 Today, my special guest is Michael Heiser, and we're discussing his new book, The Bible Unfiltered, approaching Scripture on its own terms, and that's published by my good friends over at Lex & Press. Mike, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. First things first, I'm curious, Mike, to find out where you got the ideas for the different articles that we see in this book. Are these the sorts of questions you encounter when you're out speaking, or when you're interacting with people on social media, or are these just the kinds of things you think about on a regular basis? You know, it's a little bit of all of that. I'd like to say they all come from my point of little head, but they don't. There are things that come up in conversation, you know, in Q&A. But there's a good bit that I just sort of think about a lot. There are some things that I drew on. With Unseen Realm, I have this in several of the footnotes. There's a mention of a website called moreunseenrealm.com. And one of the tabs for that is what's next. You know, so I actually draw little items from that. Occasionally things that I would like to cover down the road in a follow-up book to Unseen Realm. So the ideas, the kernels for the ideas, you know, pop up here and there really by virtue of all of those things you mentioned. Well, and if anybody's been following me for the last several years, it should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of your books. And I often find your books to be a breath of fresh air. But I suspect with the ground you cover in this book, especially that not all readers are going to react as favorably to some of what you cover here, especially with what you cover in the first part of this book. What do you think are some of those things that can get in the way of people receiving what you have to say when it comes to how we engage with scripture on its own terms? To just be blunt about it, sometimes we just need to get out of our own way. We, you know, ourselves and our traditions and sort of what we've the ways we've been taught to think in church really get in the way of understanding scripture on its own terms. So that when you just sort of let that fly, that can be uncomfortable for some people. But hopefully people realize because of where I work, you know, at Faithlife, LaGrosse Bible Software and sort of, you know, the track record. Now, I'm not the enemy to what they're trying to do. I'm one of, you know, one of the tribe. I'm sympathetic, you know, to the effort, but we really have to be honest that sometimes we just need to get out of our own way. And with context, you know, the whole sort of underlying premise of the Bible unfiltered, you know, again, is treating scripture on its own terms. We just don't consciously realize how much we impose on scripture in terms of context, you know, that we unconsciously and reflexively filter scripture through our own traditions, what goes on in the four walls of our own church, the things we're just used to that we kind of assume. Well, not only do we assume that any really intelligent Christian would think this way, you know, about this particular thing that we have that problem. But then we go even further and say, well, you know, the biblical writers must have thought just like us, they're just like us. Well, OK, you know, yeah, they're just like us in terms of the object of their faith, but they're not anything like us. When it comes to a whole host of other things and God, you know, providentially picked them in the time and the place and the context that they were part of and prompted them to produce this thing we call the Bible. And their world is just dramatically different the way they think the patterns of their thought, the way they think about reality. It's just dramatically different than us. And so that's really the big thing. There's a chapter in the book called Let the Bible Be What It Is. And again, that is the best piece of advice I can give people. Realize the Bible is an ancient, Mediterranean centered document produced by people anywhere from the second millennium B.C. on into the first century AD. It is not the product of modern thinking. God, of course, isn't surprised by that because he picked the people and he did at the time he did. And if we just sort of remember that and we don't make the Bible address questions that we have as moderns, but we let the Bible address the questions and the topics that God prompted the writers to address, we would be able to shift a little bit in our thinking. We would be able to treat the Bible for what it is and not what it isn't because when you make the Bible speak to issues that the writers never had in mind, some of those are just beyond where they're at as human beings. If we make the Bible directly teach as opposed to just applying things in Scripture, I mean, that we certainly can do. But when we make the Bible directly teach on topics that are modern, that are just well after their time period and their setting, their worldview, their whole cultural framework, then what we're doing is we're imposing our own context on the Bible. We're making it speak to things that it was never intended to speak. And we can get really misled in interpretation that way. We can make the biblical