Gerald Cooke, "The Sons of the God(s)," Zeitschrift fur die
Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 76.Band Heft 1 (Berlin: Verlag von Alfred Topelmann, 1964) pp. 23, 26, 41, 44, 46 strikes down Exaggerated Monotheism (EM) with the following:
[T]he main question is whether the phrase
M`T M'LHYM in v. 5 is to be read "a little less
than God" or "a little less than gods." The
latter has strong support in the Versions. The
translators of LXX, Syriac and Targum (cf.
Hebrews 2:7) apparently understood the text in
this way when they translated M'LHYM [as]
"angels." .... That the terms "holy ones," "sons
of God(s)," "assembly," and "council" designate
beings of a divine order is beyond question.
Throughout the Old Testament we find many
representations of Yahweh in relation to
subordinate divine beings.... God was spirit;
and the "'Sons of God' were conceived as sharing
in the 'spiritual' nature of God (Gen 6:1ff.)"^82
[Footnote 82: Johnson, The Cultic Prophet in
Ancient Israel (Cardiff, 1944)] p. 170.] ....
[Isaiah's denial of the existence of gods other
than Yahweh] is to be explained in terms of a
distinction [between Yahweh-loving gods and
Yahweh-opposing gods, a distinction allowing for
the existence of gods lesser than Yahweh and
loyal to him] within the heavenly company as a
living reality of Israelite faith, for the poet-
prophet condemns and denies existence to the
gods of Babylon . . . The gods of a foreign
people . . . are denied [meaningful] existence
. . . None deserves the worship which is due
Yahweh alone; none can perform the role which
belongs to Yahweh alone, for there is none like
Yahweh. The denial applies not to the entire
heavenly company, but to the [morally,
spiritually corrupting] gods of a foreign
people, gods that claim the worship due Yahweh
alone.... [W]orship of any of the heavenly
court besides the supreme Judge, Yahweh, is
never countenanced by prophetic Yahwism.
His authority as supreme Judge and King is
never threatened by members of the heavenly
company.
We may add that in this way must we understand Isaiah's writings for emphasis upon monotheism such that we do not come away from the Bible with the thought that there is a contradiction between, for example, Isaiah 44:24 and Job 38:5-7.
EM is a sophistry invented by trinitarians in an effort to create a crisis in theology, this in order that men should see in trinitarianism (sc. the assertion that 'there exist God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, but not that there exist three Gods inasmuch as they are mysteriously constituting one divine life') a rescue for their EM statement, which is as follows: 'The Bible categorically condemns the concept that there can be a plural number of divine beings.' The Bible, however, nowhere states that there is not more than one divine being (divine person).
It rather condemns the concept that there can be more than one Jehovah (De 6:4). It also condemns the concept that there can be more than one real God in the contest between Jehovah and the Gods championed by pagan nations, for there is but one God of universal sovereignty. Accordingly, it condemns the concept that there can be any person--whether he is immaterial, invisible and superhumanly powerful (i.e., whether he is divine, a god by nature) or whether he is a human--who owns enough power in his rulership so that he may remain unaffected by Jehovah's will to bring him, in due course of time, before Jehovah's throne of judgment so that he should be made to answer for any abuse of his power, this regardless of whether that abuse of power was in his usurping it or whether that abuse was in his bringing harm to others so that he was beginning thereby to ruin his theretofore good exercise of a subordinate authority he had received earlier by Jehovah's ordination of him.
Jehovah's attributes are not merely of superhuman magnitude, but they are of umatched magnitude; therefore, these unmatched properties mean that Jehovah is the Supreme Being and cannot be a creature. No, but they rather define Him to be the Creator, the Almighty God--the only true God of Universal Sovereignty.
We may point out here that not only is EM unbiblical, but it was not the theology of "intertestamental" Judaism. We know that not all the Dead Sea Scrolls were of sectarian origin. This appears to be the case with the Hodayot materials (4QH and 1QH mss). We have a contradiction of EM in the Hodayot fragments. Eileen Schuller, "A Hymn from a Cave Four Hodayot Manuscript: 4Q427 7 i+ii," Journal of Biblical Literature 112 No. 4 (1993) 613:
ELIM [Hebrew for "gods"] as a term for angels,
cf. 1QH vii 28 (quoting Exod 15:11), x 8,
xxiii 23, 30 ( = frg. 2.3, 10), 4Q491 11 i 14,
18, 4Q471 6.4, six examples in 4QShirShabb.
