In 2013, an Evangelical blogger, Ben
Stanhope, wrote an article entitled "The
gods of Deut 32.8: An Israelite Pantheon?" Latter-day Saints such as
myself were intrigued by the article as it refutes the common knee-jerk
reaction to plural elohim texts in the Old Testament who claim that mere human
judges are in view. However, as Stanhope wrote:
Traditionally
evangelicals counter the reconstruction described above by doing their best to
demythologize the texts in the Bible which affirm the existence of multiple
gods. They assure us: “Those aren’t gods. Those are human rulers
that the OT calls gods!”
Evangelicals are
losing the debate and we deserve to. Exegetically, the evangelical response has
been as elegant as a shaved gorilla. In
short, I believe it’s driven by 17th century terminology which is detached from
the ANE material.
Let it be noted that, as far as I am aware,
no Latter-day Saint went beyond this, myself
included, and argued that this article “proved” our entire theology and
cosmology. Instead, it refuted a long-standing “counter” by many Evangelicals
to the LDS claim that there are plural elohim in the Bible and that these
elohim are gods, not human rulers/judges. Such agrees with the current
scholarly literature as summed up by the recent Jewish Study Bible where we read: the following on Deut 32:7-9:
Most High,
or “Elyon,” is a formal title of El, the senior god who presided over the
divine council in the Ugaritic literature of ancient Canaan. The reference thus
invokes, as do other biblical texts, the Near Eastern convention of a pantheon
of gods ruled by the chief deity (Pss. 82:1; 89:6-8). Israelite authors
regularly applied El’s title to Israel’s God (Gen. 14:18-22; Num. 24:16; Pss.
46:5; 47:3). [with reference to the variant in the DSS “number of the gods”]
makes more sense. Here, the idea is that the chief god allocates the nations to
lesser deities in the pantheon. (A post-biblical notion that seventy angels are
in charge of the world’s seventy nations echoes this idea.) Almost certainly,
the unintelligible reading of the MT represents a “correction” of the original
text (whereby God presides over other gods) to make it conform to the later
standard of pure monotheism: There are no other gods! The polytheistic imagery
of the divine council is also deleted in the Heb at 32:42; 33:2-3, 7. (The Jewish Study Bible [2d ed; Oxford, 2014], 419)
However, Fred
Anson, a self-professed Mormon Studies ””””Scholar”””””” decided to
embarrass himself on Ben’s blog with the following comment:
Apart from being pathetic, one is reminded of Fred being soundly refuted on LDS using non-LDS sources, such as Christopher Davis' beat-down of Fred on LDS using Joseph Fitzmyer.
For two real scholars' interaction with one another on the LDS understanding of the elohim in Psa 82 (a related text to Deut 32), see:
David E. Bokovoy, "Ye Reall Are Gods": A Response to Michel Heiser concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John