Sheshbazzar

Oops! I "borrowed" this from others, an "outside" source, and some of "that which I allow not", regrettably remained,
Correction;

spin

Extensively, no. At length yes. There has been little depth to the discussion.

Being among the elohim is clarified in 82:6, when Elohim (82:1a) says about those he is among,

I had taken you for Elohim, sons of Elyon

You are simply not dealing with the passage beyond ovelooking its content. Here it is again:

Elohim stands in the assembly of El;
among the Elohim he renders judgment.

Elohim stands in El's assembly. There is a linguistic diferentiation between El and Elohim. Elohim is in his (El's) assembly.

Fat help some later ancient writer's tendentious adaption is.

How would you know? What you are doing is eisegesis. You need to work with the passage and what it says, then place it in the tradition it historically belongs to. This is the reason I turned once again to Deut 32:8-9. I could also have turned to the Ugaritic corpus of literature in which Baal, who has many of the traits of YHWH, makes his presence felt in the council of El, which is after all on Mt Zaphon, ie the sides of the north, the mountain of Ugarit. The notion of a council or gathering of the gods, elohim, which is presided over by El is the tradition in which the passage belongs. Just as Elohim is a part of the council, so is YHWH in Deut 32:8-9.

This is late monotheistic retrojection, substituting whatever you want to come to the conclusion you want.

What is the thought behind this comment?


spin

Loomis

From what I’ve read it appears to be even more damning than ‘sons of Elohim’. It appears to be ‘sons of El’. See Mark S. Smith and Michael Heiser for details.

Well … no. The imagery of El and his sons is the same, but the roll of Yahweh in Deut 32:9 is slightly different from the roll of Elohim in Psalm 82.

In Deut 32:9 Yahweh is portrayed as just another son - on a level playing field with Chemosh, Milcom, Shachar, Shalem, or Baal. But in Psalm 82 the sons of El are buffoons and Elohim is ‘firing them’ and condemning them to die like mortals. Elohim does not appear to be El or a son of El. He’s an outsider.

I think Deut 32:8-9 and Psalm 82 are drawing from Ugaritic & Canaanite mythology (from El and his pantheon of 70 sons), but they are not on the same wavelength. I don’t think the authors were aware of each other’s stories.

Am I making any sense?

Loomis

Yep.

Are you familiar with 11QMelch?

The author quotes Psalm 82:1 (“Elohim stands in the council of El”) but inserts “Melchizedek” in place of “Elohim” (God).

This shows that El and Elohim were not considered the same entity.

Am I making any sense?

spin

The relationship between Elohim/YHWH and El is the one I was referring to, sorry. The texts were written at different moments in the tradition's development and that's what your data points too. The exact relationship with El is obscure in Ps 82, though Elohim is in his assembly.

Both texts have been modified. We are lucky with the DSS Deut 32 that we have the earlier form "sons of elohim", rather than "sons of Israel", which confuses the passage. So does the obvious disturbance of having Elohim among the Elohim in Ps 82. It suggests an elohist alteration of the term which was there before it was changed to Elohim. Most often when changes can be perceived it regards Baal, as when the theophoric element -baal B(L becomes -bosheth B$T or -b-'am B(M. This hints at the desire to remove references to Baal and replacement with YHWH would be another means.

Ugarit was destroyed a long time before this material was written, so its influence will not be direct. It will become just a part of the undergrowth that writers had available to them. They were written at different times (and maybe even dealing originally with different deities). A more complete reclamation of the more original forms may be beyond our capabilities.


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Sheshbazzar

Of course from our monoYahwhistic perspective, there is no "El" other than Yahweh, and there never has been;

spin

I checked this out, but while 11Q13 deals with Melkizedeq, it has the MT Elohim, not Melkizedeq, at the beginning of Ps 82:1 and the Masada psalms version is the same as the MT.


spin

spin

Does that change what the texts of Deut 32 and Ps 82 actually say?


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Loomis

Yes. I agree.

Maybe it was Baal. Maybe it was Melchizedek, or maybe it was “the Son of Man.”

Or else …

Maybe Elohim #1 was originally “Yahweh” and the elohist wiped him out.

Now wouldn’t that be funny.

It could happen.

spin

We can scratch Melkizedeq as a late figure. The Genesis 14 reference can't even be found in Jubilees. Where it appears in the DSS, the Genesis Apocryphon, that text regularly uses the theophoric reference El Elyon, where as in Genesis it only appears in the Melkizedeq passage, a passage which appears between when Abram goes out to see the king of Sodom and the first words of the king of Sodom.

We can scratch "the son of man", when it means something other than "mere mortal", as a christian phrase.

Baal is the easiest of the available possibilities because the role is his in the Ugaritic literature and as a point of reference he was available, unlike Melkizedeq or the son of man.

(Sorry, I was a little confusing with terminology. I used "elohist" as an adjective. I didn't want to conjure up Wellhausen's elohist writer of his documentary theory, but simply the fact that someone changed the term to "elohim". I admit the sentence was contorted.)

Yup, but it seems unlikely though. While in the pentateuch there may have been two separate traditions indicated by the terms elohist and yahwist, there is no clear sign beyond the pentateuch that this separation of tradition existed at all. The theology in Ps 82 is sufficiently more recent than that in Deut 32, having the god on a higher level than the rest, rather than one of the mob. It would be probable that by the time we have this theology, YHWH and Elohim had been reduced to the same entity, so I don't see it likely that the scribe would change YHWH to Elohim. But, hey, who knows? It is still possible that it was a simple scribal error of reading YHWH and automatically writing Elohim, but that would mean that he didn't read the whole sentence.


spin