 Welcome to Tool Talk from Exegetical Tools where we discuss informative resources and intelligent practices to help you rightly divide the word of truth. Today I've got Michael Heizer, scholar in residence at Lagos and author of The Unseen Realm. He's done a lot of work in ancient Near Eastern Studies, especially in this supernatural world view underlying scriptures. Really prominent something we tend to gloss over. He's written about that extensively in The Unseen Realm. It's a book at the popular level that's going to link to a lot of really scholarly resources based on a lot of peer-reviewed journals, things like this. I'm really excited to talk to him today both about the supernatural world view of the Bible and biblical Hebrew and why we all ought to probably study that if we want to really get into the nitty-gritty of the Bible. Dr. Heizer, first I just want to talk about your upbringing. You mentioned to me that you didn't grow up in a Christian home and maybe some of the ways that has affected your view of the scriptures. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, it wasn't overtly hostile until after I became a Christian. Prior to that it was probably pretty normal. Nobody's really taken this religion stuff too seriously. It's kind of a cultural religious background. My parents had connection with the church only in their baptism and that was the end of that. That sort of thing. Afterwards, they thought I had joined a cult and were really concerned and again fairly hostile through high school. They're believers now and they related the story to me that they used to do and say things to me when I was in high school just to see what I would do. They were testing me and again they told me that many years later as an adult. Now I can almost like do no wrong with them. They're believers, they understand it, they get it. Thank the Lord I was a good testimony as a high schooler. But it was kind of a chess match and that really contributed to I think in some way to me really wanting to be able to think well about certain things. Certain questions I would get, certain questions I would just have and wondering well is this going to be an obstacle to my parents coming to the Lord or somebody else that I knew. I was just thinking of those kinds of terms early on. So I come from a very different background. We were very conservative theologically. I was raised in a small SBC church still a proud member of the SBC. Rep and Midwestern Seminary. I love it. It's great. But came to my first year of college at a nominally Christian school. Everyone was required to take an Old Testament class but basically the profs whole angle. Instead of teaching this even as just literature you know if you want to do it that way. It was here's another reason why you shouldn't believe in this stuff. So I you know coming from us you know having heard lots of apologetics and especially when it comes to things like the natural world and sciences and young earth creation and things like this. I just you know I was appalled and still we would disagree a lot if we were to sit in a room today and I mean I don't believe he was a believer. I'm pretty sure he told that to me. But I just remember him talking about how the world of Genesis 1 through 11 was just a different world all together. And you know it was he even showed a clip of the beginning of the Lord of the Rings just to kind of this is what you should be thinking. This is all fantasy. It's a made up world. And I just remember him talking about you know the sons of God and Genesis 6 and how crazy this sounds and me going very you know hey I've got a footnote here in my Bible. Sir. And it says that that could just mean the really virtuous sons of Seth. And I thought I had got him there. And I what I hear you telling me is I didn't get him there. I think what I know you didn't you didn't get it. I didn't quite get in there. And I think it's it's what we've talked about a little bit is equating a view of the natural world and in physical observable world and saying OK. The the writers of the Bible had a particular world view as far as science goes and God spoke within that world view. And there may be some things that he would have said differently to us. And yet the truth still stands. But the supernatural. Sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say I don't I don't think any part of scripture is about teaching science. I don't think that was that was God's goal in any regard. Right. But had been his goal then he really picked he really made poor choices. Right. For offers. Yeah. Right. Sure. Yeah. So in what in what I guess I'm coming to here is I had a similar approach to things like the supernatural worldview in the opposite direction almost saying well let's let's harmonize and kind of explain away. And he would have said this professor would have said no don't explain it away they really meant what they said and it's a bunch of bunk. And he would say don't explain it away they really meant what they said and we should take God's word for it. I would say let's just if you pardon the expression. Let's just take God out of the discussion. I would say they really meant what they said. And we should realize that the ideas that they're putting forth. And it tested philosophically in terms of logic and rationality for two millennia. And there are many philosophers who don't commit themselves to these ideas, but they will admit and demonstrating their work that they are philosophically coherent. So who are we to say well, you know those guys were idiots. They just know better now because the next question is how do we know better. And see then people are going to go well science when I'm waiting. This is a world by definition this is a question by definition. Is there a reality beyond the things that can be tested by science by definition science is not able to comment on these things so don't don't say when I ask how do we know. Don't give me science, because it tells that answer tells me you don't understand science. Science is about testing the physical world, not the non physical