James McLaughlin

Field notes on the biblical text, divine council, and the ancient world. Working-class IT guy in Ohio. Door open.

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

Psalm 82 opens with God standing in the divine assembly, judging among the gods.

Deuteronomy 32:8 says the nations were divided according to the number of the sons of God, and that Yahweh kept Israel for himself.

Most English Bibles smooth both of those. The Dead Sea Scrolls carry the harder reading in Deuteronomy, and it is the one that turns Psalm 82 from a metaphor into a courtroom.

That is what I write about here.

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@french_tho37809 @PastorPompu It's okay. We all still can be friends. It's good to have different opinions. In fact I like to talk with people who don't always agree with me.

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@mbird12 The word in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 does a lot of work here. Meet is apantesis, the word for a city delegation going out to meet an arriving dignitary and escorting him back into town. So we go up to meet Him in the air and come back down with Him. The traffic runs toward earth

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@WesleyLHuff @pjgurry P52 and the Nash Papyrus from your collection already sit on my shelf. P46 with Philippians 2 on it might have to be number 3

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@RestoredMySoul @RabbiKolakowski @Little_Ms_Nope That lines up. They fought about the priesthood and the calendar and kept copying the same scrolls the whole time. Thanks for the Elior pointer, her work on the priestly calendar is where that split gets clear

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@ThomasDierson @Conception_King @CatholicDrip___ True, and the gaps tell you something. Qumran has pieces of 4 of the 5 sections, and nothing at all from the Parables, chapters 37 to 71. Thats the section with the Son of Man figure, which is why so many scholars argue over when it was written

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

true 2 Maccabees 2 takes a swing at it. Jeremiah carries the tent, the ark and the incense altar up the mountain Moses climbed and seals them in a cave, and says the place stays unknown until God gathers His people again.
Only a tradition, but it is an old one, and it points to Nebo

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

The Torah makes the link itself though. Numbers 13:33, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim, and that is the spies in the text, not later folklore.

And Genesis 6:4 says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward. @DRMSHPhD pointed out that came in to the daughters of men is a repeated action verb, so the text itself expects it to keep happening

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

Jeremiah is the best book for that case. The Greek is noticeably shorter and arranged differently, and at Qumran 4QJer b and d have that same shorter form in Hebrew but 4QJer a and c at Qumran match the Masoretic. So both Hebrew editions of Jeremiah were around before Jesus, and the Septuagint is a witness to one of them

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@drjohnmeade Origen settled this in the 3rd century. The Hexapla put the Hebrew and the Greek versions side by side in columns, the first parallel Bible, and nobody had to pick a side

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

Keep reading past 36 though. v38, the Father is in Me, and I in the Father, and v39 they try to seize Him again. His answer did not walk the claim back, it made them angrier and the gods in Psalm 82 are the divine council. @DRMSHPhD pointed out that reading them as human judges turns Jesus into saying any Jew could call himself Gods son, when the quote is bookended by claims to deity

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

It goes back further than most people think. Justin Martyr in the 2nd century says God gave the care of things under heaven to angels He appointed, the angels broke that, fell for women, and begat children who are those that are called demons.

So the order in the early church was angels first, then the giants, then the demons. Second Apology 5

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

The Gospels read like they already assume that answer. Matthew 12:43, the unclean spirit passes through waterless places seeking rest and finds none, so it goes back to the house it left. spirit with no body, looking for one. Thats the same picture as 1 Enoch 15:11, the spirits of the giants that afflict and attack and cause trouble on the earth

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

Chapter 20 is the good one. Uriel over the world and Tartarus, Raphael over the spirits of men, then Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel, and Remiel over those who rise. The Protestant Cannon only names 2 of those 7, Michael and Gabriel. Raphael shows up in Tobit and Uriel in 2 Esdras

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

Enoch actually lists what the Watchers taught, and its all hands on stuff. 1 Enoch 8:1, Azazel taught men to make swords and knives and shields and breastplates, how to work metals, bracelets and ornaments and eye paint. Then 8:3 adds enchantments, root cutting and astrology. Metalwork, makeup and magic. Nothing in the list thinks for itself

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@Adam_FaithfulM For me its v18 in the oldest copies. P66 and P75, both papyri from around 200 AD, read the only begotten God there where the KJV has Son. So John opens the prologue calling the Word God in v1 and closes it the same way in v18, God making God known

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

The Easter example cuts the other way. Only English and German call it after Eostre, and our only source for her is Bede. Most of Europe says Pascha, Paques, Pasqua, Pascua, straight from the word for Passover.

And the Stoics you close on were read by the church and kept. Tertullian called Seneca saepe noster, often one of us

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

The book carries its own postmarks. Book 1 ends written among the Quadi on the Gran, and Book 2 ends written at Carnuntum. A journal kept in army camps on the Danube.

Paul wrote Philippians from custody about a century earlier, and it has the same flavor. 4:11, I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@JeffRobertBlask It does. Deuteronomy 32:17 is the one I point people to. They sacrificed to demons who were not God, to gods they had not known, new gods who came lately.

The Bible expects spiritual beings who show up new and looking for worship. The test it gives is what they want from you

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

The star gods thread in the Bible runs through Deuteronomy 4:19. Moses warns Israel not to bow to the sun, moon and stars, all the host of heaven, which Yahweh allotted to the peoples under heaven.

@DRMSHPhD read that together with 32:8, the nations handed to lesser gods at Babel. They are in the text, as created beings under Yahweh who end up judged

[James McLaughlin @pulse38echo]

@eick74 @CatholicDrip___ And Melito is the earliest Christian Old Testament list we have, 2nd century. It has every book of the Protestant 39 except Esther. He is also the one who coined the phrase Old Testament. The first person to use the name gave the short list