Let’s stop pretending the Bible is a clean, polished monument to monotheism. It isn’t. It never was. You crack that thing open with a little historical awareness and suddenly you’re staring at a cosmic board meeting, a full room of divine beings, all leaning over the conference table while Yahweh plays chairman.
Yeah, you heard me.
The Bible has a pantheon.
A divine council.
A whole damn squad of supernatural office workers.
And I know the church hates that. They slap duct tape over the leaks and hope nobody notices. But Grumps notices. And now you’re going to notice too.
Because once you see the divine council, you can’t unsee it. And the whole “There is only one God!” narrative falls apart like a cheap church pew under a heavy tither.
Let’s walk through the wreckage.
The Bible Was Born In a Pantheon, Not a Vacuum
Christianity loves rewriting history. The faith markets itself like it sprang fully formed from Mount Sinai with a glowing “One God Only” sticker attached. But that’s myth wrapped in marketing wrapped in delusion.
The earliest layers of Israel’s religion weren’t monotheistic. They weren’t even close. They were henotheistic, loyalty to one god while fully acknowledging the existence of others.
The ancient Israelites lived shoulder-deep in a mythic swamp shared by every civilization around them. The gods weren’t metaphors. They were part of the landscape.
Do I need to remind you that the Ten Commandments start with “No other gods before me”?
Not “There are no other gods.”
“Don’t put them ahead of me.”
You don’t warn people about imaginary competition.
Unless, of course, the competition was real.
The Divine Council: Adonai’s Cosmic Co-Workers
The divine council isn’t a fringe theory. It’s the backbone of ancient Near Eastern religion, and the Bible echoes it line for line.
The Canaanite pantheon, uncovered in the Ugaritic texts, came with a ready-made divine hierarchy:
- El, the supreme god, Ancient of Days
- Asherah, the mother goddess
- The seventy sons of El, each ruling over a nation
- Baal, the storm god, a major player
And what do we find in the Hebrew scriptures?
- El.
- Asherah.
- Sons of God.
- Host of Heaven.
- Divine assembly.
Israel didn’t invent monotheism. Israel inherited a pantheon and gradually edited it into something else.
A lot like someone inheriting their uncle’s decrepit Ford and slapping a “Brand New Car” sign on it.
Genesis: The Bible Accidentally Leaves the Mic On
Christians love Genesis as if it’s the ultimate statement of God’s singular power. But look what it actually says when you stop translating it through Sunday School goggles.
Genesis 1:26
Let us make man in our image.
Plural. Not poetic. Not symbolic. Not the Trinity. The Trinity wouldn’t exist for another millennium. These are divine beings being addressed. A council.
Genesis 3:22
The man has become like one of us.
Knowledge of good and evil was divine knowledge shared by the whole council. Angels don’t have this status. Only gods do.
Genesis 11:7
Let us go down and confuse their language.
Again plural. Again divine council. Again ignored by theologians like it’s an embarrassing family secret.
The writers weren’t hiding anything. They assumed everyone knew the supernatural ecosystem they were working with. Only later editors got squeamish and tried to retrofit monotheism onto texts that clearly predate it.
Deuteronomy 32: The Smoking Gun the Church Hopes You Never Read
Let’s talk about the verse that breaks Christianity’s entire narrative over its knee like Bane crushing Batman.
The oldest manuscripts say:
When the Most High divided the nations,
He set their boundaries according to the number of the sons of God.
Adonai’s portion was Israel.
This means:
- The Most High (El) divided the world.
- His divine sons got nations as their jurisdictions.
- Adonai got Israel.
That’s a pantheon.
Not an allegory.
Not angels.
Not metaphors.
Real gods with territories.
Later Jewish editors panicked and changed it to “sons of Israel” to erase the divine council. But the Dead Sea Scrolls preserved the original reading, and the Septuagint kept the older version too.
This is where I tell you the part preachers hope you never learn:
Israel’s god wasn’t originally the highest god.
He got promoted later.
Heaven’s Board Meeting Scenes the Church Never Quotes
Psalm 82
God stands in the assembly of El.
He judges the gods.
That’s not figurative language. That’s Adonai bossing around the other gods about how poorly they’re running their nations.
Job 1–2
The sons of God present themselves.
The satan shows up and clocks in.
Not fallen angel.
Not cosmic enemy.
Just an employee in the divine bureaucracy.
1 Kings 22
Adonai asks the heavenly host who wants to go deceive a king. A spirit volunteers.
This is the Bible.
Not Greek myth.
Not Marvel Phase 13.
This is the stuff sitting quietly between your Psalms and your Proverbs.
When Monotheism Finally Shows Up, It’s an Act of Theological Panic
Monotheism doesn’t appear until the Exile. That’s when you get the insecure declarations:
Before me no god was formed.
I am God and there is none beside me.
That’s not confidence.
That’s propaganda.
It’s what you shout when the competing gods won in war and you’re trying to rally morale.
Monotheism wasn’t the starting point.
It was the coping mechanism.
And to solidify it, editors had to transform the old pantheon into:
- angels
- demons
- metaphors
- poetic devices
- “figures of speech”
Anything except what they originally were: gods.
Why This Matters: Religion Runs on Pretending
If the Bible wasn’t monotheistic from the beginning, then Christianity’s whole foundation starts wobbling like a cheap card table.