world, not the non material world. So the real question is, is there a non material reality is that intellectually defensible. And again you don't need to be a believer in, you know, Christianity to affirm and demonstrate the validity of the intellectual coherence of that idea. So I don't have a pithy way like you just had to answer the question that's what I would have said to the professor if I didn't, you know, in tune enough, you know, with him at that point, but because I can't dismiss it honestly. And because by definition, I don't really, I'm not in the place I don't have the tools and neither does anybody else to be able to dismiss it honestly. It stays on the table. And then since it stays in the table maybe the thought at least the thought does creep into my mind. Well, you know if there is a God and all these things that we believe as Christians sort of extend from that initial proposition. You know, can God actually do anything to convince people or influence people to write something. Could he become me. If he did, could he rise from the dead. I mean all these things extended from very simple ideas. And since they do and since the fundamental idea is intact. Maybe I should actually pay attention. Maybe I should, maybe I should allow for this to get some play in my own thinking, my own way of approaching scripture, my own theology. Isn't it funny, we're talking here now about does a soup, does a supernatural perspective, like in the early, let's just say in the Old Testament, can that be part of our theology. You realize what we're talking about here. We're actually asking the question, if the supernatural world view the biblical writers can be part of our theology. I mean, there's so much irony in that. But, I mean, I'll be honest that that's, that's a question that people need to need to ask themselves I mean I, and the response to unseen realm has been overwhelming and positive. But I'm always quick to add, it makes some people nervous. It troubles them. And what I try to do is I try to say the reason you're troubled is that you're now you're confronted with this question. Does this world view have a place in your theology. My response that is, Well, your theology either needs to be text driven biblical theology, or it's something else. So, there's a little subset to that. And that was probably going to make even more uncomfortable. But again, if we think about it, it's all all these kinds of questions of the way you find, you know, like, what's so normal about the resurrection. What's so normal and scientific about the incarnation. These are all things that, that as Christians, we are forced to believe. Or else it's kind of a dumb conversation and even talk about Christianity without these things. And in the believing, you know, and again, I don't mean to be pejorative when I say or silly or, you know, kind of dismissive when I say in the believing church because I'm one of them sympathetic to it but in the believing church. There are a lot of people whose belief about the supernatural world is a lot smaller than the biblical writers, they just don't know it they don't really realize it. Because they've been taught to not see things. They've been taught to not ask the kinds of questions that we're talking about here. They, the scripture has been de-mythologized for them so that the questions never occur to them. And that's on one level that's okay. I mean, you can be a believer without, you know, this stuff. I mean, you're going to be inconsistent. Okay, I think because what's so normal about these things that you insist have to be believed. So you're going to be inconsistent, but you can understand the gospel and embrace it and good. That's the most important thing. But what you can't do is you can't come to me and talk to me ever again about interpreting the Bible in its own context. Because you're not doing it. Right. That's what you can't do. Yeah, so you mentioned obviously the incarnation, the virgin birth, the resurrection, these things. Let's talk then about the Old Testament. What are some of these really prominent ideas that are easily filtered out? Use that kind of language in the book. You talk about having a filter where we just kind of gloss over things that are really prominent in the text, but we give them short shrift, or we try to explain them away. And you would say, you would argue for a mosaic. Let's look at each piece and let's see how they fit together. What are some of those key pieces? Well, just on a conceptual level, I would say limiting the supernatural world to God, the triune God, Godhead, and angels, demons, and Satan. And then you tie the knot on the top of the bag and that's it. Limiting it to those things is a mistake because the biblical terminology doesn't justify that. I mean, you have a plurality of Elohim, so you have to, you know, gods, you have to do something with that. And, you know, I'm actually a pretty run-of-the-mill, Trinitarian guy. I believe that the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, Yahweh is what I like to say, species unique. There is none like him. But I also believe, because it's very obvious from the text, that there are other Elohim, there are other gods. So we have to really understand, you know, what the term Elohim means. And we are too quick, you know, to link the term with a specific set of unique attributes and say, oh, there's only one of those. So all these Elohim passages like in Psalm 82, they're really just talking about people. Well, that works really terribly when you go over to Psalm 89, and you've got, you know, the Elohim, the Bene-Elohim, the Bene-Eloyan, you know, from Psalm 82 in the skies, you know, with God. We don't have a bunch of Jewish elders floating around in the skies, ruling the nation. You know, it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work on so many levels. And so all I'm suggesting is that we need to just get a better view of what's going on in the text. And I'm trying to encourage people in the book, I'm not just trying to poke people in the eye in the book. I'm trying to encourage