A 5-Part Series on Michael Heiser’s “The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible” (Part 1–Let’s Get Introduced)

A few years ago, biblical scholar Michael Heiser came out with his book, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. From time to time, someone would ask me if I had read it, to which I replied, “Not yet.” Well, to make a long story short, that “not yet” has now come to pass. This past month, I read Heiser’s book and found it to be quite informative and fascinating on a number of levels. So much so, that I’v decided to devote a few blog posts to it. These posts are not going to be like the full blown, chapter by chapter book analysis I often do. There simply is too much in Heiser’s book for that. Nevertheless, I do want to highlight a number of key observations and arguments he has made in the book that should cause any Bible reader to not only see a number of passages in a whole new light, but indeed get a much clearer view of the entire worldview of the Bible.

Truth be told, if you’ve ever read the Bible in depth, you will have come across a few passages from time to time when you found yourself thinking, “What the heck is this about? I have no clue what’s going on!” There are talking snakes, divine/angelic beings seemingly having sex with women, “goat demons,” weird “sons of Anak” giants roaming around Canaan…and who’s the “us/our” when God says, “Let us make man in our image”? The list can go on. If you’re like me, you’ve tended to say something like, “Well, it’s probably something like, well…goat demons…something satanic…moving on!” And so, you are aware of a few weird things here and there, but hey, you’ve gotten the overall picture—so that’s probably good enough.

And sure, it probably is good enough…but you really would kind of like to know the answers to some of the questions, wouldn’t you?

Well, Michael Heiser’s book gives quite a few intriguing answers to a number of them by means of arguing that we in the post-Enlightenment, modern western world really have no clue regarding just how robust the ancient supernatural worldview was. If you’re an atheist, well, there is no God, no devil, no angels or demons—end of story. Even if you are a modern American Christian, you believe in God, probably the existence of some kind of Satan figure, and when you think of angels and demons, you think of glowing figures in white robes and red creature with horns and hooves, and you think they’re just “kinda around somehow,” but you don’t really dwell on it. For the most part, in your day to day life, even though you’re a Christian, you still pretty much think like a modern, Enlightenment-influenced westerner. Therefore, that really does affect how you read the Bible, namely, you miss quite a lot. As Heiser’s book clearly shows, there is quite a lot of “spirit-world stuff” going on in the Bible.

The Basic Argument of Heiser’s Book
The easiest way to highlight the main points from Heiser’s book I’m going to address in the next few posts is to do it by way of bullet-points. What does Heiser argue? Here it is:

• God has an entourage: Throughout the Bible, there are passages that talk of God, the supreme, Most High God (Elohim), having some kind of divine council of other divine beings—sometimes called angels, sometimes called sons of God(sons of Elohim), and sometimes called “gods” (elohim). They are not “Gods” in the same way God is God; but they are divine beings.
• In Genesis 3, a high-ranking divine being (a guardian cherub depicted as the serpent) deceived Adam and Eve and caused them to sin. For that, he is cast down and cursed by God.
• The odd story in Genesis 6:1-4 is about how other divine beings further corrupted humanity by having sex with women and spawning a race of giants—the Nephilim.
• After the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, because humanity continued to rebel against God, He let them be under the jurisdiction of the aforementioned “fallen” divine beings.
• Then, beginning with Abraham, God begins His plan to not only address the problem of sin and death as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin, but to redeem and transform humanity to eventually overthrow and supplant the “fallen” divine beings, and to be rulers of His creation.
• Deuteronomy and the Conquest of Joshua make mention of the descendants of the Nephilim from Genesis 6:1-4, and thus Joshua is depicted as the one who was able to wipe most of them out.
• When we come to Jesus and the Gospels, Jesus is the climax of God’s plan with Israel: When he begins his ministry, he begins by casting out demons (i.e. the “fallen” divine beings) and essentially beginning to make an assault on the kingdom of Satan. Hence, the ministry of Jesus isn’t just about him going around healing people and telling them how they can “go to heaven.” It is about God, through His Son Jesus, finally making a direct assault on the jurisdiction of Satan (that high-ranking cherub from Genesis 3) and the rest of the “fallen” divine beings (who are henceforth known as demons).
• This spiritual warfare is picked up in Paul’s letters as well as Hebrews: With Christ having bound Satan and having triumphing over death, the sending of the Holy Spirit is God’s way of empowering the Church to “reclaim the territory,” if you will, from those “fallen” divine beings, whom Paul often call principalities, powers, thrones, and dominions.

Now, most of us are familiar with those stories of creation, the Fall, the Tower of Babel, the Conquest of Joshua, and obvious Jesus and Paul’s ministry. But I’m hoping that if you read Heiser’s book (or if you just read my next few posts on his book!), you’ll be able to see that there is a lot more to those stories, indeed to the entire biblical story, than you first realized. Not only that, but you’ll be able to make some sense of those various “weird” passages in the Bible that you simply didn’t know what to do with.

This post serves merely as an introduction. After this, I expect to write four posts on Heiser’s book. In my next post, I’m going to focus on what Heiser says regarding the overall supernatural worldview that permeates Genesis 1-11.