What can I say? I’m just here to piss Christians off. Correction: I’m here to piss SOME PEOPLE off. Many years ago I stopped referring to people I don’t personally know as “Christian” because some of the characters I run across, debate with, or have in my close circles are FAR from “Christian”. They are the ones living their lives based on this mindset.
If you’ve been around my corner of the webs, then you won’t be surprised to see a headline like There Are Other Gods in Christianity, and you will most likely be intrigued and open-minded to the thoughts I am about to disclose in this blog article. You’d know that I have been spending the past few years diving DEEP into the spiritual realm, the part of our human life that typically makes no sense, is easily skewed and has billions of people believing in thousands of different things simply because that realm is so hard to understand.
First of all, I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that I would one day come to think that God talks about other actual gods in the Bible. Still, when I discovered the truth about translation errors throughout the centuries, it became more palatable to consider.
Does the Bible talk about other “gods”?
First, we have to accept these facts:
The Kind James Version is one of the most FLAWED translations of the Bible.
The “Bible” wasn’t something found. What was found was a bunch of individual “books” that men decided to put together and call “The Holy Bible”.
Translators back in the day were not highly educated. Naturally, we need to presume that with society’s advancement, errors are being found.
No single English translation will ever represent the original biblical languages perfectly. Why? In part because the Bible’s ancient languages do not function like English. A word in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic might not have an exact English word to match. Each language constructs sentences differently, which means a variety of words or reconstructed sentences will always be necessary.
This is okay, even good. It keeps us in an inquisitive, learning mode alongside others who are also trying to understand the Bible. It helps us remember that our Bible is not an answer book or instruction manual—it is a collection of sacred Scriptures we are to meditate upon within the community.1
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version is the most accurate recent Bible translation at this time. Per the scholars and experts.
Now that you understand that translations play a huge part in this question, let’s begin with Exodus 20: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It then goes on to describe idols and whatnot. One could interpret that as two different items: other gods, and idols. Aside from the Elohim item that has been thoroughly addressed by other answerers, Psalms addresses us all as Gods: “Ye are Gods, and children of the Most High” This is quoted by Jesus when asked if he is the Son of God.
The Bible also mentions some of the pagan gods of the Philistines in particular: Dagon, the fish God, and Baal, Ashtaroth, and Molech. These all seem very much “false” Gods, as described in the story between Elijah and the priests of Baal, or when the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant and brought it before their statue of Dagon and the statue collapsed and the Philistines couldn’t get the Ark out of their city fast enough for all the problems they were experiencing. Ashtaroth, if I’m not mistaken, was big on fornication on hilltops. Molech was a bloodthirsty statue. None of these gods did anything, said anything, or were anything to the Israelites.
The whole of the Old Testament shows that these were false gods because of this, and shows the power of the One True God. The New Testament continues this by showing the miracles of Jesus, the incarnated form of that One True God. The whole point of the Bible seems to be, “Here: this God, this one, is the only God worth worshiping, so worship Him.”
A scholar by the name of Dr. Michael Heiser is a specialist in ancient languages and cultures–I think he fluently translates something like 7 different ancient languages–and gives some thorough insights into what you’re exploring here. His inspiration for digging into the text so deeply came from Psalm 82. You can watch all 4 parts of a lecture series he gives on this topic right over on YouTube.
To summarize 4 hours of Dr. Heiser’s material in one deeply inadequate paragraph: in essence, yes, Scripture does acknowledge the existence of other beings in the heavenly realms. These are referred to with divine language (“sons of God”), but they are not God (capital G). They’re smaller rulers. Once we reach the NT, these powers have been replaced by us and we (believers) are now given the title “holy ones,” which Paul uses repeatedly throughout his letters.
The rebellious former sons of God are stripped of their authority and God’s faithful human followers are instead given the right to rule.
The Bible is crystal clear in its monolatry.
Again, TRANSLATION IS KEY HERE.
