Heiser's plural 'elohim' and divine council mean he secretly teaches polytheism or multiple creators

The charge usually starts from Psalm 82 ("God stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgment in the midst of the gods") and Genesis 1:26 ("Let us make man in our image"), and jumps to: if there's a council of elohim, Heiser must be smuggling in a pantheon of creator-gods alongside Yahweh. Heiser saw that objection coming and answers it directly in chapter 4, titled "God Alone." His point is that elohim isn't an attributes-word, it's what he calls a "place of residence" term. He lists every category the Old Testament actually calls elohim: Yahweh, the members of Yahweh's council, the gods of other nations, demons (shedim), the dead Samuel conjured in 1 Samuel 28, and the Angel of Yahweh. Then he asks whether any Israelite writer really believed the ghost of Samuel and the God of Israel were equals. Obviously not. The word just marks something as native to the spiritual realm, the way "human" covers a genius and a newborn without claiming they share abilities.

From there he states his conclusion in plain terms: "there is no warrant for concluding that plural elohim produces a pantheon of interchangeable deities… that is polytheistic thinking. It is not the biblical picture." He backs it up by cataloguing verses where Scripture calls Yahweh uniquely incomparable (Exodus 15:11, Deuteronomy 3:24, 1 Kings 8:23, Psalm 97:9), the creator of the other council members (Psalm 148, Nehemiah 9:6), and the only one of the group owed worship (Psalm 29:1), none of which is ever said of any other elohim. His own summary line is that Yahweh is "species-unique among all residents of the spiritual world."

On Genesis 1:26 specifically, Heiser reads the "let us / our image" plural as God addressing his heavenly council, not distributing the act of creating among several gods: verse 27 immediately snaps back to singular, "God created… he created," because God alone does the creating. The plural describes shared imaging status between God's human family and his heavenly one, not co-creation. So the popular attack has the grammar backwards: the plural is real, it's just never doing the job critics assume.