them, look, what you believe is coherent, but it might be coherent for a completely different reason than you suspect. And some of the arguments that you've given for it aren't very good and pardon me while I destroy them. But I'm going to put something in its place. You know, I try to be really text driven. I try to take the text in its own context. Yahweh is unique. There is none besides Him. But on the other hand, when the Psalmist, and this is, you know, lots of passages, when the Psalmist or anybody else refers to Yahweh as the God of gods, it means exactly what it says. Right. And so we need to come to grips with that. So that divine counsel motif seems to be prominent, pretty self-evident. I'm reading your section on it, it's helpful. It is intimately tied to who we are, how God looks at us as His family. It is not a coincidence that believers are spoken of as sons of God, as children of God. We get adoption language. You know, John 1-12. As many as received him to them, he gave the authority to become the sons of God. In Hebrews 2, Jesus introduces us to God and God to us in the congregation, in the council. The whole great cloud of witnesses thing. There are dozens and dozens of terms. And again, at different semantic levels, whether it be literal or symbolic or both, there are phrases and terms strewn throughout the Bible that connect us as supernatural members of God's family and God's co-rulers, participants with Him in ruling His creation. The links are deliberate. They are intentional. They are not accidental. You know, I hate the English translation saints in the New Testament. I just hate it. It's holy ones. If you look at it as holy ones, who are the holy ones in the Old Testament? Well, they are predominantly members of the divine council. Okay, that means something. If you understand the council is God's, you know, God's non-human family. They were created to participate with Him, to image Him in their realm. And humans are created to participate in image God in the natural realm. That this humanity was created to be fit for sacred space, to be fit as a member with the divine family. That is our intended destiny. That should be normal. In God's mind, that is normal. And we know the story about how that gets messed up. But God is constantly working toward moving things ahead to the past, back to Eden. And it's no mistake that we, to Him that overcomes, I will put Him over the nations. Who's over the nations now? That would be the sons of God that were allotted to the nations to Deuteronomy 32 at the Babel event. We displace them and replace them. They are illegitimized, you know, through the resurrection, through lots of other things. All of these ideas, it's a matrix of ideas. All of these ideas are connected intelligently and intentionally. But if you're not thinking, you know, in terms of the supernatural worldview, you can only see that partially. And in many cases, you just miss it. You don't really know when a New Testament writer picks up a thread and runs with it because you haven't seen the thread in the Old Testament. And again, I like to encourage people to think of a matrix of ideas. You know, that you're using that matrix of ideas and out of that is going to emerge this mosaic, you know, to use these metaphors. It's useful and helpful that it's intelligently designed. You know, there's a grand mind behind scripture that is guiding the writers to do certain things, to connect certain dots. And what unseen realm is, it's not a theory of everything. The book is exactly what I describe it as in the introduction. The book is a starting point. It gives you the lay of the land. If you have this stuff in your head, you honestly will never read your Bible the same way again. I can say that because that's what happened to me. This took me 15 years to put this thing together. That's what happened to me. So it's not an overclaim. It's a claim that comes out of my own experience. There's just so much there. And the dirty little secret to the book is that nothing in the book is original to life. It's all based on peer-reviewed scholarship. What my role is is not to think original thoughts. My role is to take the material of scholars through their wonderful efforts, whether intentional or not, providing the data, and then connecting those dots for people. I'm a synthesizer. I want to connect the dots for the people and then try to communicate what scholars have seen and observed in language that doesn't require a PhD. Just the normal interested person that they can read it and digest it. And I would challenge listeners, and I know in every interview I do, people are either wigged out by this or I don't know if I want to think that way. And I understand that. Trust me. I was there. But I would challenge your listeners to go to Amazon and read the reviews. I've got almost 750 reviews on this thing, which exceeds my expectations, believe me. The best ones, they're overwhelmingly just from late people. Just from pastors, you know, that like, holy cow, why did I never get this in seminary? Why did I never see this before? Again, don't worry about that. Just see it and know why it's there. Use the book to get the lay of the land and to challenge you to try to think the writer's thoughts after them. I mean, by that is the world, the mode of thinking that is really going to help people in connecting dots between the testaments. Right. And you say that. Thank you so much for ending on that phrase, because that's exactly what I want to get at. I'm thinking here of intertextuality, right? How later authors are using earlier authors work. And I'm thinking here about something I've been mulling over. Maybe this is miserable. I don't know. Because I'm thinking about biblical theology, especially these kind of whole Bible biblical theologies. One of the things, phrases I keep coming back to is reading the Bible left to right, which is incredibly ironic, given the fact that I'm about to talk about Hebrew with you. But really not importing. So even just talking about the Sons of God and the Divine Council, which is one of the main