This is part two of The Strange Parts, a series on the passages of Scripture that only make sense with a supernatural worldview. Part one laid out the ground rules. Now we open the strangest psalm in the book.
“God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”
Psalm 82:1 NKJV
Read that verse slowly. God stands up in an assembly, and He judges among the gods. Plural. Your translation is not being sloppy. The Hebrew says elohim twice. God takes His stand in the council, and He passes sentence on elohim.
Now, if you grew up where I did, somebody taught you a way around this verse before you were old enough to ask questions about it. The gods, we were told, are human judges. Corrupt Israelite magistrates. The psalm is about crooked courtrooms, and the word gods is a kind of honorary title, the way we might call a judge Your Honor. It is a tidy solution. It has been around since the rabbis. And it falls apart the moment you read the rest of the psalm.
The Sentence That Gives It Away
“I said, ‘You are gods, And all of you are children of the Most High. But you shall die like men, And fall like one of the princes.’”
Psalm 82:6-7 NKJV
Sit with the logic. You shall die like men. That is a strange sentence to hand a being who was already going to die like a man, because he is one. If the accused here are human judges, the verdict is no verdict at all. Telling a corrupt man he will die like a man is telling him nothing. The threat only has teeth if the ones receiving it are not men. They are beings who would not otherwise die, and their punishment is that they will go down like any petty human prince.
So who are they? Here is where the word study earns its keep. Elohim is not a name like Bob, and it is not a job description like king. It is a word for a resident of the spiritual world. Jehovah is elohim, but no other elohim is Jehovah. The Old Testament uses the word for the God of Israel, for the gods of the nations, for demons, and even for the departed dead when the medium at En Dor sees Samuel rising. What all of them have in common is not power or rank. It is the realm they live in. Calling a being elohim tells you where it lives, not how strong it is. The word never puts anyone on Jehovah’s level. He is the uncreated Creator, and everything else that carries the label is His handiwork.
| Word | Original | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| elohim | אֱלֹהִים | H430 | A resident of the spiritual realm. Used of Jehovah, of the gods of the nations, and of other spirits |
| sod | סוֹד | H5475 | The council or intimate assembly of Jehovah |
| nachalah | נַחֲלָה | H5159 | Inheritance, allotted portion |
| shedim | שֵׁדִים | H7700 | Demons, the spiritual powers behind pagan sacrifice in Deuteronomy 32:17 |
Where the Council Came From
Psalm 82 assumes a backstory, and Deuteronomy 32 supplies it.
“When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, When He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is His people; Jacob is the place of His inheritance.”
Deuteronomy 32:8-9 NKJV
Your NKJV says children of Israel in verse 8, following the Masoretic Text, the medieval Hebrew tradition our Old Testaments are built on. But the oldest witnesses we have tell a different story. The Dead Sea Scrolls read sons of God, and the Septuagint, the Greek translation made two centuries before Christ, agrees. And the older reading makes sense of a detail that otherwise dangles. Israel did not exist yet when the Most High divided the nations at Babel. Jacob had not been born. The verse is saying that when Jehovah broke the rebellious nations apart, He portioned them out under members of His heavenly host, sons of God, and verse 9 lands the contrast. The nations went to the lesser elohim. Jacob, Jehovah kept for Himself.
We will walk through that Babel story properly in the next post. For now, notice what Deuteronomy adds a few verses later. When Israel chased other gods, Moses says they sacrificed to shedim, demons, gods they did not know. The powers behind the nations were real, and they did not stay faithful stewards. They took worship for themselves. Psalm 82 is the courtroom where that treason is finally read out loud. Defrauding the widow and the fatherless, propping up the wicked, ruling the nations into darkness. And the Judge stands up.
Psalm 82 is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a courtroom, and the verdict has already been read.
Jesus Read It This Way
If this still feels like a stretch, take it up with Jesus. In John 10 the crowd picks up stones because He called God His Father, and He answers them from this exact psalm. “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods”‘?” Then He presses the point. If Scripture called them gods, to whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken, how is it blasphemy for the one the Father sanctified and sent into the world to call Himself the Son of God?
The argument only works if Psalm 82 is talking about real beings in a real council. Jesus stands in front of an armed crowd and stakes His defense on the strange reading, the plain one. He read the psalm the way it was written. We should be slow to read it any other way.
Why This Is Good News
Now the pastoral part, because this psalm is not trivia. Look around at the world. The nations still rage, injustice still grinds the poor, and some days it feels like the wrong powers are winning. Psalm 82 names the powers, and then it says something better. They are already under sentence. The psalm ends with a prayer, and it is the prayer this whole series is building toward.
“Arise, O God, judge the earth; For You shall inherit all nations.”
Psalm 82:8 NKJV
All nations. The ones that were portioned out at Babel come home in the end. Hold that promise. The rest of the series is the story of how Jehovah keeps it.
Discussion Questions
- Read Psalm 82 out loud. Where does the human-judges reading strain against the words on the page?
- Why does it matter that elohim describes where a being lives rather than how powerful it is?
- Read Deuteronomy 32:8-9 alongside Deuteronomy 4:19-20. What was Israel’s unique position among the nations?
- How does Jesus’ use of Psalm 82 in John 10:34-36 change the way you read the psalm?
- What injustice in the world weighs on you most right now? What does it mean to pray Psalm 82:8 over it?
Going Deeper
The NET Bible’s translator notes on Deuteronomy 32:8 lay out the textual evidence for sons of God in plain language, and they are free online. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm devotes several early chapters to Psalm 82 and the meaning of elohim. For the brave, read 1 Samuel 28 and notice what the medium calls what she sees. The word is elohim, and it will test whether the definition above has taken hold.
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