Week Eleven: The Divine Council

In the beginning, God created... The introduction to the creation of all things is one of the most universally recalled stories from the book of Genesis. As the creation narrative (some call it a creation myth) goes along, with God calling into being light, water, and animals, God finishes, in Gen 1:26, by saying, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness." Humanity is thus created in the image of God, but there's a small question left in the plural pronouns God uses to refer to Godself. Let us in our according to our...

Bandstra writes that the "us" refers to the Divine Council, which was "thought to be the governing assembly of angelic beings that managed the world with God" (Bandstra, 43). Others have suggested that the plural reference is about God's trinitarian nature. Regardless, God references Godself in the plural often in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. Here are some of those situations:

Gen 1:26 - Let us make humankind in our image
Gen 3:22 - See the man has become like one of us
Gen 11:7 - Come let us go down and confuse their language

But there is also a fair bit of description about this Divine Council scattered throughout the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures...

1 Kings 22:19-22: A "host of heaven" is seen standing to the right and left of God, various persons debating about who will do a specific task, before one of them volunteers; the Divine Council thus has some freedom of agency and opinion with respect to approaching God, acting on God's behalf, and departing from God's presence.
Deut 32:8-9: There as many nations of people as there are numbers of gods.
Psalm 82: The Divine Council is a place where God holds judgment - perhaps as 'chairperson' of this gathering; these gods are described as "children of the Most High" who are nevertheless mortals and shall die like humans.
Isaiah 6:8: God uses both singular and plural pronouns to refer to Godself - "Whom shall I send and who shall go for us?" Thus perhaps these angels or other gods are extensions of God's own identity/personhood/self.
Job 1:6 & 2:1: Here this body are referred to as "heavenly beings" and Satan, or the Accuser, comes among them; perhaps Satan is one of these angels/beings/Divine Council members. Additionally, the members come in front of God at various times - but it's not clear whether their comings and goings are ordered by God.
Psalm 29:1-2: "Heavenly beings" are directed in the psalm to join in the worship of God; this may be one of their important roles.
Job 38:7: This is another example of the heavenly beings or divine councilors worshiping God and singing praises in God's honor.
Psalm 89:6-7: Here the council or heavenly beings are noted to be "all around" God, not so much in the physical/proximate sense, but in the sense of status as "heavenly." They are said to be "in the skies" or perhaps thus on another plane/dimension or simply invisible to the human eye. Finally, they comprise a group of "holy ones" who, perhaps, sit en banc as a council. It is simply unclear what this council administers or decides.

With this description of the Divine Council in mind, it is pretty interesting to go back and understand the creation beginnings in light of God seeking this council's assistance/approval/feedback when it came time to create humanity. Bandstra suggests that "the act of creating humanity was deemed so momentous that God sought the approval and cooperation of the Divine Council" (Bandstra, p.43). With the enormity of the task ahead of "them," one can almost imagine God convening the Council of heavenly beings and other angelic figures. As they gathered from their realms and domains, I envision them standing in God's presence as God unveils God's plan for this new entity that would be created in their heavenly/angelic image, but who, as mortals, would exist on an entirely different plane of being - a different domain, and thus be subject to the frailties of life as we know it now. Nobody could have known then what God may have known would soon be in store for this new human race.

By 3:22, Adam and Eve had eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thus become even more resemblant of God and God's divine council: they know had a very specific knowledge, which presumably gave them even more agency to make decisions about how they would act and behave from then on. Such a development must not have been what was intended, because by 11:7, the council was creating plans to scurry their advancement and prevent this human race from becoming angelic or heavenly in their own ways. Of course, this fear would require that humans would be able to reach the next dimension or plane of existence for these heavenly beings; while such a step could be considered physically possible back when this narrative was created (i.e. the tower of Babel and reaching heaven), we use other language to describe the disconnect between our human and divine worlds/states of being.

Either way, it's quite interested to reflect on this group and their role as advisors/helpers to God in the creation of our human race today. Whether real or fiction, the story gives us added context to the ways that early nations made sense of their existence and even the primacy they assigned to their own identities vis-a-vis the rest of creation.