writers turn out to be saying things they just never would have intended to say. And then we miss the things they did intend to say if we don't try to think like they thought. And so that's sort of the fundamental premise of the book. Well, that's helpful. I won't ask you any more questions related to that section. If people want to know more, they just have to read that first part of the book. The second part of the book, you take a look at a number of different accounts from the Old Testament. So I'd love to have you just dig into a few of those with me and just help give the listeners a flavor of what they're going to encounter in the book. We'd love to have you comment on Samuel's ghost and Saul's judgment. Now, this was a story from first Samuel that I always wanted to see a flannel graph for and we never did have one quite for this. During my Sunday school days, it would have been interesting, certainly to have that talk to us about that. What are some of the things that work there that we maybe don't expect if we just take that at face value? It's actually an important passage in a number of respects. I mean, there's some real significant theology that comes out of this. I mean, most people will know the basic story, you know, that Saul, you know, is sort of in going toward the end of his reign and his life. And he's run all of the mediums, the people who contact the dead and practice other, you know, forbidden practices. He's run them out of the land. But somehow when God won't talk to him, when God won't answer his prayers, he knows where to find one of them. And he does the medium at Endor. Some translations have the witch of Endor. But she's described as the mistress, the Balaat, the mistress of the Ove. And Ove, an Ove-Ode, is the plural in Hebrew, were the spirits of the departed dead, specifically the human dead. So Saul knows where to contact one of them. And again, we know the story. I want to talk to Samuel and we're not told what she does in the passage, but whatever she does produces a dramatic result and it scares her. She gets freaked out by the fact that Samuel is on the scene. And, you know, she tells Saul, he asks, you know, what do you see? And she says, I see an Elohim or I see Elohim coming up out of the ground. And Saul says, what does he singular? What does he look like? And then she describes him and, you know, describes how we've come to know Samuel. And then he and Saul have a conversation. And the content of the conversation is stuff that Samuel had said earlier in scripture and things that Samuel would know and so on and so forth. Well, there are a number of things here that are really interesting. Elohim, I see an Elohim coming up out of the ground. You know, that's the term that is typically used in scripture for God or gods, you know, if it's plural in context. And that's the term that she uses of Samuel and the biblical writers use of Samuel. Now, in the broader ancient world, that's not unusual because other texts, Canaanite literature, Ugaritic literature, which is part of the Canaanites culture, they use this term to describe the departed human dead. And they're not gods in the sense of the God of Israel. They're gods in the sense of spirit beings. And I address the meaning of Elohim and unseen realm a lot. So we don't have polytheism here. This is just a term, Elohim, that has nothing to do with a specific set of unique attributes the way we're sort of used to thinking about the letters G, O, and D. Biblical writers did not think that way about Elohim. And this is one of the great proof texts for it. They're not saying, Hey, our departed loved ones are on a on an attribute par with the God of Israel. I mean, nobody's going to say that because that's just stupid. And nobody believes that. And the biblical writers certainly never talk in those terms. But the Elohim, that term means a spirit being, a real spirit being. And here we have Samuel brought up from the dead, where his spirit anyway, brought back into conversation with the living is probably a better way to say it. And they have a conversation. What it means, especially if given her terminology, the mistress of the Ove, if you go over to Isaiah 19, three Ove is used in parallel with three other terms connected with the dead in the afterlife. And so this is a passage where you can actually look at and say, the biblical writers believed in this this idea that the way we express it now is ghosts. They believe that the spirits of the human dead went on living. There was no like annihilation or cessation or soul sleep or something like that. They went on living in the afterlife. And again, these are familiar ideas to us as Christians. We just were not used to seeing them and put in these terms in this kind of scene in first Samuel 28. But the Bible, especially the Old Testament, has really a fairly well developed theology, if you will, of ghosts, of afterlife spirits. And you say, well, why would God let Samuel go visit Saul? Why would God allow this whole scene, this whole episode to happen? Because elsewhere in scripture, contact with the dead is forbidden. And that's true. God's not endorsing what the woman typically does. But the point is that in this scene, we get a glimpse of God's allowance for this