The Spirit World in the Old Testament

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to The Table podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook, and I'm the assistant director of the Hendrick Center here at Dallas Theological Seminary, and today we are going to be discussing the spirit world in scripture. Now, I want everybody to understand me and hear me. We are not talking about the spirit world like how we experience it in our day-to-day life. That we actually covered in a different podcast called How Christians Think About the Paranormal. So if that's what you're interested in, pause here, and go over to that podcast. 

Today, we are going to be concerned with the passages and the indications of a spirit world in scripture, particularly the Old Testament and the interpretations that Christians have, that Christians have currently, and maybe even have had historically of those passages. That is where we are headed, and I am so thrilled to be joined by Bob Chisholm, who is the department chair and senior professor of Old Testament studies here at DTS. Bob, thank you so much for joining us. And then we are also joined by John Walton, who is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. Thank you so much, John, for being here as well. 

John Walton: 

Great to be here. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Wonderful. So I think we just need to get started by letting everybody get to know y'all a little bit. How did you all end up interested and really spending your lives in studying the Old Testament, and then maybe if you want to add on how you're particularly interested, or how you got into thinking about the spirit world in scripture? John, let's start with you. How did you get into this gig? 

John Walton: 

So I was raised in a family that was very Bible oriented. So I basically was raised in the Bible. We learned it early. We learned it deeply, and when you're a little kid, that tends to mean that you learn the trivia, and which testament has more trivia? Well, of course, it's the Old Testament, and so I kind of became by default specializing in Old Testament by virtue of that basic, largely unimportant fact early in my life, and so I enjoyed the Old Testament because I had been trained in it in those ways that you are in church and in family. When I went off to college, I didn't know what to major in. I didn't realize that there could be a career in Old Testament academia. I had no such idea of such a thing. And so I thought, "Well, if I'm interested in Old Testament, I could be a pastor or a missionary, but those don't really connect to Old Testament." So the vocational test told me to be an accountant. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh my goodness. 

John Walton: 

And so I majored in economics and accounting in college. It wasn't really until nearly the end of my college career that it suddenly dawned on me that there's an academic field for teaching Old Testament, and the minute I realized that, I'm there. That's what I want to do. That's what I'm born for. That's what I was raised in. That's what I want to do. So at that point, that became my academic interest, and I began pursuing that into graduate work and on. So that's kind of how it happened. You would almost say by accident, but of course there aren't accidents like that, and I feel like when people say, "So how did you go from accounting to Old Testament?" Well, the answer is easy. The book of Numbers, of course. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh my word. Oh, You are set up for that. So I guess we can't really discount kids in quiz bowl and that kind of thing. It could be laying a really solid foundation. 

John Walton: 

Yeah. Right? I mean, it worked for me. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So how did you come to think… And I know, well, actually, you've written very directly on the spirit world. So how did you come to think in that specific area? What was interesting or thought-provoking for you? 

John Walton: 

Well, of course, I've spent a lot of time in the book of Genesis that was, I had courses in it in my graduate work. I wrote my dissertation on the Tower of Babel. I wrote a commentary on Genesis relatively early in my career, and so Genesis was an issue, and so therefore the serpent, and the whole question is Satan there. I got involved in the Book of Job, and of course writing about Satan there, and so that part of the discussion has been pretty much things that I've dealt with for a long time. It was really the influence of my son who pushed me into going further into that and talking about demons in the ancient world and things of that sort. It was an interest of his, and, of course, the book you're referring to, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology, we wrote together. 

When I say, "Wrote together," I'm using that loosely. It's like 90% him, but lots of the Old Testament stuff I provided, and of course I was consulting with him all along the way, and we truly did work together, but lots of the ideas he was generating, and the interest was part of what he was generating. So lots of what I had done within my various fields that fit into that, we brought into it. He had me do an article for festschrift on Demons in the Old Testament and the ancient Near East just because he wanted to use that research, and he said he wasn't going to be able to do it, so I to. So I did that for an article, and then that ended up being a chapter in the book. And so those kinds of things. So it was really my son made me do it, but it was a great project to work on, and I'm really pleased with the book and the ways it pushes the conversation forward. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, it's always helpful to have a father who could just do the academic work that you need done for something else over here. Man, I wish I had that. 

John Walton: 

Although, he's much more critical of my work than I am of his. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, of course he is. That's how it works. What about you, Bob? How did you get involved in Old Testament and how did you become interested in it and thinking even about the spirit world? I'm assuming it's because it's a part of the Old Testament, but what about you? 

