In his essay “’Comparativism’ and the God of Israel,” Robert P. Gordon wrote the following under the section “The Conciliar God,” on the topic of the Divine Council in the Old Testament. Do also note that also presents a theology of God that is antithetical to Classical Theism, such as God thinking and deliberating, as well as not possessing exhaustive foreknowledge:
In
the Old Testament, prophets not only witness but may on occasion take part in
the Divine Council. Micaiah is merely a spectator in relation to the curious goings-on
that are described in 1 Kings 22. Isaiah, on the other hand, not only
interrupts the proceedings of the heavenly court with his confession of
uncleanness, but also offers his services as messenger and seeks clarification
as regards the time-range of the message that he is to announce (Isa. 6:1-13;
esp. vv. 5, 8, 11). Those who revocalize וֽאָמַר (“And he [or ‘one’] said”) in Isa. 40;6 to וָאֹמַר (“and I said”; cf. 1QISa, LXX) envisage prophetic
participation in the proceedings of a Divine Council meeting at which an anonymous
figure in the Isaiah tradition is commissioned with a message for the returning
exiles. Zech. 3:5, as pointed in the MT, has the prophet contribute a sentence
to the proceedings when he asks that a clean turban be placed on Joshua the
high priest’s head.
A
different level of engagement is represented in the visionary experience of Amos
7. There is no direct mention of the Divine Council here, except the possible
hint in וָאֹמַר
(“and I said”) in the first two visions (vv. 2, 5). Indeed, it would hardly be
possible to have a conventional Council session in these two visions, since
they incorporate acted out judgment upon Israel, in the locust attack on the
crops and the destruction of the land by fire (vv. 2, 4). Nevertheless, it is
difficult to divorce the Amos visions from the world of the Divine Council. If
not Amos himself, an early interpreters of his sees this kind of experience as
God’s revealing of his plan (סוֹד) in his prophet-servant (3:7); and the point of his previews in
ch. 7 is that they give the prophet the opportunity to intercede on behalf of
his endangered people. Here the God of Israel condescends to being entreated
and even to “repenting” of his decision in a way seldom described for an
Israelite ruler. Certainly. Amos 7 differs in this respect from the typical
king’s council in Old Testament narrative, whether as in 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam),
or 2 Samuel 16-17 (Absalom), or 1 Kings 22 (kings of Judah and Israel). In Amos
7 God is not seeking advice because of his perplexity, but shows himself willing
to have his judgment opposed because of his merciful character.
This
aspect of the divine character is most strikingly apparent in the account of God’s
meeting with Abraham in Genesis 18. Their encounter is not presented as a session
of the Divine Council, and yet there are elements in the story that seem to
point that way. And after all, it is on the basis of Abraham’s intercession for
Sodom in this chapter that he is described to Abimelech in 20:7 as “a prophet”:
“H is a prophet and he will pray for you” (Genesis 18 and 20 are traditionally
assigned to different sources, but the portrayal of Abraham as a prophet if
intercessory accomplishment is found only in ch. 18). What God decides to
reveal to Abraham is nothing other than his סוֹד (“plan”). When it is recognized that 18:17 introduces a flashback
(cf. The Revised English Bible, “The Lord had thought to himself”), it becomes
evident that God’s decision about Sodom has not yet been reached when he visits
Abraham. His “going down to see” is not the taking of the road from Hebron to
Sodom—about which the text has nothing further to say, for only the two
accompanying angels reach Sodom (cf. 18:17, 22; 19:1) (verse 22a then fulfils
its proper function as being a resumptive repetition picking up verse 16 after
the flashback material of verses 17-21)—but, as we would ordinarily expect, his
descent from his heavenly abode to investigate what his human subjects are
doing (“I shall go down and see whether they have done according to the outcry
that has reached me”, v. 21; cf. Gen. 11:5). So Abraham is truly in the
position of a prophetic intercessor whose bargaining takes place before the
divine plan is finalized. The result is the remarkable picture of Abraham the
Hebrew haggling with God over the fate of a pagan city, which might in its
entirety be spared if there were, finally, but ten righteous people in it. In
Genesis 18, then, God is memorably shown as being open to persuasion by a mere
mortal (cf. “dust and ashes”, v. 27).
We
may perhaps hear echoes of the Council in the book of Hosea in the
self-deliberations of God over Israel. There are scarcely any speech formulae
to punctuate the text, and in that respect oracles and soliloquies go seamlessly
on. Something of Hosea’s own perplexities are, doubtless, surfacing in the
divine fretting over Israel. Hosea has stitched his heart on the sleeve of God.
This God has no colleagues or even juniors to whom he turns, no Council where
decisions can be debated. All is happening in the mind of Israel’s God. So he
asks, “What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah?” (6:4); “How
can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?” (11:8). Andersen
and Freedman attribute the seeming lack of structure in Hosea to the
consideration that Yahweh’s self-deliberations occur within the context of the
Divine Council, or even that they represent a state preliminary to the Council
(F.I. Andersen, D.N. Freedman, Hosea: A New Translation with Introduction
and Commentary [AncB, 24], Garden City 1980, 45). So God soliloquizes, and
we hear him debating the pros and cons of the policy that he is hammering out
Only Jeremiah among the later prophets comes close to such a depiction of God
(cf. Jer. 5:7-9). The debating of pros and cons also seems to be a feature of
Hos. 2:4-25 (2-23), and David Clines has written suggestively about this
chapter as presenting, not a sequence of actions, but a series of options, the
last of which is the course that God actually decides upon, viz. forgiving
Israel and loving her out of her rebellious ways (D.J.A. Clines, “Hosea 2:
Structure and Interpretation”). Andersen and Freedman in their commentary
published a year later, and in apparent independence of Clines, view with some
favour the possibility that the first two options in Hosea are discharged in
favour of the third (Andersen, Freedman, Hosea, 263). If so, the
conceptuality of the Divine Council is not too far away. (Robert P. Gordon,”’Comparativism’
and the God of Israel,” in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions: Selected
Essays of Robert P. Gordon [Study for Old Testament Study Series; London:
Routledge, 2016], 193-95)
