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.