Bob Chisholm: 

Well, first of all, I want to say I'm delighted that John was willing to join us today. John is one of my go-to guys on ancient Near Eastern backgrounds, and I'd like to promote his book right here. 

Kymberli Cook: 

There it is. 

Bob Chisholm: 

I frequently use ancient Near Eastern thought in the Old Testament, so thank you John for joining us here at DTS today. We're excited to have you and hear what you have to say. I grew up in a Christian home, and my parents came to faith in their thirties, and so all of a sudden we were in church all the time when I was five or six, and I always enjoyed the stories of the Old Testament, like any little boy would. I mean, who's not going to like Sampson and several others that appear? But I decided I wanted to be a sports writer, and I went to Syracuse University, which has a very good journalism school, and so I was planning on becoming a baseball writer, but about halfway through my college days, I had a spiritual awakening. 

I was already a believer, but I had a spiritual awakening, had a deep desire to study the Bible, and I had a pastor who said, "You ought to go to seminary." And I said, "What is that?" And he explained to me what a seminary was, and he said, "You'll study Greek and Hebrew." I said, "You got to be kidding me. Why?" So I was pretty ignorant about some of the languages and things like that, and then I was interviewing for a job with the Cleveland Plain dealer, and I ended up sharing the gospel with a guy who was interviewing me, and he said, "Young man, when you get as much zeal for news writing as you do for your faith, you come see me," which I think was his way of saying, "You're not getting the job, but I'm impressed." And so I decided I needed to go to seminary. 

So I went to Grace Theological Seminary in Indiana and just planning on studying theology. I just wanted to study the Bible, and I was terrified at the thought of taking Hebrew, but I did really well in it, much to my surprise, and my professor, James Battenfield, he said, "Have you thought about a career in Old Testament studies," and I said, "Well, tell me what that would look like and what that would involve." And I just got really interested in Hebrew. I did well, and then I came down to DTS and just pursued a career in it. I'm not as much of a specialist in this area we're talking about today, as John would be. Most of my academic career, I've been working in the prophets. I like narrative literature, so I've been doing a lot of work in Judges, Samuel, Isaiah, but I've gotten more interested in this spirit world thing. 

Mike Heiser, the late Mike Heiser, who's now with the Lord, I found some of his talks at ETS interesting, and so gradually I got a little more interested in this and started to teach Job and Genesis. And so I find it interesting, and people have a lot of questions about it, and there's some difficult texts, and so I always find those challenging, but that's pretty much how I got interested in it. It comes up in the literature that I'm studying and teaching. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, absolutely, yeah. And actually the reason I wanted to do this podcast is it's for the Sunday school class that I teach. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Oh, okay. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Because we were actually going through a book written by Michael Heiser, and we'll reference the Divine Council at some point in this podcast, but he kind of had that running through a lot of his material, and I got so many questions about it. 

Bob Chisholm: 

You can say that. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And I was like, "I don't really know very much about what's going on here." And so I thought, "You know what? We're doing a podcast, and I'm going to find some people." Well, there you go. That's kind of like what your son did, John. I came, and I found somebody who's going to tell me about it. So I think before we hop into specifically talking about some of the spirit world entities, I think it might be helpful to just ask, and you guys might say, "Well, there's really nothing," but to ask when we're looking at any Old Testament text, but particularly the text that involve the spirit world, which is something that we can't see and seems quite mysterious, is there anything that we need to keep in mind as far as context or the ancient Near East, just anything like that that we need to know about and that the people listening where you would say, "You can't just read what it says on the surface and that's the way it is," or is that the way it is? Who wants to start? 

Bob Chisholm: 

I'm going to defer to John. I'm delighted that he's with us today, and I view my role as supplementary 

Kymberli Cook: 

John. What do you think? 

John Walton: 

So this is something I talked about quite a bit in the book that I just published called Wisdom for Faithful Reading. We're accountable when we view the Bible as having authority, it means we're accountable to track with the authors, not just to do our own thing, and the authors are writing in a language that we have to have accessible to us, either because we learn it or because somebody translates it for us, but they're also writing in a culture. And if we're going to be accountable to them, we have to be accountable to their culture because they are writing within that culture. I like to say that Israelites thought a lot more like Babylonians than they think like us. And that certainly there are things that God was trying to do in them that would differentiate them greatly from the Babylonians or the Egyptians, but still on the main, they thought more like Babylonians than they do like us. 

