posts of reviews that some will probably say border on hagiography, I promised to take a few lines to consider the other side of the story, as comparatively trivial in spiritual seriousness as Heiser’s “errors” may be — if indeed such they are.

Turnabout is fair play. Your mileage may vary. Here goes …

Let me start by saying none of these three concerns has anything to do with the basic fabric of Heiser’s divine council worldview. That stands on a soundly scriptural basis, and any speculation it may involve is clearly labeled as such.

In two of three instances, I don’t need to make much of a case. Heiser was actually fighting with himself but didn’t realize it. That is definitely true of our first example, where Heiser inadvertently demolished his own argument elsewhere in his book.

1/ A Non-Literal Leviathan

Binary Thinking

Michael Heiser wanted a non-literal Leviathan in scripture. Perhaps, given his acceptance of at least a very large local flood as literal truth rather than myth, he was anxious not to appear unscientific by positing a dinosaur-like creature capering around in the seas of the very early Old Testament. So he makes this rather bold and unfortunate statement in a footnote to chapter 42:

“Leviathan is certainly not a literal prehistoric sea creature that survived into the time period of the Old Testament. The name is known from other Canaanite literature, such as that of Ugarit, and is referenced in the same ways as we find in the Hebrew Bible. It was a well-known chaos symbol across the known ancient world.”

Michael, Michael, Michael … why so binary? Could not Leviathan be both a literal prehistoric sea creature and a very natural, plausible metaphor for chaos in both scripture and the ancient literature of the Canaanites?

Leviathan rates a mention four times in the Old Testament. In Isaiah, Leviathan is inarguably symbolic, pointing to the enemies of Israel. In Asaph’s Psalm 74, I suspect the intended meaning is similar to Isaiah’s. In Psalm 104, however, this is manifestly not the case. Psalm 104 is about the works of the Lord, including mountains, valleys, springs, wild donkeys, storks, goats, rock badgers, lions — all literal, created things. The psalmist then talks about Leviathan, “which you formed to play in it [the sea]”, which teems with “creatures innumerable”. Why would the psalmist suddenly switch from genuine creatures known to his readers to an entirely mythical being he says (incorrectly, per Michael Heiser) that God “formed”? The question answers itself.

Mystery Beast in the Natural World

Job is much worse. Thirty-two of the thirty-four verses in Job 41 describe a mystery beast you and I have never seen and almost surely never will. The remaining two are about God. Identifying Leviathan to Job as a known creature of his day is an acutely important part of God’s four-and-a-half-chapter dialogue with his servant. We may not need to know what Leviathan was, but Job sure needed to.

The dialogue begins with God and his creation, echoing the first chapter of Genesis, then moves into describing the awesome depths of the sea, the power of big weather, the clouds and finally the constellations — all very real, identifiable parts of Job’s lived experience. From there God moves into a lengthy description of specific, real, well-known animals: lions, mountain goats, wild donkeys and oxen, ostriches, horses and hawks. By the time he gets to Behemoth (late in chapter 40) and Leviathan, God has used nothing but examples from nature that even a modern reader would immediately recognize, as is also the case in Psalm 104. Indeed, God’s entire argument to Job absolutely depends on Job being familiar with the lives and habits of the creatures to which he is referring, if not by having seen them himself, then at least by having heard reliable accounts of them.

The Problem in Job

Here is the problem with a non-literal Leviathan, and it’s Michael Heiser’s problem, not mine: if Leviathan is a fiction, a myth, or just an over-hyped, bad-breathed crocodile, then the entire book of Job is every bit as fictive. What would be the value of describing to Job a creature that didn’t exist, let alone to detail the futile efforts of men to injure him with their weapons if such battles never occurred in the real world? Job would have at very least thought, if not actually said, Hey, wait a sec, I’ve never heard of this crazy creature ...

Leviathan is the culmination of God’s argument to Job. After God finishes, Job is fully persuaded, worshipful and repentant. But without a real-life Leviathan, it simply isn’t much of an argument. Leviathan’s historicity is a requirement. Absent it, God’s argument is every bit as credible as comparing the power of human beings to that of Balrogs, Ents or Glaurung the Great Worm ... except that Job had not read Tolkien.

Even if we were to decide the book of Job is merely the product of some uninspired human author rather than the Holy Spirit carrying along one of his servants, and that Job is a mere character in an ancient story rather than a real person, we are still stuck with more or less the same logical problem: Why would the writer build his storyline argument on nothing but what can be observed by anyone in the natural world, then suddenly make the culmination of that argument all about one or more fictitious creatures? It makes no sense from an authorial perspective, never mind a divine one. Whether it is God’s argument or no, to make it persuasive — let alone conclusive — requires that readers find not just the characters in his story but also his logic credible. Without a known, real-world creature in chapter 41, the tale falls completely flat. And making up a Leviathan from scratch isn’t at all necessary. Substituting a whale, a shark, a hippopotamus or an elephant in chapter 41 would have still been quite impressive while not requiring readers to suspend their disbelief.