kind of thing, specifically because he is the conduit for the information. That's really the rationale behind a lot of the commands against divination. You go back to Deuteronomy, this whole list of things that people were not supposed to do. And the laws of God are there because God wants to prohibit this sort of thing. He's not in the business of prohibiting things that people can't do. Like thou shalt not fly. OK, Lord, I got that one down. You know, we're never going to violate that command. I mean, these kind of commands were given because these things could be done because there's an active, animate, vibrant, spiritual world, both good and evil. And the commands are given in Deuteronomy to prohibit, to circumscribe where you get information from the other side. God wanted his people to only get it through the means that he has chosen or him through me, you know, the high priest, the ephod, whatever, the prophet. And you weren't supposed to get it from any other means, because when you do these things, the whole point of the commands in Deuteronomy is that you don't know what you're going to get. You can't control this turf. This is not your world. It's the realm of the divine and not the realm of the human. And you have prophets do things out of Deuteronomy 18 that these things that are condemned and God doesn't condemn them in other contexts. And the reason is he is in control of the encounter. He is the source of information. He's not going to mislead people. But at the same time, he says, don't mess with this because you don't know what you're going to get. So there's actually some really important theology here about our relationship to the spiritual world. This notion of, you know, again, you have you have a scriptural passage and this isn't the only one that connects to the whole notion of ghosts. You know, like, does the Bible speak to that in any way? It does. And this is one passage that you can go to for that. But in its own context, this wouldn't have surprised anybody in ancient Israel, and they would have gotten the message clearly that God is in control of this event. And so we can trust the information. Whereas if we're doing this on our own and God is divorced from the process, we shouldn't be doing that. Well, next, let's transition into everybody's favorite revenge proverb. Proverbs 25, 22. How can we heat burning coals on the head of our enemy? I think a lot of people read that and they're not really sure what to do with it. So give us some of the additional context and background that helps us make sense of that. There's two ways to look at the context of this. One is to actually look at the preceding verse. And that's typically what people think about context. And in this case, that's good advice. The verse that we have in mind is Proverbs 25, 22. You know, you'll heat burning coals on his head. The Lord will reward you and you're right. We tend to think of that as an endorsement of retaliation. But if you actually go to the preceding verse, it says, if your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat. And if he's thirsty, give him water to drink for you. We'll heat burning coals on his head and the Lord will reward you. That's 21 and 22 read together. So instead of pulling out that phrase, you know, heat burning coals on his head and then we we associate that with ouch. That's painful. Burning coals are painful. So we're supposed to throw them at people and, you know, put them on their head and punish them and retaliate. No, that verse, because it dovetails, you know, grammatically and structurally with the one that precedes is not an endorsement of retaliation. Again, right before it says, if your enemy is hungry, give him bread. If he's thirsty, give him water for you will heat burning coals on his head. It's not an endorsement of retaliation. It's actually a rebuttal to retaliation. And the idea is that you do good to your enemy. And in so doing, they can become ashamed and then they can reconsider what they're doing to you. So you don't do tit for tat. You don't escalate the situation. You treat your enemy with kindness. It actually discourages us from seizing opportunities to harm people. And that's a common ethic elsewhere in the Old Testament. You know, as far as the other part of the context is, what would the metaphor have meant? And scholars disagree on this. I mean, there is a custom known from ancient Egypt where a person who had been shamed would bear a pan of, you know, smoldering, you know, coals on top of his head as an outward display of his regret or something like that. So that might be in view. Others would say that that the metaphor of burning coals, I mean, think about it, we'll just go through the passage again. If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat. If he's thirsty, give him water to drink for, you know, the result that you will heat burning coals on his head, you'll make him ashamed. That idea, if that's the case, and I think there's a really good case to be made, that that's the way we should look at this. Then you do have other ancient Near Eastern metaphors and these sort of cultural attributions where that act either demonstrates shame or the idea of burning is used metaphorically to sort of speak of an inward burning