The divine council
When God Gave Israel to Yhwh
Moses says the Most High divided the nations and gave Jacob to Yhwh. The talk asks why later copies changed that, and why Christianity still calls Yhwh the Most High.
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Summary
He sets the Israel-Iran war aside without taking a side, then reads Deuteronomy 32:7–9 as Moses' words after Aaron has been stripped and left to die, with Moses knowing he is next. Verse 7 tells the people to ask their fathers and elders, and those elders are about to be wiped out too, so the memory has to be retrieved at once. The context is a deathbed song, not a calm creed.
Verse 8 says the Most High divided humankind according to the number of the sons of Elohim, and Jacob is Yhwh's special possession. English translations often do not print sons of Elohim. The Dead Sea Scrolls, from the second century BCE and found in 1947, read sons of God, and a Masoretic copy from 1008 reads sons of Israel. Michael Heiser is described as accepting that the scrolls are older, and as still refusing the result that Yhwh received the Hebrews from someone else.
The sons of Elohim are treated as real persons, male and female, since humans are made in their image. In the same talk Yhwh is called a spiritual entity with jurisdiction over one nation, a rival son, and not the Father Jesus reveals. Restoring the earlier reading, the talk says, would force Christianity and Judaism to be rebuilt. Yhwh's conduct in the Exodus, forming the people into an army after a promise of a better place they did not receive, is offered as the character of a son who would try to overthrow his Father, while Jesus fulfills a law that required love and worship of Yhwh and humanity is described as legally free.
