I know God didn't take His place among an imaginary Divine Council of the gods:
Psalm 82:1---English Standard Version
1
God has taken his place in the
divine council;
in the midst of the
gods he holds judgment:
And I know the Early Church Fathers didn't believe men becoming gods was a "figure of speech".
“Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, of his boundless love, became what we are that he might make us what he himself is.”—Against Heresies, Book 5, preface
Are you referring to this?
John 10:34-35---King James Version
34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are
gods?
35 If he called them
gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
So--how do you explain that? There are either no other gods--or there is. Claiming they were humans, or just kidding--won't solve your dilemma created by those testimonies.
https://journal.interpreterfoundati...l-in-the-hebrew-bible-and-the-book-of-mormon/
. Deuteronomy 32, sometimes called the Song of Moses, contains a poem Moses is said to have recited to “the whole assembly of Israel” (Deuteronomy 31:30) just before his death. The kjv, following the Masoretic version of the text, renders one crucial part of the poem as follows:
Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people
according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’S portion
is his people; Jacob
is the lot of his inheritance. (vv. 7–9, emphasis added)
[Page 168]As it reads in the kjv, Moses sings here that God established national boundaries based on the number of the children of Israel (בני ישראל;
bĕnê yiśĕrā’ēl) and retained the Israelites (“Jacob”) for himself.
More recent translations of this passage, however, contained a significant variant reading.
Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of the gods; the LORD’S own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.
(NRSV vv. 7–9, emphasis added)
Here the nations are not divided according to the number of the children of Israel but rather according to the number of the gods. Whence this new reading? The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known today as the Septuagint recorded that God divided the nations “according to the number of the angels of God” (κατὰ ἀριθμὸν ἀγγέλων θεοῦ;
kata arithmon angelōn theou). This was long assumed to be an error, and so the Masoretic Text was preferred by the translators of the kjv. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars revisited this matter.
Among the recovered fragments was a text (4QDeutj) giving a much earlier reading of v. 8 that significantly diverged from the Masoretic Text. Rather than dividing the nations according to the number of the children of Israel, God, in this textual witness, is said to have divided the nations according to the number of “the sons of God” (בני אלוהים;
bĕnê ’ēlōhîm).Carmel McCarthy, writing in the authoritative
Biblia Hebraica Quinta, could see no other reason for this variant than it arose through “deliberate emendation” by scribes with “theological motives.”
But the scribal alterations did not end with v. 8. At the conclusion of the song, Moses exults, “Rejoice, O ye nations [גוים;
gōyîm], with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and [Page 169]to his people” (kjv v. 43).
Again, consulting modern translations reveals a significant difference. “Praise, O heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods! For he will avenge the blood of his children, and take vengeance on his adversaries; he will repay those who hate him, and cleanse the land for his people” (
NRSV v. 43, emphasis added). The reading provided by the NRSV (among other modern translations), draws from the textual witness of 4QDeutq. As preserved in this fragment, Moses adjures the members of the divine council, identified as “gods” (אלהים;
’ēlōhîm), to worship Yahweh.
A poetic parallelism conceptually linking the “heavens” (שמים; šāmaîm) and the “gods” (אלהים; ’ēlōhîm) is also evident in the Qumran version, but lost in the Masoretic reworking, which changed “heavens” to “nations” and omitted reference to the gods worshipping Yahweh altogether. The reading in 4QDeutq aligns closely with the Septuagint, which represents Moses as commanding: “Rejoice, O heavens, with him [i.e. God], and bow down before him, all you sons of God” (εὐφράνθητε, οὐρανοί, ἅμα αὐτῷ, καὶ προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες υἱοὶ θεοῦ;
euphanthēte ouranoi hama autō euphanthēte ouranoi hama autō kai proskynēsatōsan autō pantes uioi theou).
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The transmission of Deuteronomy 32 indicates that the divine council is (or was) so overtly present in the text that scribes wishing to downplay the apparent polytheism undertook alterations that would make it theologically suitable for emerging orthodox trends toward a “purer” monotheism. Bernard Levinson sees in this passage “mythological imagery of God presiding over the divine council” that “almost certainly” challenged the monotheism of the copyists handling the text, which in turn “triggered the attempts to purge the text of polytheistic elements.”Paul Sanders summarizes the current scholarly consensus on this matter nicely:
“Both in v. 8b and 43a the fragments from Qumran contain references to gods beside YHWH whereas such references are not found in the [Masoretic Text] and the Samaritan Pentateuch. In the latter versions the absence of these references would seem to be due to deliberate elimination.”