So my default can't be my thinking. My default has to be ancient world thinking, and then I can talk about how Israel was different, how the Bible shows them to be different, how God wanted them to be different. And so I think that's an important perspective to take that whenever we read scripture, I mean, we've got the general Hermann Gunkel statement, "Context is everything," and that includes not just literary context, but cultural context, linguistic context, theological context. And so if I'm going to be faithful to the scripture and its authority, I need to read it in context, and that includes culture. So that means I can't just read it as me, because I'm modern, western, 21st century, and that's my mindset. If I just indiscriminately read it as me, I'm going to be imposing things on the text that are me, that is not the text, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities for misunderstanding. 

So I want to try to move me a little bit off the table, as hard as that is, to say, "Okay, what about them? What would've they known? What would have they meant?" I've got an author which I believe is speaking intentionally, purposefully, with meaning, and he expects his immediate audience, the Israelites, to understand him, but that all has a cultural setting. I was reading a new book the other day, and one of the characters said to the other in their wild and crazy world, "I just want a 9:00 to 5:00, a white picket fence, a black lab, and 2.5 kids." 

Now, as an American, I read that, and that makes perfect sense. I know he is talking about a 9:00 to 5:00 job. I know he is talking about the kind of house that would reflect kind of an ideal suburbia. I know that he's talking about a black windowed methane lab. Oh wait, no, a dog. And that he's talking about the kind of average level of… That's culture. That's just all filled up with culture, and that's because this is insider to insider, okay? And so we understand it because we're insiders, but yet when we read the Bible, we're not insiders, and we don't like to think of ourselves that way, as outsiders, but we are. 

The insider to insider communication is Israelite to Israelite, and so in that sense, I can't afford not to read it that way, because I'm an outsider. And if they do stuff like 9:00 to 5:00 and white picket fence, I'm not going to know what they're talking about unless I can penetrate their culture. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So specifically when we're- 

Bob Chisholm: 

Can I add something there? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh, sure, go ahead, Bob. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, I totally concur with that. That's why they made us spend so much time working in Akkadian and Ugaritic, et cetera. Right, John? 

John Walton: 

Absolutely. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Long hours working in those texts, but I concur. I'd just like to add a couple of things to what John said. I always emphasize with my students the importance of contextualization. It sometimes is called accommodation, but God reveals truth about himself within a context, and he will speak within that framework. For example, in Genesis, when he creates the world, there's a heavenly ocean. Well, I don't believe there ever was a heavenly ocean, and I don't believe there is one today, but nevertheless, that's the way they thought about it, and so God is willing to accommodate himself. I like contextualize a little better because it makes it a little more proactive on God's part, missiological almost, where God contextualizes his revelation, and another important principle is progressive revelation. 

We can't necessarily project something that's in the New Testament back on the old because there is a progress of revelation that takes place as well. So those are a couple of other elements in that approach to scripture. And of course John was referring to relevance theory. We just pick up on things because we're part of the culture, and I think the great challenge is we try to get back into that world as much as we are able, but boy, there's still gaps. For us there are gaps, and it's hard work sometimes, and it requires a lot of methodological precision. Okay, we've got Egypt, we've got Mesopotamia, and all other areas. How do we methodologically utilize those materials? Do we just assume it's all one big culture, or are there important distinctions to be made geographically and chronologically? And John has a nice discussion of method in the book that I held up earlier, and so those are some other elements that I'd like to mention with regard to what John said. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. And even in the midst of those, of that approach to scripture, presumably there are different interpretations along the way, different… As we're trying to figure out where we are, and what it might be saying, and what black lab, and white picket, and Ugaritic may or may not mean. So when we're looking at the spirit world passages where it seems like there's something else going on or there's direct reference to something going on in that world, what are the major camps of interpretation that we need to be aware of or that would be helpful for people to be aware of, so that they don't think, "Oh, I just read what it says on the surface, and this is what it is, and just go on their merry way. Are there any major camps of interpretation? 

John Walton: 

Well, when you think about the spirit world as it's reflected in the Old Testament, some people take the approach that's more like de-mythologizing. They say, "Oh, demons, that was really just psychological problems, or epilepsy, or this, or that." So they de mythologize. That's certainly one approach. There's another approach which reads from these passages a cosmic battle that's taking place, and day by day angels are fighting with demons right in your backyard, in your living room, and that there's this… And I call that conflict theology. That's what we called it in our book. So you've got the de-mythologizing camp, which is way over on one side, and the conflict theology, which is on the other side where demons and angels are fighting all around us. And so those could be kind of two camps that define the perimeter, but of course there's all kinds of positions in between that can be discussed. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Would you consider either of those, the ends of that spectrum, to be outside of the realm of Christian orthodoxy, or could you even be within Christian orthodoxy and hold to those camps? 