of shame. So there's a metaphor here. There's the preceding verse, you know, preceding, you know, part of the passage for context. And then there are some cultural customs that really, I think, clarify for us. Again, this is not about escalating a bad relationship. It's about doing good to your enemy so that your enemy will reconsider what they're doing to you because it just shames them. The way you're treating them makes them ashamed of the way that they're treating you. Well, that seems a lot better in that context. So thank you for correcting me and my love of that favorite revenge proverb. Well, it's a little hard for me to believe that you're like pulling that thing out of the holster all the time. Well, you know, just just with my kids, I'm like, oh, I love you. It'd be nice just to heat burning coals on your head so you behave like no, no, I don't do that. I'll show you. Yeah. Yep. Yep. You know, I hope my kids aren't going to be too warped when they come out of the other end of this parenthood journey with me. We'll see. Time will tell. Let's jump forward to part three of the book. That's where you look at some various accounts from the New Testament. So one that kind of caught my eye was demon swine and cosmic geography or looking at Mark five there. Again, another biblical account that I would have loved to have had a flannel graph for in my Sunday school days. But again, I was denied this one as well with what you shared on this one. I was really amazed at how much more there is actually going on there. And we often get stuck in the elements of the story and how it's unfolding and the demons going into the swine and all that. But there's a whole lot more at play there. So tell us about that for this one. It really helps if people are familiar with, again, what I call an unseen realm, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. You know, I don't want to say, hey, go read Unseen Realm and then you'll understand this one. But there's a little bit to be said for that. I mean, they could use the Faith Life Study Bible and get what the Deuteronomy 32 worldview is, that God disinherited the nations, divorced himself from them and assigned them to lesser gods as a punishment. And then that's the Old Testament rationale for why, how we get from God relating to everybody, humanity and mass, both before and after the flood, to this situation when you get to the patriarchal period where people have other gods. Well, this is the explanation. This is the backdrop for it. Well, that worldview seeps into the New Testament because, hey, that's the New Testament, guess what, is attached to the Old Testament in lots of ways. And this is actually a really telling instance. Now, this story is familiar and scholars, especially if they're a New Testament, they're never thinking about the Old Testament context for this, unfortunately. They're looking at it and saying, oh, well, this is how the Gospel writers describe mental illness. And there are some passages that you could try to make that correlation. But this one's really clear. This is an exorcism. OK, there are demons inside this person. So we're not just dealing with mental illness here. Some will say it's political liberation because of the name given to the group of demons, Legion, that this is sort of a political commentary on the Romans that Jesus is going to cast the Romans out like he cast out the spiritual legions. He's going to cast out the Roman legions. Well, again, there's just more going on to this than that. There's a lot of cosmic geographical symbolism here. Jesus goes into Gentile territory. That's the first thing that's important to notice. He's doing a lot in Jewish territory. He goes into the country of the garrisons, which historically at this time is really under Gentile control. And one of the sort of obvious proofs for that is they're raising a swine here. That's not something you'd normally do in Jewish territory because of the prohibition against pork and swine. So he goes into the garrison territory, which is Gentile territory. And then we have this encounter. And Legion asks, what do you have to do with me? Again, which is familiar language, you have similar language and similar accounts in other Gospels. And the real key is to compare some of those episodes with this one specifically here, because elsewhere, like in Mark 124, he goes into a Jewish part of Galilee. And in that passage, the unclean spirits address Jesus as Jesus of Nazareth. But in this passage in Mark 5, when Legion says, hey, what do you have to do with me? He addresses Jesus as the Son of the Most High. And that language is important because that is the title used in Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9 about the division of the nations. The title Most High reflects an Old Testament theology of cosmic geography, because this is where that phrase shows up a lot. It shows up in Psalm 82, which is about the Psalmist crying out that God would take back the nations at the end of Psalm 82. Psalm 82 is a very famous divine counsel, again, spiritual warfare passage and various other places. But when Legion does this and when it's recorded faithfully with this kind of language, what it telegraphs is that Jesus, by going into this place and having