While the decision was harsh, the other nations are not completely forsaken. Yahweh disinherited the nations, and in the very next chapter of Genesis, he calls Abram out of—you guessed it—Mesopotamia.

God alone created humankind to function as his administrators on earth. But he has also created the other elohim of the unseen realm. They are also like him. They carry out his will in that realm, acting as his representatives. They are his heavenly council in the unseen world. We are God’s council and administration in this realm. Consequently,

In Genesis 3:5, Eve is being told that if she violates God’s command, she and Adam will become as elohim, knowing good and evil. Notice that the phrase is “knowing good and evil,” not will be capable of good and evil. As free-will beings, Adam and Eve were already capable of disobedience. Like God’s holy ones in council, they were imperfect.

Ancient people thought the stars were living entities.3 Their reasoning was simple: Many stars moved. That was a sign of life to the ancient mind. Stars were the shining glory of living beings.

The covenant between Yahweh and Israel enacted at Sinai follows the conventions of a type of covenant known from ancient Near Eastern sources. Scholars refer to it as a vassal treaty.13 This type of covenant was, in essence, an oath of loyalty by an inferior (the vassal, here Israel) to a superior (Yahweh, the initiator of the agreement).

At Sinai, Moses and others saw the seated God of Israel, under whose feet was a pavement “like sapphire tile work and like the very heavens for clearness” (Exod 24:9–10).

Ziggurats were divine abodes, places where Mesopotamians believed heaven and earth intersected.8 The nature of this structure makes evident the purpose in building it—to bring the divine down to earth.

Egypt’s temples are carved and painted with the imagery of luscious gardens, or why pyramids and ziggurats were built. These structures were mountains made by human hands which served as gateways to the spiritual world, the realm of the gods, in life or in death. They were metaphors in stone.

The point of Genesis 6:1–4 was to express contempt for the divine Mesopotamian apkallus and their giant offspring. Biblical writers had an easy choice of vocabulary for divine beings: sons of God. Their readers would know that the phrase pointed to divine beings, and other passages in the Torah (Deut 32:17) labeled other divine beings as demons