points of your book is talking about how that plays out through the biblical narrative. It seems like almost we've gone right to left. We've said, well, this is what Sons of God is kind of meaning in the New Testament. So it's probably talking about humans in the Old Testament. And when we do that, we're missing the significance of it being applied to humans in the New Testament, because it was always only ever going to be applied, except for maybe in like the Davidic dynasty, right? It's the Son of God language there. But there's this idea that God is shifting his vice region, his rule to humanity, primarily through his Messiah and the Indwelling Spirit. I think that's fascinating. And here I kind of want to shift gears a little bit on on a similar topic. You are an ancient Near East guy. You're a Hebrew studies guy. Many of our listeners, some of them are going to be, they're going to love it. They're going to eat it up. They're into Semitic languages and learning all that stuff. Others, if they have learned a biblical language, it's Greek, and that's just fine for them. Thank you very much. Why should they be learning Hebrew? They should be learning Hebrew so that they can think well about what the writers of three-quarters of their Bible are doing. And on one level, it's more than just looking up words and then going to a lexicon. Oh, here's my list. I've got six glosses here. I'm going to pick the one I like. You need to get a feel for not only a semantic range, but intertextuality is just so important. You need to get a feel for grammar as well. A lot of this is avoiding pitfalls as well. You don't want to be able to, I should say it this way, you don't want to make a claim about a text, either a word meaning or a tense, the whole idea of tense, which isn't the same in Hebrew as it is in Greek and all that. You don't want to make certain claims and just kind of blow it. A lot of people who are more familiar with Greek, they're going to transfer the terminology, the approach, even like the verb system. Hebrew doesn't really have tense like we think of it. I mean, it communicates tense in different ways, but it's not sort of rooted in a form, that kind of thing. It's more a spectral. It doesn't exclude time, but they're just different things to think about. Different ways that a writer would accomplish the same thing that Greek does, but you're not going to be able to tell that unless you know some Hebrew, and you're at risk of saying things about Hebrew that you can really only say about Greek or English for that matter. So learning the language is important just for being able to avoid pitfalls. But I would say more fundamentally, because we're not speaking to PhDs here, I would assume predominantly, but you want to be able to intelligently interact with serious commentaries and serious journal articles. You need to be able to follow their discussion intelligently, to assist you in thinking about the Hebrew text. So I think maybe, so I am in the trenches of this. I'm a little further along in Greek than in Hebrew and with a lot of seminarians finishing master studies, entering PhD studies. And I think maybe one of the biggest hangups, so I'm talking to the guy now who's in seminary, or I'm talking to the guy who's been picking up Greek for a long time. We have a lot of listeners who will be in their PhD or have been out of grad studies for a long time, considering getting back into it, and they are staying sharp in the languages. They love it. And what that normally means is they're reading the Greek New Testament a lot. Many of them are going to be into Hebrew. I feel like maybe one of the bigger hurdles I've seen in your teaching experience, I'd love for you to weigh in on this, is just the letters themselves. The alphabet just seems, as foreign as Greek is, Hebrew is like on another planet. And so what encouragement would you give to somebody who's not even started out with biblical Hebrew? Well, I mean, the characters are limited. I have found in my teaching experience that people pick up the letters, the alphabet really quickly, and the right to left thing really doesn't bother them because they are mentally assigning the values in their head left to right. So it might surprise people to hear that, but in my experience with students, it's overwhelmingly true. The alphabet and the direction are really not much of an issue. I think, and this applies to Greek too, one of the, you have to sort of discipline yourself to be patient. And that is we look at a text, and we tend to sort of want it to work like English where you look at an English paragraph and you know all the letters and all the words. And we tend to feel like failures if we can't look at a verse and just sort of know things instantly. Be patient. Okay, work through it word by word. You will begin to learn with practice what goes with what. It's not like Greek where like an article could be here and then it goes with this like four words away. Okay, you know, it, Hebrew doesn't do that to you, but you have to be patient with it and go cluster by cluster, you know, and you'll be able to see and detect, you know what the writer is doing. It's very patterned. It's very orderly in many respects. When I'm talking here about Hebrew narrative poetry is a totally different game. Most of this narrative that you're going to be getting in class and just be patient with it. Don't try to memorize everything that's happening on the page as well. I struggled with Hebrew, my first year, because I had had two years of Greek and found Greek very easy. I could just sort of memorize why it's doing what it's doing. You know, why, why do we have this vowel change? Oh, it's before this letter. It was it was easy. I'm sitting there in first year Hebrew trying to memorize why all the dots and dashes change when you add an ending. And they don't all change the same way depending on the ending. And, you know, it just mystified me. And then it occurred to me. It actually didn't occur to me. My Hebrew teacher had to tell me, look, if we took the Hebrew Bible over to Israel today, a six