Reducing Praise to a Snicker

In principle, Heiser knows there are some lessons a non-literal example cannot teach. He says so most eloquently earlier in The Unseen Realm when arguing for literal elohim other than Yahweh:

“The denial that other elohim exist insults the sincerity of biblical writers and the glory of God. How is it coherent to say that verses extolling the superiority of Yahweh above all elohim (Psa 97:9) are really telling us Yahweh is greater than beings that don’t exist? Where is God’s glory in passages calling other elim to worship Yahweh (Psa 29:1-2) when the writers don’t believe those beings are real? Were the writers inspired to lie or hoodwink us? To give us theological gibberish? To my ear, it mocks God to say, ‘You’re greater than something that doesn’t exist.’ So is my dog. Saying, ‘Among the beings that we all know don’t exist there is none like Yahweh’ is tantamount to comparing Yahweh with Spiderman or Spongebob Squarepants. This reduces praise to a snicker. Why would the Holy Spirit inspire such nonsense?”

Indeed. You tell me. A literal Leviathan is just as critical to our theology as literal non-Yahweh elohim are to Heiser’s own thesis in The Unseen World. I believe if Heiser had had occasion to consider the theological problems with a non-literal Leviathan in Job and Psalm 104, he would have agreed with me.

2/ A Local Flood

Four Weak Arguments

Heiser makes four arguments from the text of scripture for a local flood in a footnote to chapter 23: (1) phrases like “the whole earth” can bear a local meaning, such as “the whole land”; (2) the table of nations in Genesis 10-11 contains only nations in the Near East, Mediterranean and Aegean; (3) the phrase “all humankind” also appears in contexts where it clearly does not apply to all humans everywhere; and (4) Psalm 104:9 appears to forbid a global flood.

The only reason a local flood is necessary to Heiser’s argument about giants after the Flood is that at this point he had only come up with two options to explain their presence in the world later on: (1) a local flood; or (2) the Flood failed to dissuade the errant sons of God from coming back to earth and sleeping with the daughters of Noah’s sons in the generations that followed it, producing more Nephilim. (The latter option is easily dismissed: it is hard to imagine even very determined sons of God repeating an error God had already shown himself willing to destroy his creation to rectify.)

A Third Option

There is a third option Heiser did not consider in the process of writing The Unseen Realm: that Ham’s wife could have carried Nephilim genes into the new world. As far as the records of scripture go, the later Old Testament giants like Goliath were only present among the Canaanites, the descendants of Ham, not among Japhethites or Semites. Why might God have allowed Ham’s genetically-contaminated wife a pass through the Flood? We cannot know, but grace is certainly a possibility we can’t rule out. Or maybe she was an exceptionally nice gal.

It would be interesting to see if Heiser stopped using the local flood arguments after thinking that one through.

In any case, his four arguments from scripture for a local flood are nowhere near as robust as usual. Numbers (1) and (3) do not exclude the possibility of a global flood, they simply allow for the possibility of a local one. Concerning (2), the table of nations includes only nations known to the writer of Genesis at the time he composed it. There is no reason descendants of one or more of these groups could not have migrated to the more distant parts of the earth (China, India, Australia, the New World) later on. As to (4), what Psalm 104:9 is probably saying is that in the natural order of God’s creation, the waters would never again have covered the earth after Genesis 1:9-10. He had set a boundary [gᵊḇûl] for them. The Flood was a deliberate, miraculous exception to the norm (“all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”), which is to say the boundaries God had set in place for them were torn apart.

3/ A ‘Change of Approach’

Concerning God’s plans to bring salvation into the world after the Babylonian exile, Heiser writes:

“The apostasy of his people and their subsequent exile prompted a change in Yahweh’s approach to restoring his rule on earth. He could not depend on humans, though he had pledged himself to humanity’s preservation.”

One does not like to make a man an offender for a word (“prompted”), but the entire paragraph from which I nicked these two sentences is strongly evocative of a God adjusting his strategy on the fly in response to what his enemies were doing. This we know with absolute certainty was not the case. God knew from the very beginning he could not depend on humans to accomplish his will, and he always intended to purchase a people for himself through the agency of his Son. He foretold it long before the Babylonian exile in many ways; the prophetic “mosaic” to which Heiser refers is comprised of all the scriptures pointing to Messiah. If we must talk about when that was decided, Paul writes, “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”

My point is not to re-litigate the old Calvinist/Arminian bone of contention, but simply to note that it was “in Christ” that all this was to be accomplished from the very beginning. God never had a plan to “save the world through Israel” except insofar as Jesus would be born to an Israelite woman and Jews, at least initially, would be foremost in taking that message to the world.

To be fair to Heiser, he knew this too, which is why I think the above paragraph is an unfortunate slip that sailed by an editor beaten into exhaustion from checking thousands of scripture references rather than some kind of calculated denial of divine omniscience. In a beautiful passage earlier in the same book, Heiser cites a story in 1 Samuel 23:1-13 as unmistakable evidence God knows not only what men will do, but what men would have done in circumstances that did not even occur. That is the extent of divine omniscience! Heiser flat-out calls God “omniscient” four times in the book and three times right in this passage about David in 1 Samuel, so he is manifestly not embracing heresy. Our God is the God of the possible as well as God of the actual, and Mike understood that as well as anyone.

As far as the plan of salvation was concerned, it was all Christ, all the time. It always will be. Israel as “God’s son” was simply an exercise in showing his people (and the world) their need for a Savior who could do for them everything they could not do for themselves. The law was a yoke they must come to realize they could not bear.

God knew that when he gave it to them. Moses told them as much.