This is the first of a video series by The Bible Project illustrating material from biblical scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s Unseen Realm.
In the first pages of the Bible, we’re introduced to God and humans as the main characters. But there’s also a whole cast of spiritual beings who play an important role throughout the Bible, though they’re often in the background. In this video, we begin to explore these beings and how they fit into the unified storyline of the Bible.
Spiritual Beings
If you’ve ever been puzzled about angels, demons, and other spiritual beings in the Bible, you’re not alone! Our modern depictions of these creatures are mostly based on misunderstandings of who they are and how they fit into the overall storyline of the Bible. In this first installment of our Spiritual Beings video series, we’ll introduce the biblical concept of spiritual beings and rediscover their role in the biblical story that leads to Jesus.
I get a lot of email about my views on Yahweh and divine plurality. You’d think people would find my material via Google or my divine council website, but I guess not. I’m making this page for you all, of course, but also to provide myself a convenient one-stop link to send people.
Mike’s “lay level” work on the divine council and the nature of Israelite monotheism (the basic essays)
These live on my divine council site; the items selected here can also be found in the Faithlife Study Bible (FSB), the Lexham Bible Dictionary (LBD) and a volume of the InterVarsity Press OT Reference series (IVP). They are short distillations of the topics:
I should also mention that these issues feature prominently (among many other points of biblical theology) in my best-selling book, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible(Lexham Press, 2015), and its “person-in-the-pew” distillation, Supernatural: What the Bible Says About the Unseen World and Why It Matters (Lexham Press, 2015).
Mike’s relevant scholarly publications
Some of these live on my divine council site as well. Others cannot be posted here due to the wishes of the academic journal that published the content (if you subscribe to my newsletter you can access articles not linked here via a protected folder). These articles tend to be technical, save for the one critiquing Mormonism’s use of Psalm 82.
If you want to find believers near you interested in The Divine Council, the Naked Bible Podcast, and other Biblical material produced by Dr. Michael Heiser, check out the new MIQLAT Network!
The link to join the network is published inside each issue of Dr. Heiser’s newsletter so you must be subscribed to the Miqlat Newsletter to join.
It’s up to you to exchange contact info with those who contact you via the network. If you don’t want to give out your email address feel free to resume your conversation on the DivineCouncil.org forum via private thread, private message, or live chat.
I’ve already found four local people I would not have known about, otherwise!
Dr. Heiser’s Naked Bible podcast is one of my favorites. With 215 episodes and climbing it’s become a challenge to find which episode mentions a topic of interest. Thankfully, there’s a transcript made of each episode. But how do you search the content of hundreds of separate files?
Searching Filenames is Easy; Searching File Content is Hard
Searching the contents of hundreds of files is no easy task. The two best (only?) tools for this are Adobe Acrobat Pro and DevonThink.
Acrobat Pro
With Acrobat Pro, there are two options to search multiple pdfs: search a directory or search an index. My searches take five seconds without an index and two seconds with an index. I haven’t used Acrobat to search more than 200 files in a directory but presume the lag time will increase files increase.
DevonThink
DevonThink searches return instantly. An index is built and updated as files are imported and the search time for 215 NB transcripts is not discernible. I have another directory with 1900 files of similar size and the search time for that directory is also indiscernible. Wow.
Recommendation
Both Acrobat and DevonThink are crucial to my workflows. If I had to choose one tool for this job, however, it would be DevonThink. Searching the contents of thousands of files is what it’s designed to do, and it does it exceptionally well. If you need to perform searches like this on a routine basis, the $149 cost is a no-brainer. It comes with the best OCR conversion engine (ABBYY FineReader) which costs more than DevonThink itself, go figure.
Adobe seems to overprice the standalone purchase of their software to encourage users to choose a subscription, instead. Since I use six of the tools in the Adobe CC suite on a routine basis, the $50/month is justified. Your mileage may vary.