John Walton: 

Yeah, there are Christians who in most every way would be considered Orthodox, who hold both of those kinds of positions. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay, that's helpful, because oftentimes when we talk about the ends of the spectrum, oftentimes you think, "Oh, I shouldn't really want to be there," that kind of thing. It's out of bounds. But that's not necessarily the case here, if I'm hearing you correct? 

John Walton: 

Right. I don't land in either of those camps, but those are… 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's' all right. 

John Walton: 

If you want to survey the landscape, those are some of the things that you would identify. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. Okay. So when we talk about the… let's actually dig into some of the entities in scripture that we see in the spirit world. I think it's obvious we have God, and I'm probably going to move past him pretty quickly, though He deserves a lot, and I probably shouldn't. 

John Walton: 

I don't think we're going to de-mythologize him. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, let's not. Let's not at least on a DTS podcast. What about angels? What do we see? What are some key passages, key areas where it seems like angels are in play? John, do you want to start again? 

John Walton: 

Again, those are our ideas that develop. In the Old Testament, my opinion is that we should take the word fairly strictly, that is that it refers to messengers. That's what the Hebrew term refers to. That's the role that they play. That's the role that they consistently play in the Old Testament, and even when we pick up the Greek word of angelos, it has that same kind of sense at its core, but yet things develop, and eventually it becomes the case, as often so in Christian thinking, that any… Okay, I'm going to use a fancy word here, supramundane, non-human entity would be described as an angel, and that mixes things up a little bit. 

In the Old Testament, I don't think they would've thought as the cherubim or the seraphim as angels. They wouldn't think of the Divine Council members as angels. They're the sons of God. They're not angels, yet even by the Septuagint they're translating sons of God as angels. And so angels takes on a growing definition, at least that's how I've seen it as time goes on. So in Christian theology, we're used to using that category, angels, to talk about all the supramundane entities who are good guys. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. No, really. 

John Walton: 

But that only happens over time. In the Old Testament, it's certainly not that broad. We should not, in my mind, talk about the seraphim or cherubim as angels. They have other roles. They're not messengers. Don't ask that cherub to go deliver a message. 

Bob Chisholm: 

He's sort of a bodyguard, isn't he? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh, no. 

John Walton: 

Yeah, yeah, regardless. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So the cherubs in Valentine's Day, we've missed it all, huh? 

John Walton: 

Right.That's the Middle Ages thing, got all mixed up with Eros. It shouldn't go there. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, to illustrate John's point further, I understand Genesis 3 as you can be like the Elohim, the gods who know good and evil, but if we start throwing gods around in our church, people are going to think we're crazy or polytheistic. So I think we kind of default to angels even though that's not really technically correct with regard to those beings. Agree, John? 

John Walton: 

Agree. 

Bob Chisholm: 

 Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. So let's unpack that a little bit. Let's unpack the good guys in the spirit world that we see in scripture. So I'm hearing you say, "The Seraphim and the Cherubim." Can one of you talk about what you're referencing when you say the Divine Council, and is that the same as the Elohim that you were just talking about, Bob? 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah. I would see the Elohim in Genesis 3 as God is… You know the, "We, us," passages. I don't think that's inner Trinitarian dialogue, or trialogue, or whatever. That's the council. God is speaking to the Council, and so there's a ruling body in the universe headed up by God, and we see glimpses of this council in various places in scripture like I Kings 22, where Micaiah is forced to tell the king what he has seen in a vision, and actually, interestingly enough, and this is I think a good example of contextualization, it's the host of heaven that's up there with God, the host of heaven, which if you study that elsewhere, includes the sun, the moon, and the stars, and they're deliberating. 

In fact, God sets the agenda, who is going to go and deceive him, and then oddly enough, Ha Ruach, the Spirit steps forward, and he has a game plan that is authorized by the Lord, so there's a glimpse of this assembly as well. So it's called different things throughout the Old Testament. I teach a course where I just got a whole list of ways that the assembly is referred to, but it's kind of like a ruling body headed up by God and distinct from God. It's not polytheism, right, John? 

John Walton: 

Correct. So the sons of God in Job, they're gathering together. That's the Divine Council. And in Ugaritic text, the sons of God is the term for the Divine Council, and we have the Divine Council referenced in Psalm 82. We have it referenced even in Isaiah 6. Isaiah has entered the throne room, and the Divine Council is meeting. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Who will go for us. 

