If you have read more than a couple of things on this site, you have run into two words that get used like everyone already knows them: Heiser and the divine council. You have also seen me say, more than once, that this is “not a Heiser replacement.”
That is a fair thing to be confused by. I have been writing as if you already walked through the door I am supposedly the gateway to. So here is the door itself — what these terms mean, who Heiser was, and why any of it matters for reading the Bible.
The Ancient Near East (ANE)
The Bible was not written to you. That sounds harsh, but it is the single most important thing to understand before you read another verse.
It was written for you, but to people who lived three to four thousand years ago in the part of the world scholars call the Ancient Near East — the region around modern Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Those people carried their own assumptions about gods, kings, temples, the sky, the dead, what a sacrifice did, what a covenant was, why a name mattered. They never wrote those assumptions down, because to them they were obvious — the way you never explain to a friend what a “phone” is.
We don’t share those assumptions, so we fill the gaps with our own — twenty-first-century, Western, individualist — and read a book that was never speaking our cultural language as though it were written last year for people exactly like us.
ANE study is simply the work of recovering what the original audience already knew. When you put those assumptions back, passages you have read a hundred times suddenly carry weight you had been walking right past. That is most of what happens on this site: I am not adding anything to the text. I am trying to subtract the modern lens.
Who Was Michael Heiser?
Dr. Michael S. Heiser (1963–2023) was a biblical scholar with a doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages. He spent his career on a question most pastors quietly skip: what do you do with all the strange material in the Bible? The other gods. The heavenly beings. The “sons of God” in Genesis 6. The giants. The seventy nations. The passages where God seems to be presiding over an assembly of other divine beings.
Most modern teaching either ignores those passages or explains them away. Heiser did the opposite. He took them seriously, read them in their Ancient Near Eastern context, and argued that they are not embarrassing leftovers — they are part of a worldview the biblical authors took for granted and that later Western readers gradually stopped noticing. His book The Unseen Realm (2015) put that argument in front of ordinary readers, and it is the book that reshaped how I read Scripture.
He was not a fringe figure or a sensationalist. He was a careful academic who happened to be willing to look directly at the parts of the Bible most people prefer to keep in soft focus.
The Divine Council
Here is the idea at the center of Heiser’s work, in plain terms.
The Bible presents God as surrounded by a council of lesser heavenly beings — not rivals, not equals, but created beings who serve under His authority, carry out His decisions, and at times rebel against Him. Scripture shows this assembly directly: God “presides in the great assembly” and “renders judgment among the gods” (Psalm 82); the heavenly beings present themselves before Him (Job 1-2); the prophet Micaiah sees God on His throne with “all the host of heaven standing around him” (1 Kings 22).
This is what scholars call the divine council: the heavenly administration God works through. It is not polytheism — there is only one God, uncreated and supreme, and every other being in the picture is created, contingent, and subordinate. But the cosmos it describes is busier and more contested than most modern Christians were taught to picture. Read with the council in view, a thread runs straight through the Bible — Babel, the conquest of Canaan, the showdowns with Baal, the New Testament’s “principalities and powers” — that otherwise stays invisible.
If you want the full inventory of who is in this picture, that is exactly what the Divine Council Inventory lays out.
Why This Is “Not a Heiser Replacement”
When I say this site is not a Heiser replacement, I mean it literally. Heiser did the scholarship. He had the doctorate, the languages, the decades of academic work. I have a library, a method, and a job in IT. I am not trying to be the next Heiser, and I could not be if I tried.
What I am doing is filling a gap he left open. Heiser’s books are dense. His lectures are technical. He wrote for people who already wanted the academic depth. The man sitting in a pew on Sunday — working a job, leading a household, sensing there is more in the text than he is being handed — usually cannot get from where he is to where Heiser is. The on-ramp is missing.
This site is the on-ramp. It is the gateway, not the destination. If you can read Heiser directly — or Walton, or Wright, or any of the scholars who shaped this work — then do. They will take you deeper than I can. My job is just to get you to the door and through it.
If something here serves you, that is gain.
Go deeper