Because if Adonai once sat among peers, then he’s not omnipresent, omnipotent, or eternal.
He’s a character who changed across time.
An edited figure.
A politically promoted deity.
And that means the Bible isn’t divine revelation.
It’s a scrapbook of evolving mythologies; stitched together, reinterpreted, scrubbed, re-scrubbed, all to keep up appearances.
The divine council is the fossil record of Israel’s original religion.
Once you know how to read the strata, you can see every evolutionary layer.
Grumps’ Final Verdict
The Bible isn’t the story of one perfect God ruling alone. It’s the story of a pantheon being downsized over centuries until only one deity was left standing and everyone else was demoted to angelic interns.
The divine council is the Bible’s smoking gun, sitting right there in your translation, daring you to notice it.
And here’s the fun part:
Once you realize Adonai was never alone, you’re finally free to see the scriptures for what they are:
- Myth.
- History.
- Politics.
- Poetry.
- Power plays.
Human imagination in cosmic clothing.
Religion hates that clarity.
Further Reading
So you want to go deeper. Good. Most people hit a little religious turbulence and bail out like a Baptist in a brewery. But if you’re the kind who likes ripping the wallpaper off sacred narratives to see the mold underneath, here’s the library starter pack.
These are the scholars, books, and resources that lay out the divine council, Canaanite religion, Israel’s mythic evolution, and the messy editorial history that turned a pantheon into a monotheistic PR campaign.
1. The Ancient Near Eastern Foundations
Mark S. Smith – The Origins of Biblical Monotheism
The book that makes pastors cry. Smith shows how Israelite religion evolved out of Canaanite polytheism, with Yahweh absorbing El’s identity and the divine council shrinking over centuries. Heavy scholarship, but a must-read.
Mark S. Smith – The Early History of God
If you want the clearest breakdown of how Yahweh went from a regional storm god to the One God, this is the one. Shows exactly how the divine council worked and how its members got demoted.
John Day – Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan
A brutal, clear-eyed look at how Israelite religion did not start monotheistic. Covers Asherah, Baal, El, and the whole Canaanite family tree the Bible tries to hide.
2. Ugaritic Texts and Canaanite Mythology
The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (translated by Mark S. Smith and Wayne Pitard)
This is the closest thing to reading Yahweh’s older cousins. The language and structure mirror the Hebrew Bible so perfectly you’d think you were reading an early draft.
Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (NIVC series)
El, Asherah, council scenes, Baal’s rise, divine bureaucracy. This is the primary source material that exposes the shared religious DNA.
KTU (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit)
The full corpus of Ugaritic texts. Raw, academic, and absolutely devastating to the idea that Israel’s theology was unique.
3. Divine Council Scholarship
Michael S. Heiser – The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature
Heiser personally believed in the Bible, but his academic work admits the obvious: the divine council is everywhere in the text. His research is clean; his theology is not.
Patrick D. Miller – The Divine Council in the Hebrew Bible
One of the definitive academic articles mapping council scenes across the biblical text. A sober, methodical, scholarly demolition of simplistic monotheism.
4. Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Biblical Text Layers
James C. VanderKam – The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible
Shows how older versions of the text preserve the sons of God language the later scribes tried to erase. Crucial context.
Emanuel Tov – Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
If you want to see where the edits happened, this is the scalpel.
5. Israel Before Monotheism
Thomas L. Thompson – The Mythic Past
A wider survey, but essential for understanding how Israel’s stories reflect myth more than history.
Niels Peter Lemche – The Israelites in History and Tradition
Breaks down the archaeological and textual gaps that reveal how Israel’s early religion formed.
6. Comparative Mythology and Cognitive Science
Bruce Lincoln – Theorizing Myth
Shows how myths evolve, consolidate, and get repackaged as history, including biblical material.
Pascal Boyer – Religion Explained
Not about divine councils specifically, but essential for understanding why humans invent gods, councils, and cosmic hierarchies in the first place.
7. The Primary Sources Themselves
If you have the spine for it, read the texts raw:
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Hebrew Bible (with critical apparatus): BHS or BHQ
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Septuagint (LXX) – Rahlfs-Hanhart edition
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Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran sectarian texts)
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Ugaritic texts (KTU editions)
Nothing beats seeing the plural gods with your own eyes instead of through a Sunday morning filter.
8. Articles and Essays That Hit the Nail on the Head
Patrick D. Miller, “Cosmology and World Order in the Old Testament”
A perfect survey of Israel’s mythic worldview.
Joel S. Burnett, “A Reassessment of the Baal Cycle”
Shows how biblical writers reused Canaanite narrative structures.
Mark S. Smith, “The Divine Council in the Hebrew Bible” (various articles)
Smith owns this field. His papers make the council undeniable.
If You Want to Burn Your Old Theology to Ashes
Start with:
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Smith’s The Early History of God
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Heiser’s academic dissertation
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The Ugaritic Baal Cycle
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VanderKam on the Dead Sea Scrolls
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1 Kings 22, Psalm 82, Job 1–2, Deut 32:8–9 (DSS version)
Read those five things and you’ll see the divine council staring at you like it’s been there all along.
The Bible didn’t start monotheistic.
It became monotheistic.
And the divine council is the evidence trail the editors forgot to shred.