year old can read it without the dots and dashes without the vowels. There's a reason for that. You don't need them. So quit trying to memorize the behavior of the language and just go with the consonants. They told me, this is what I tell my students, I will tell you when one of the dots matters. Unless I tell you, don't worry about it. Know the patterns of the consonants and you'll do just fine. It really helped. Don't try to over-memorize things. It's orderly. There are patterns. Just be patient. Patience is a big thing. But I would say to both your Greek and Hebrew listeners. My sight reading illustration is important because, yeah, you can take a Hebrew Bible over to Israel today and a six year old can read that thing. Is the six year old an exegete? No. You can take a Greek New Testament over to Greece and hand it to somebody who is fluent in Greek. Can they sight read the text? Yeah. Are they good interpreters? No. Can an English Bible to the average person on the street, can they read it? Sure. Can they do exegesis? No. My point is here, you don't want to get in the trap where you think you understand what you need to understand just because you can translate something. It is far more valuable to be able to follow an exegetical discussion in a paper, in an article, in a commentary. Because the people who produce those things will take it apart for you and talk about what you can say interpretively and what you can't say. And you need to understand that discussion. So I stress to people, look, build competence in exegesis, not translation. Look for intertextuality. It's a big deal. How Scripture writers repurpose other parts of Scripture is very significant. Situate what you're reading in the wider world view. It's just crucial. So I tend, again, to gravitate myself in the way I advise people. It's wonderful if you can sit down and cite the text. Again, my illustration applies. That doesn't mean anything. It means you can translate. Good. Good for you. What does it mean? Take it apart. What are the exegetical things you can say and things you can't say? If there's more than two or three things you can say, how would you rank them? What's the order of plausibility when it comes to interpretation? That might require you to run some searches to look for authorial patterns. It might require you to look for how the New Testament writer repurposes part of what you're thinking. Do they do that consistently? A lot of this is really about gathering data, but then being able to ask the right interpretive questions about the data. You are not an exegete if you can just read. That is not exegesis. Reading is not exegesis. Exegesis is something you have to develop over time and you have to practice, and you have to watch through, again, reading good exegetical material. You have to see it modeled. You have to become acquainted with how it's done. And then you sort of will learn to mimic it in your own thinking. You'll be able to learn what questions to ask. But again, if you don't know the basics of each language, you can't follow that discussion. And it's just not going to help you much. Yeah, so no excuses. Me and other listeners who are struggling with or haven't even yet begun Hebrew studies, you need that as a 3-4 force of your Bible that's a part of reading the Bible left to right and seeing how the New Testament authors play off of the Old Testament. I appreciate, so back to the unseen realm. I really appreciate that it is kind of closer to popular level that you've got some resources available online that are diving more deeply into this. That's more unseenrealm.com. Is that right? Yeah, there's a tab for each chapter of the book where I give either additional bibliography or additional discussion of certain points. So yeah, those who are wanting to get a little bit more into what he's getting at background, but even including some of the linguistics aspects at a popular level, even within the book, I would encourage people who are interested in this think that this could be something they want to dive in more. Go just read the book, maybe link to the articles, maybe save that for later. Go read the book, get an idea of what's being said. See how it comes out in your reading, in your exegesis. Go pick up a biblical Hebrew class and learn that, learn it well. If you've already dove in deep there, maybe you need to go pick up another Semitic language or something because that's going to play in, even in your book, even in this popular level work, you're going to play in a little bit of some other Semitic languages and how they tie in. I really hope people will pick this up. I hope they will be encouraged by this and that it will help them to better understand what God has done, what he has revealed through his word. Any other resources, Dr. Heiser, that they need to be looking for? Yeah, I would say if you're going to be a serious student, you need to learn, you need to do two things, you need to have good reference material and you need to start learning to tap into the journal literature regularly. We're all used to commentaries, but a commentary, you have to realize, a commentary has a page count. Publishers say, here are the pages you can have. And that restricts the number of words that you can use to do anything in the book. Journal articles can turn a one-page commentary discussion into 10 or 15 pages of discussion. Journals are by definition far more detailed in any given point than commentary. So learn to tap into the journal literature and have good reference material and above all, look for patterns and try to think the writer's context after him. Intertextuality is just a really big deal. That goes with this study of how the New Testament cites the old and all that sort of thing. You want to be able to understand why a writer is doing what they're doing and not just be able to read the words that they put down on the parchment, but why they're doing what they're doing. What are they tracking on? What idea are they propelling in what they're doing? Dr. Heiser, thank you so much for being with us today. You're welcome.