this power encounter with Legion and Legion recognizing who he is, the message is, look, Jesus is not just here to get rid of the Romans and restore the physical national kingdom or country of Israel. Because that was the Jewish expectation of Messiah. It's all about us. It's all about restoring our political independence and getting rid of the Romans and all that. What he's saying here is, look, it's bigger than that. Yes, this is God's turf, this thing we call Israel. But by going into Gentile territory and doing the same thing and then having that encounter recognized and connected back to Deuteronomy 32.8, this is also Jesus telegraphing that I am also the Messiah, the owner, the rightful heir of all the nations, including the ones that were disinherited back at the Babel event. I am here to reclaim everything, not just this little turf, you know, little piece of land the size of New Jersey, this Israel thing. I am here for everything. I have sovereignty and dominion over every nation, everything. It's a very sort of proleptic way for the gospel writers and Jesus himself to do this particular thing and make it clear, at least to the people who are thinking about their Old Testament, that this guy, Jesus of Nazareth, is the promised seed, not just to the nation of Israel, but he is the promised seed to bring the whole world back into a family relationship with the most high, the God of Israel and the God of every nation. So there's a lot of sort of just, you know, running under the surface here to this incident. Well, let's jump a little bit further in the New Testament to James 117. This is the verse that talks about the father of lights. I see people use this verse from time to time and they try to apply it sometimes in some very odd ways. I would love to have you just unpack how you take a look at this in the book. I thought that was very helpful because I think people are often using this verse in ways that maybe wasn't intended. Yeah, just as James 117, we might as well just read it, reading ESV, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Again, this phrase only occurs here in scripture. There are other references to God and light in different passages, but the thing to really recognize here is that Father of lights fundamentally points to God's role as the creator of the lights, the celestial objects, the stars, you know, so on and so forth. And again, that's really familiar from Genesis. But there's a little bit more to it. It's not just a statement of creation. We have to realize how did the ancient people perceive these lights? How did they think about them? Obviously, the most translatable aspect of this to us is that, well, the celestial bodies mark seasons in the passage of time. And that's why they were created back in Genesis one. And that's true. Therefore, they're associated with change. OK, they do change. They move there in different positions and so on and so forth. The word that James uses here that's translated change in our English translations is elsewhere used in Greek material to describe the movement and positioning of stars. And therefore, seasonal changes, which have an effect on the land, the growing seasons and all that kind of stuff. So it's a big deal. And people would understand the lights change. But of course, their father, the father of lights, does not. There's no variation in him. He is fixed. He is permanent. So it's kind of a profound point on that level. The celestial bodies change and vary, but the father does not. It's good theology. But there's more to it than that because people thought of the lights in the ancient world as heavenly beings, the stars of God, Job 38, 7. That's a phrase used to describe the sons of God against spiritual beings in God's heavenly host. And so the statement actually asserts the God of the Bible, his superiority to them. They are inferior. He is superior. He's the one who created them. He's the father of lights. OK, he's the one who brought them into existence and not the other way around. He is uncreated. They are created. So we have the father of lights being a reference to the lone creator, the uncreated creator, the superiority of the father, that creator to not only just the physical things that we associate with light and lights, but also every other spirit being, again, this is just really significant theology, not only for the ancient world, but for also for us. It asserts the omnipotence, the sovereign team, the lordship of the father over every spiritual power, not only that, but he is invariable. He's unchanging what he is, what we know of his nature and character and his ability, his attributes will never change. He will be the same and they are not because they're lesser. Well, thank you for that. I hope all of you listening have enjoyed some of the directions we've gone with just having Mike unpack a little bit from four of the chapters that you'll encounter in the book. There's a lot of chapters in the book. What I like about it, especially those they're short. I mean, you could read a lot of them in just a few minutes and you're going to learn a lot of new things. So it'll change your perspectives. If you enjoyed what you've heard so far, be sure to pick up the book. I think you'll get some gems there. You