John Walton: 

Yeah. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, who will go for us. 

John Walton: 

Who will go for us. There's another plurality in the divine realm, and so, again, as Bob says, contextualization is the key here to read it in its own context rather than impose our later theology on it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And so I think especially when you hear, "The host of heaven," and that kind of thing, at least in my evangelical upbringing, Awana, all of that kind of world, I've always envisioned a bunch of angels. And so to your point that you were talking about earlier, and just to be clear, so that's not what we should necessarily think of, and we don't know much else beyond that there is this ruling body. Is that what I'm hearing? 

John Walton: 

Correct. We were told very little about how they operate, and we see them again in Daniel 7 where the ancient of days is seated on the throne, and the whole court is gathered around him, multitudes, unnumbered gathered around, and so we get this idea of a heavenly entity. Now, maybe I can mention, I'll try to be quick here, but one of the issues, lots of times when we think about polytheism, we think it's an issue of numbers. There's one, monotheism, and there's a bunch, that's polytheism. And that's true, of course, but it's not the most important thing about polytheism. The idea of polytheism is that the gods act and live in community, and the community of the gods is how they do their work. There's jurisdictions. There's roles to play, and the people in the ancient world understood the gods as acting, and living, and being identified in and by their community just like people were. 

And so polytheism was a very natural way for them to think. They viewed themselves as being in community, and so they viewed the gods as being in community. People drew their identity from their community. The Gods draw their identity from their community, and so the Divine Council is an expression of this idea of the gods in community, but Israel has got to do a little bit different thing with it because they've got this idea of one God, only one God is worthy of that title and position, yet he's not a God without community, and so that's an interesting contextual element to it. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, it's a good point. And also at like at Ugaritic there's a hierarchy. There's a high god like El, and then you've got Baal, Yam, and Mot kind of buying for power beneath his authority, but I think his authority is recognized. And then you've got craftsman deities like Kothar. There's a hierarchy among the gods, and I would say the messengers are kind of like go-fors, wouldn't you, John? They're kind of on the perimeter who take messages and things 

John Walton: 

At one level, yes, they are go-fors. Some of the other guys would say, "No, I don't do that," but on the other hand, there is a certain dignity to the messenger role because when they went someplace else, they were to be received and treated just as if they were the person they were represented. That's why with the angel of the Lord, the Malach Adonai that we see in the Old Testament, sometimes suddenly he's speaking first person as God, or that somebody Is bowing down, and that's not inappropriate for the messenger role. They're treated as if they are that person. So it does have that dignity to it as well as your go-for roll 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yes. Because you're representing the one who sent you. That's why David gets so ticked off when the Ammonites mistreat his messengers, cut off half their beard and half their clothing. Yeah, you better treat the… And if I recall, in the Ugaritic text, when Yam's messengers come into the assembly, he's not coming. They're coming as fiery flames, but they're spoken to as if Yam is there. 

John Walton: 

Right. 

Bob Chisholm: 

The one who sent them. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. So those are the good guys. What about the bad guys that we see, particularly in the Old Testament, but in scripture? Walk me through those entities. 

John Walton: 

Well, it's one of the things that I noticed when I first wrote the article on demons in the Old Testament in the ancient Near East, that the Old Testament really does not have a demonology. I did a whole taxonomy chart of the different categories, and where they fit in, and how those categories changed over time, but even a couple of the rare Hebrew words like shedim and se'irim that are sometimes translated as demons really aren't quite that. And so I dealt with that in that book, but that's really a remarkable thing, that whether it's very minimal or non-existent at all, that they have no demonology because they're living in a world that's just replete with demon entities, and that would be that's a very distinctive difference that we see, but of course in Hellenistic Judaism, they adopt all that demonology, and suddenly Jews have a very full demonology represented in Enoch, and Qumran, and all the Hellenistic literature, but that doesn't come from the Old Testament. That comes from the Mesopotamian world, so it's a very interesting phenomenon. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, it is, and sometimes it seems in the Old Testament as if the spiritual enemies are the other gods, the competing gods, and I personally believe that there are spiritual entities, or were spiritual entities behind those gods, and so they're gods from the standpoint of those, but it doesn't mean the Old Testament doesn't say they don't exist. They just can't rival Yahweh. Is that the way you see it, John? 

