What is the Divine Council?

The Council of Heaven and Earth (1 of 2)

The divine council has become an exceptionally popular subject of discussion in recent years- in both Orthodox and non-Orthodox circles. But what is the divine council? Some scholars have understood this as a Near Eastern motif appropriated by the biblical authors in articulating their distinctive view of the world. I find this approach unconvincing, as the motifs of ancient Near Eastern civilization themselves did not simply emerge in a vacuum: rather, the biblical witness attests to a saturation of early mankind in the environment of divine revelation, in a tradition transmitted from Adam to Noah and through Noah to all nations. This helps account for the motifs shared among many ancient cultures, far transcending the limited environment of the Near Eastern and Mesopotamian world. In order to understand the divine council, we must understand it in relation to the whole fabric of Scriptural imagery and in terms of the Biblical view of the cosmos, in which the visible world is an imprint of the invisible world in orbit around the throne of God. We see this in the order of the creation days: on the first day, God creates the “heavens and the earth”, yet it is the “earth” which is without form and void. The heavens represent the prototype, the earth represents the type. The same dynamic is evident in the architecture of the tabernacle and temple, which is a miniature representation of the cosmic order. In the Holy of Holies, which corresponds to what Scripture calls the “Heaven of Heavens”, we see the Manna, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and the Rod of Aaron which blossoms. The Holy Place- which corresponds to the visible Heaven- has the Bread of the Presence, the Menorah, and the Altar of Incense.