might be made a little uncomfortable at times, but it might be good. Maybe you're being stretched a little bit to think outside of your box. I like to tell people. I actually told somebody in church, you know, not too long ago, who I overheard in conversations saying, well, Mike, believe some kind of strange things. And I said, I'm as scary as the text is. You don't need to be afraid of your Bible. It's just the Bible. You'll be OK. Well, it's good to know that you're as scary as the Bible allows you to be, Mike. I wouldn't be doing a service to listeners if I didn't ask Mike, do you have any new books in the works? I know you're always working on a number of different things, but any things in the more immediate horizon we should be aware of book-wise. Those who follow my work will know that probably a year ago, I self published three books that I called the 60 Second Scholar Series. They were three books, a hundred readings each that you could read in a minute. Those were picked up by Zondervan and they're going to be republished in May. So that's not too far from now. They were each trimmed to 80, but the content of what's in there is basically the same. I mean, I would say almost all the same, except for a good editorial pass on them. So that's coming down the pike in May. And then Lexham, I also just handed in a manuscript for a book about angels, just about angels. It's not about demons. I'm actually working on on that as we speak, sort of a companion book, but there'll be a book about angels and a separate one about demons sometime, I think, in 2018. But we don't have dates for those yet. And for the angel book and the demon book, if you had to contrast that between the unseen realm and supernatural as far as academic level, like, where will these new books fall? I would say that they're going to be pitched closer to unseen realm than supernatural. So somewhere in between, but kind of like, you know, unseen realm was. And it unseen realm is not a book just about angels and demons. I mean, those two subjects factor in to that. But unseen realm is really about the unfolding of the supernatural epic God salvation plan with an eye toward how the invisible realm intersects with our realm and how one is a template of the other. But these two books sort of drill down specifically on one angels, the other one demons. There'll be parts of the book that answer specific questions about and frankly, you know, some myths about angels and demons that are kind of familiar currency within the Christian world. But it's basically a drill down biblical theology of each of those things, but also trying to cover ground that really deals with questions people wonder about both of them. I know because you just don't have enough things to do. You're also producing other types of media. You've got some podcasts that you do. I see a lot more from you on Facebook Live. So in addition to your books, what are some of the other types of content people can connect with you on? I see you doing a lot of different things these days. Yeah, the big one is the Naked Bible podcast. We're approaching our 200th episode. You could just go to Naked Bible podcast dot com. You could also find it by using my home page, d r m s h dot com d r m s h dot com. I have another podcast and we've done 13 episodes called peer a normal where we take, you know, as you might guess, you know, paranormal topics. But we discuss them from the perspective of peer reviewed science and peer reviewed scholarship on those topics. And it, believe it or not, anything that you could sort of put in that bucket. There's actually serious research published out there that a lot of people never find they never know that it even exists because they're just looking on the Internet. They're using Google, you know, to to get information about these different things. But myself and three or four other co hosts were all Christians. We discuss, again, paranormal subjects and we stick to peer reviewed research on them. And it's a fun podcast. We do maybe one every eight or ten weeks. So, you know, six, seven episodes a year, but Naked Bible podcast is every week. Well, and as we do with every episode, I'll be sure to include links to Mike's different podcasts, his website, places you can buy the Bible unfiltered. So if you're listening to this after the interview is done, head over to www.SeanTabit.com. You can search for Michael Heiser. You'll be able to find this interview and our previous interviews and just click on through to any of the additional resources or information that might be of interest to you. It's time to bring this episode of the Sean Tabits show to a close. Many thanks for being a part of my conversation with Michael Heiser. Once again, our book today was the Bible unfiltered approaching scripture on its own terms. You can find out more about Mike and his many great books and resources at his website, which once again, that's at drmsh.com. Mike, I just want to say thanks so much for sharing with us today. It's always an honor and a pleasure to speak with you, my friend. Thank you. Thanks for having me on and look forward to actually connecting with you face to face at some point in the future again. And that's all for this episode of the Sean Tabit show.