John Walton: 

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I do in that book you've mentioned so kindly, Ancient Near Eastern Thought, and by the way, there's a new addition that has even more the methodology and some things in it, but in that book, one of the points I raise is that in the ancient world, they don't think of divine existence in terms of metaphysical categories that we tend to do. For them, a God exists when he is capable of acting, and so that's why even in Isaiah it keeps saying, "Well, they can't do this, and they don't do this, and they aren't capable of doing that." If they can't act in a divine way, then for all intents and purposes, they don't exist. So they don't ask that question or address that question in the kinds of metaphysical ways that we would. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I'm going back to something you said, Bob. So if the gods of the other tribes and peoples are the enemies, let's put it that way. 

Bob Chisholm: 

 Well, Baal is an enemy. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, yes. Fair enough. And then I'm also going back to something you were saying earlier, John, about the gods and or the community, basically, of Gods, and that that was represented representative of those specific locations. So the idea kind of a cosmic geography, that there are different spirits assigned to specific physical locations or different gods maybe assigned to different locations, is that a part of what you're talking about, Bob, as far as what you're saying, like- 

John Walton: 

I was all ready to jump in. 

Bob Chisholm: 

No. Yeah, we'll get John involved here definitely. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, go ahead. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Most of that comes out of Deuteronomy 32:8 where there's a textual issue, the Hebrew text. When God divided up the nations, he did so in accordance with the number of the sons of Israel. In the Septuagint, it's the angels of God, and it looks like at Qumran it's the sons of God, it's just sons of God, and so it looks like in the Hebrew tradition and in the Greek tradition, they've interpreted that in different ways, but a lot of people will argue, "Yeah, God delegated authority over nations to members of the council who are sons of God, and he reserved Israel for himself," verse nine of Deuteronomy 32. And then the passages in Daniel come into play with the princes, the Prince of Persia and the Prince of Greece, who are not human princes in those contexts. They're I don't want to say angelic. . 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, well, that's what I was going to ask. So if- 

Bob Chisholm: 

Council members gone rogue is I think what Michael Heiser would say if he were with us today, and there's a battle that's going on. It's not going on in my street right out here, as John talked about that extreme view earlier, but there seems to be some conflict in the heavenlies that has a bearing on what is going on down on the earth. Those are the key passages that I think that come into play in that regard. Right, John? 

John Walton: 

Yeah. I- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Real quick, sorry, I just want to clarify. 

John Walton: 

Yep. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So you're saying that that idea would be the Divine Council and the good guys, apart from those who went rogue, not some kind of community gods that are the enemies, like Baal and that kind of thing? 

Bob Chisholm: 

Well, if indeed you can extrapolate from those texts, then there would be maybe a spiritual entity behind Baal, and he's gone rogue, and Psalm 82 may address that as well. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. Sorry, John, go ahead. 

John Walton: 

Okay, so I probably have a little bit different position on some of those issues. I don't know if I'd be as comfortable calling Baal an enemy of God as an alternative to Yahweh. The reason I back off a little bit from enemy is because I'm not sure that he's high enough pay grade to count him as an enemy. God doesn't feel put off because Baal is somehow challenging his authority. People get confused. So I would just want to nuance that just in terms of yes, he's obviously not just buddy buddy with God. Yahweh is not threatened by him. Yahweh is not at battle with him. He doesn't rank high enough to do that. Is the garden ant my enemy? No, but I might not want them there. So I would wonder about the word, "Enemy," whether that's the best way to describe him, but I get what you're saying. They're certainly not on the same team by any means. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, and Yahweh tells Gideon to tear down the altar in his hometown. 

John Walton: 

Yeah. Sure. Sure. So Yahweh-. 

Bob Chisholm: 

And he does a number on Dagon over in Philistines territory. 

John Walton: 

He does, he does. So again, they are in opposite one another, but again, enemy I take almost as if there's a war going on, and Baal, boy, he's winning some battles, and no, it's not that, but again, that might not have to be included in the word, "Enemy." With Deuteronomy- 

Bob Chisholm: 

Yeah, I see what you're saying John. I see what you're saying on that, yeah. 

John Walton: 

With Deuteronomy 32, I'm very happy to follow the alternative reading that it's Sons of God as in Qumran, but there the differentiation that we recognized and gave voice to was that it talks about it according to the numbers of the Sons of God, but it doesn't go quite as as to say, "And everything was distributed to those numbers." Yes, Israel was reserved for Yahweh, but that still falls just short of saying that the geographical areas were doled out to each of those entities. So again, maybe it's implied. You can certainly read it there. Others have, certainly Michael Heiser has, but again, it's just we tried to reflect that little ambiguity that that's not mentioned. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, that's helpful to know. That really is. So what about the… We've got just a little bit of time left, and it feels very not okay to talk about the spirit world and not reference Satan, or maybe we should. Maybe we should just not reference him, but- 

John Walton: 

I really need to say one quick thing about Daniel 10. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay, go ahead. 