It is true, however, that Jewish sectarianism abused Biblical revelation about the existence and nature of spirit creatures (angels), and abused the Biblical revelation that there was a principal angel over all others. Some of this abuse in time developed into a worship of angels. Such abuse, however, we may not lay at the feet of Bible writers, nor may we say that the abuse was concomitant with a popular Judaism's understanding that there was a principal angel of Jehovah. Paul A. Rainbow, "Jewish Monotheism as the Matrix for New Testament Christology: A Review Article," Novum Testamentum 33, 1 (1991) 80: "[But this early] Jewish interest in God's chief angel [did not] result in a hypostatic bifurcation between God's glory and his personal being (pace C. Rowland, J. Fossum). This angelic entity . . . remained "essentially distinct from God".... [Apostolic, Jewish Christianity's] major step was to identify Jesus with God's principal helper . . . and must have arisen directly out of experiences of Jesus . . . Hence the Christology of the early church . . . entailed a binitarian mutation in Jewish monotheism."
We should qualify Rainbow's statements here and elsewhere in his article by pointing out that although apostolic Christianity gave high honor to Jesus as a divine being, yet it did not declare Jesus to be coeval in his person with the Father, nor was there ontological equality with his Father, nor did apostolic Christianity make Jesus an object of sacred service. Apostolic, Jewish Christianity put no greater strain on Biblical monotheism than had a truthfully Shema-honoring Judaism because apostolic Christianity never held that the Son of God is independent of (not ontologically subordinate to) the Father: true (apostolic) Christianity has never held that the Son has ever been at any time ontologically equal to the Father, although the glorified Son embodies a certain fullness of godship (Col 2:9) greater than was so for any other angelic being, even greater than the Son himself had owned in his prehuman existence.
Rainbow (p. 84) points out that "[t]he fact that in some Jewish minds Enoch could become "like one of the glorious ones" (2 Enoch 22.6-10) blurs the boundary between [patriarchs and angels]." We should state that it certainly disproves the contention 'A popular, intertestamental Judaism held that angels were not real hypostases but that they were rather vivid word-pictures for intradeical, divine agencies.' Such a (disproved) contention is to say (the unreal thing) that Judaism held that "angels" were merely poetic ways of describing God's interventions in the cosmos. That there may have been some sects (e.g., the Sadducees) which may have been open to such a concept of nonhypostatic angels seems possible (cf. Ac 23:8), but it is entirely irresponsible to hold that the general belief--one surely held by ancient and intertestamental Judaisms--in personal angels had not given an epistemic readiness within those Judaisms' Shema-honoring monotheism for a popular acceptance that God had a subordinate helper, a chief angel and Spokesman (Logos), and that the Scriptures had taught explicitly and by intimation such a heavenly entity's existence in numerous passages (e.g., Ex 4:16; 23:22-39; Pr 8:22-30; Isa 9:6 LXX).
It is not at all incredible that some Jews--especially those (wrongfully) holding to anthropological dualism--held that there was some sort of occult connection between Jehovah's angelic Logos and the human ministry of Israel's long-awaited Messiah (cf. Mic 5:2; Dan 7:13; 12:1). The connection might have been postulated in some circles in accordance with either a paganish, human-taking metempsychosis, or a human-taking adoptionism occurring either (a) at conception/birth or,-- and this for an ordinary-born Judahite male--(b) later in life at a time when he might receive divinization by an infusion of the Logos into him. The thing to keep in mind is that even though we know that such a connection between the Logos-Wisdom and the foretold Messiah is not supported by canonical Scriptures, yet it per se does not postulate a compromise of the Shema confession inasmuch as by neither of the Messianic models was there a declaration that some supernatural person need be thought of as existing in rivalry to Jehovah God--as though such a concept was commensurate with a sort of (apostate) Christology that later would come under a Talmudic rabbinate's condemnation as the postulation of a "two powers in heaven" heresy.
That Philo was an exponent of a Mosaic apotheosis into (finally?) a subsistent in the Logos should strike down an interpretation that his concept of angels was that they were merely intradeical divine agencies, and that the Logos, the principal angel, was but merely a so-called (i.e., unreal) hypostasis. Rainbow (pp. 84-85) puts it this way: "To posit "divine agency" as a bland, general taxon unifying both classes [sc. personifications and actual, personal beings in the heavenly realm] may be more confusing than illuminating. Hutardo needs to demonstrate that ancient Jews themselves knew such an abstraction . . . before he can use it as a single model to explain the emergence of Christology."
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