God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked.” Psalm 82:1-2:
You’re going to be hard-pressed to convince any reasonable-thinking person that the individual who wrote this meant anything other than God was rebuking other gods. There are traditional interpretations that claim that these other gods are merely leaders among man, but that doesn’t hold water with:
“You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” Psalm 82:6-7
If these other gods were just human, why the need for God to condemn them to be mortal? Wouldn’t that be automatic?
Again, none of this matters, because what we have throughout the Bible are books that clearly knew of other gods but were later redacted. The problem is that these editors didn’t get rid of all of the references to these other gods, and some evidence of their existence remains. Again, here is an example from the very first line in the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
The Hebrew word for God here is “Elohim”, and that is a plural form to be translated as gods (Elohim is also used in Exodus 12:12, where it describes “the gods of Egypt”). Elohim is plural in form but singular in construction (in that it depends upon the verb, created, or bara). This suggests that the creation was the work of a plurality of gods. It’s clear that some polytheistic references survived the editor’s hand.
Genesis 3:22 “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.”
There are the words right from God’s mouth, speaking to other god(s) about the arrogance of man.
The Burning Bush and God’s Confession
Take a look at the scene with Moses and the burning bush, where God admits this. First, God identifies himself to Moses as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then he reveals a new name for himself (Yahweh). This confirms that the name, Yahwehism and the Yahweh cult can begin only with Moses.
Exodus 6:2–4 (KJV 1900): And God spoke unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Lord: 3 And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of *God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. 4 And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.
The Hebrew translation of God (asterisk) is from the Hebrew word El Shaddai, Which is incredibly interesting, as this is the Hebrew God admitting that he is the Canaanite god El, who is the chief god of the divine council in the Canaanite pantheon.
There are striking resemblances between the biblical god of the patriarchs and the Canaanite god El. El is the head of a council of gods; He is said to have a long, white beard; He dwells on a mountaintop in a tent; his epithets include “father of all creatures, bull, king, protector of patriarchs, god of the father of the clan.”
Pay attention to how personal and place names are formed from compound elements where one part is “el” (Isra-el, Ishma-el, Beth-el). By contrast, after the time of Moses, when the new name of God is referred to as Yahweh, the “Y” sound permeates with Israelite names using “Yah” (Elijah, Yeshua, etc.).
It has been determined in critical scholarly circles that God, known in this regard as El, served as a leader on a council of other gods (Ba’al, Asherah, and Anat among them), and like other polytheistic religions, these other gods served specific purposes in the council (Ba’al was the god of weather; Asherah the goddess of fertility—also El’s wife). After the chaos of the 6th century, the Israelites returned to a decimated city and began to rebuild the city and the temple to Yahweh. Thinking their defeat was a punishment from their god for daring to regard the council gods at the level of Yahweh, there began a reformation of the texts, and this is where the first redactions of mentions of other gods took place.
It’s not that there are merely polytheistic references within the Bible, so much as the Bible texts were originally written or spoken as polytheistic, and monotheism was a later development that required the slipshod hand of redactors to make it monotheistic (beginning around the 6th century BCE—Priestly texts written by Israelite captives in Babylon).
So….What do I think?
I believe the gods of ancient times were just the fallen angels and their offspring mentioned in Genesis 6. Greek and Roman pantheons, for example, same beings called by different names.
Other spiritual beings with power exist even today. Principalities are the big guys who control and influence nations. Demons are more like the foot soldiers on the earth.
The world’s spiritual beliefs through the ages become just the same story with different names in different times and places once you start to study it. Serpent worship for example is in every culture from the Americas to Asia, since the beginning.
The dragon of China sounds just like the serpent from the garden. A flying serpent. The feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. The Egyptians also worshiped serpents and would wear serpent headdresses. The word America even means “land of the plumed serpent”. Plumbed means feathered. Of course for every piece of truth, esoteric knowledge, there is the exoteric or false meaning that is given to the masses. It’s all connected…..
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