John Walton: 

That is the central passage, and that is the preposition in Daniel 10:13, the Prince of Persia, it's usually, "Resisted me," or, "Stood against me," but that preposition there is always to stand before me. It doesn't suggest conflict. So again, in Daniel 10, we take a little bit different view of that, that it's not really saying what lots of people say with it, but we can't go into that in detail. Let's by all means be Satan's advocates. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what do we see in the Old Testament about either the accuser, the one who stands against God, I mean, however… I don't even know the specific ways. You guys do. What do we see his reference? 

Bob Chisholm: 

He's only mentioned specifically two times, Ha-Satan the adversary. I don't consider I Chronicles 21:1 as referring to Satan by name. I just see the Satan there as a human adversary that the Lord used, if you look at the Samuel parallel, that the Lord used to incite David. Now, that raises all kinds of questions, which we'll have to talk about a different time and place on that. So there's only two references in Job Zechariah. 

John Walton: 

Right. I find it helpful with my students to use two terms separately, Devil and Satan, even though, of course, Satan comes to be a name for the Devil by the time we get into the New Testament, but let's separate those out, Devil as the general job description, Satan as the name of a functionary. Okay? So once we do that, the point that I make is that in the Old Testament way of thinking, in their theology, in their worldview, there is no devil slot. There's no job description for that, and therefore when we read about this character named Ha-Satan, we can't immediately say, "Oh, since in New Testament we use that as a name for the Devil, this must be the Devil." I think that that's a flawed transfer, and so I would say that the Old Testament has no role for a Devil. That is the chief of the demons, who is the highest power in that realm, and sort of dualistically working against God. There is no Devil in their thinking. 

So then we have to redefine Ha-Satan differently. Where does he fit in? And again, we don't find anything that suggests anything but a functionary within Yahweh's system. He's doing the job that's been given to him. He raises an issue about Job, which is a legitimate issue to ask, "Is Job serving God for nothing?" That's a very legitimate question, and Job he does not tempt, he does not possess, he does not deprave, he does not do any of the things that we often connect the Devil with. He does what God gives him permission to do, and to bring suffering on- 

Kymberli Cook: 

So you're suggesting he would be a member of the Divine Council? 

John Walton: 

Possibly. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I mean, again, possibly, yeah. 

John Walton: 

He comes among them. Whether he comes as an outsider or an insider there's dispute about. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. And so going back to what you saying about the- 

Bob Chisholm: 

But I think we need to- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Real quick, Bob. I want to clarify something. So when you said, "The Devil job description," how… Was that a Hellenist idea? Where did that come from then? 

John Walton: 

Yep, we start to see it in Hellenism, Hellenistic Judaism. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay, and where do we see that? 

John Walton: 

Well, we see it in things like the Book of Enoch and Qumran, and also, of course, it probably has roots back into Persian Zoroastrianism where it's a more dualistic approach to things, so it comes out of those contexts. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Okay. Okay. Bob, what were you going to say? 

Bob Chisholm: 

Well, John's view is one view. There is a viewpoint that views the Ha-Satan in Job as a little more of a sinister figure. He may be the prosecutor in the Royal court, but if so, he's more like Inspector Javert in Les Misérables. In calling Job's integrity into question, he's really challenging God's wisdom, and in determining who's righteous, and who isn't, and God does accuse him in 2 of inciting him against Job for no reason, and there are more and more scholars today who are seeing a spiritual warfare interpretation of Job, and I'm thinking of Robert Fyall, who wrote a book 21 years ago where he really tries, because to support John's view, you could make the point that he just disappears. 

The Ha-Satan is there. He does his job, and he's gone, but those who see a spiritual warfare dimension, and really that's more God's answer to Job. There's a spiritual battle going on in the cosmos, and he refers to it in chapter 40 in between the two major speeches, and some of these scholars, Mettinger, there's a whole bunch of them, Gibson, LaCocque, I think Ortlund's new book goes this way, that the Ha-Satan is the reality behind Leviathan when you get to the end of the book, so he hasn't disappeared. So I just want to make the point that there are some scholars who are taking a different view of Job and would see the Ha-Satan as more than just a royal court functionary, but I agree with John. There is no developed view of all this like you see in the New Testament. 

