Two Powers in Heaven

I recently read a paper at the Pacific Northwest regional meeting of the society of Biblical Literature entitled “The Beth Essentiae (or, Beth of Identity) in Biblical Hebrew.” The paper was on a specific use of the Hebrew preposition beth (one letter; the letter “b”). For definition’s sake:

The beth essentiae “is used to indicate the predicate and especially of the predicative.” That is, at times beth + noun functions as the copula or serves to complement the subject of a clause.

To illustrate:

What’s interesting about this is where other possible uses of beth occur in the Hebrew Bible. I’m going to note two here. If beth essentiae is the correct interpretation of the preposition’s syntax below, a couple of passages have significant implications for the second power (second Yahweh) idea in the Hebrew Bible.

Isaiah 66:15 is a verse noted by Gesenius as an example of the beth essentiae:

See, the LORD (YHWH) is coming with fire-His chariots are like a whirlwind-To vent His anger in fury, His rebuke in flaming fire.

The red “with” is the Tanakh translation of the beth preposition. If we translate this predicatively, we get “See, YHWH is coming as fire . . .” The context clearly hearkens back to the Sinai imagery in passages like 68:18; Exod. 19:18; 24:17 (and possibly, Deut 33:1-2, which is rife with text-critical problems). Why is this significant? Because of the Angel of YHWH description and the burning bush in Exod. 3:1-2-

¹ Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the ?mountain of God. ² ?And ?the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.

Once again, the red “in” marks the occurrence of the preposition beth. If we translate this predicatively we get: “the angel of the Lord appeared to him as a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.  This would conceptually align YHWH coming as a fire in Sinai imagery with the Angel as fire at Sinai.

Technorati Tags: Angel of the LORD, Binitarian Monotheism, Exodus, Isaiah, lesser YHWH, two powers

Readers of two powers material of course know the arguments for seeing both the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man as distinct deity figures. It is core to the two powers idea. My dissertation traced this back to the El-Baal co-regency of Ugarit.

I offer here another take on that, where the same conclusion is made, but from a different wellspring of ancient Near Eastern material. The author is one of my favorites, Julian Morgenstern, whose thoughts on Israelite religion are always provocative. I’m not sure I buy his angle here, but his work is testimony that even “way back” in 1961 there was a scholar not of the evangelical Christian flavor who saw clearly that the Son of Man was a deity figure.  It would be nice if NT scholars paid attention to Israelite religion. Instead they want to explain away the “son of man” language as hardly indicative of any theological significance. That’s what you get when you ignore 3/4 of your Bible and its ancient Near Eastern context.

Technorati Tags: Binitarian Monotheism, Daniel 7, Israelite religion, son of man, two powers

This is the title of very good article by Charles Gieschen that I recently found on the web.  I have mentioned Charles Gieschen before as the author of a schoalrly work on Angelomorphic Christology.  That book is extraordinarily expensive, but this article covers a lot of the same ground with respect to the Name.

Technorati Tags: Gieschen, the Name, Two Powers Doctrine in Judaism