He only shows up a couple times, so it's certainly not developed there, but it may be rooted in those passages. Some of these later texts may be understanding Job that way. Of course, you got to explain the talking snake in Genesis 3. There's something going on there. He's not just a snake, but- 

Kymberli Cook: 

Once again, sinister. 

Bob Chisholm: 

He's not mentioned as Satan, and then, of course, in our circles, the reception history, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are always brought into play, but I don't think Satan is in view at all there, if you read those passages in their context. I think Ezekiel is just referring to a Cherub. The King of Tyre is being compared to the first man. I follow the Septuagint there rather than the MT, and in Isaiah you've got a bunch of pagan kings who are taunting the king of Babylon as he shows up in Sheol, and that's drawing on their own mythology, and so we've got some texts in our tradition that are used to develop this Satanology in the Old Testament that I don't think are being used properly, and I have a hunch John agrees with me there on those. 

John Walton: 

I do. And again, we deal with all of those in this book with my son. 

Kymberli Cook: 

There it is. 

John Walton: 

Yeah, the whole point of this book is to go through all of those passages, and to really parse them out, and deal with them, and granted, as you say, there are different opinions that can be had on them, but those opinions are all different from saying, "This is exactly the same kind of thing as what we get in the New Testament." 

Bob Chisholm: 

Right. Right, and that's the point I was making earlier when I talked about this back reading that goes on. You have to acknowledge that there's progressive revelation, and you can't just take everything in the New Testament and pose it on the old, and that happens in this discussion. 

John Walton: 

It does. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yes, yes, there are lots of thoughts that we could add to that, and we could go down a giant rabbit hole with that, but we won't this time. One final question I just want to ask. So we've been in all of these passages and kind of thinking about these potential cosmic entities and all of that, and so not necessarily in the sense of… I guess to a degree they could be in our living room fighting, but how should this impact how we function as a church, how we live our lives, even just the interpretations of it, and what are the implications of having different interpretations of these things? 

John Walton: 

Bob is looking to me. In the end, I think it affects the whole idea of where our allegiance lies, in whom do we find our hope, in whom do we trust for all of the challenges that we face, whether they're human, the result of human behavior, or larger spiritual aspects, that basically God is the one who reigns, that God is the one who is in control, that God is the one in whose hands history is held, and that therefore we're not supposed to fear. It may be that the devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking to devour, but our trust is in our God, and I think that's the contrast we're supposed to find. I don't think the Bible is trying to give us an authoritative taxonomy of spirit beings in the cosmos. It's trying to get our focus in the right place. 

Bob Chisholm: 

[inaudible 00:48:15]. Yeah, when I teach it, like these Old Testament passages, I always try to interpret them in their context as we've emphasized, but when I'm teaching in the church, you're really doing more correlation at that point in biblical theology where you are tracking the development maybe more, and where it ends up in the New Testament, and so the New Testament does say that there is spiritual warfare, Paul in Ephesians 6, but as John said, we don't have to be fearful because we serve the living God and the risen Christ, and so I always try to emphasize that in my own teaching. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what I'm hearing is that it is important to recognize the existence of this spirit world. The scripture, and particularly the Old Testament in our conversation, does reference it, and there seemed to be mentions that of… What was your fancy $5,000 word, John, Supramundane? 

John Walton: 

Supramundane. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Of the supramundane, that there do seem to be those kinds of things happening, but like you said, John, and you, Bob, that all of it is really to direct our attention to the greatness that is Yahweh, and that we worship him, and that, again, we are not to fear, we're not to serve these other entities or anything else that we might encounter. We're supposed to keep our eyes on him. So gentlemen, I just- 

Bob Chisholm: 

Mhmm- 

Kymberli Cook: 

What? 

Bob Chisholm: 

Easter is coming, so we celebrate the victory of risen Christ. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Indeed. 

Bob Chisholm: 

And Jesus came to destroy the works of the Devil, and he has done that. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Indeed. Well, gentlemen, we are out of time, but I just want to thank you so much for joining us, for allowing me to pick your brains with regard to this topic and kind of really work our way through some of the passages that it seems can either push people into interesting interpretations of the spirit world in our own time, or just think that they know exactly what the Bible is saying, and they might not be taking some of the contextual issues into view, and that kind of thing. So I just really want to thank you, Bob and John, for being here. 

John Walton: 

You're very welcome. 

Bob Chisholm: 

Thank you. 

John Walton: 

It was an enjoyable conversation. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Wonderful. And we also want to thank you who are listening, and we want to encourage you to join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture.