The company and the ranks

The Elohim file already said the word is a class and Yahweh is one of them. This page is the roster. I want the ranks the texts actually staff, read with Mauro Biglino's concreteness and with the secular scholarship that will not let concreteness turn into one spacecraft for every ancient name. Biglino is willing to see bodies, delegates, and vehicles where a pulpit sees moods. I think the scenes are more honest that way. I also think his equals-sign, the one that welds every pantheon into a single crew, is a step past the roster. The Earth Adam page already declined that passport. Here I want the offices.

Elohim is the company. The word is plural. When the cult is speaking of Yahweh it can take a singular verb, which is how a national god sits inside a class word. When the text is looking at the group, the plural stays plural. Other Elohim, the ones Israel is told not to put before his face. Exodus and Deuteronomy and Joshua are full of that menu. A menu is not monotheism. Jethro, also called Reuel, friend of El, says the comparative sentence out loud in Exodus 18:11. Now I know that Yahweh is greater than all the Elohim, because of what he did in Egypt. Greater by deeds. Not unique by definition. Biglino stays on that. So do I. Yahweh has to give Moses a name in Exodus 3 because a name distinguishes him inside a company. You do not ask the sole being in existence which one he is. Psalm 82 is the verse that keeps the company from evaporating into a metaphor. A council. Gods, sons of the Most High, who will die like men. Biglino reads a government with a long life, not a mood. I run that reading. I do not need them to be visitors from another star for the chart to be real, and I do not need them to be figures of speech either. The Earth Adam is the workshop, the superior local build, the tzelem. This page is who stands in the building.

Elyon is the allotting office above the national portions. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is the tell. The Most High divides the nations. In the Dead Sea scroll and in the old Greek, he divides them according to the sons of God. The medieval Hebrew says sons of Israel, which is a later theology protecting a later creed. Yahweh's share is Jacob. His people. His boundary. Mark S. Smith, in The Early History of God and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, is the secular account of how that West Semitic high god and a southern Yahweh got braided. Biglino reads Elyon as a commander over the allocations. I can use both without merging Elyon, Yahweh, Baal, and a Mesopotamian king into one officer. Judges 11 is the sentence I trust. Jephthah tells the Ammonite king to keep what Chemosh his god gave him. Israel keeps what Yahweh gave Israel. Two land-grant powers. Particular houses. Blood, land, and a portion. I am not sanding that into civic niceness.

Malakhim are messengers, and the noun is a function before it is a species. Men on a diplomatic errand are malakhim too. The Christmas-card angel is a later costume on this word. Biglino's messenger chapter is concrete, and the scenes earn it. At the bush in Exodus 3 a malakh of Yahweh appears in the fire, and then Yahweh is also there, speaking. Two presences. Biglino calls it a crowded bush, and he is right that translators overlap the two until a theology can breathe. Hagar meets a malakh in the wilderness in Genesis 16, a concrete encounter, and the speech slides toward the god's own voice the way a delegate's speech slides. Genesis 22 keeps the distinction cleaner. An Elohim tests Abraham. A malakh calls from the sky and stops the knife. Gideon, in Judges 6, is threshing when a malakh sits with him, waits while he fetches food, and fire takes the offering. David lifts his eyes and sees a malakh with a kherev, a sword, standing between earth and heaven, and the people at the threshing floor see him too and hide. I do not know what a witness in that century was looking at. I know the text thinks he was looking at someone. Biglino reads physical delegates of the company, and in places he reads craft. The delegate I will sign. The hull number is his hypothesis. A hypothesis can sit on the desk without becoming the lexicon.

Archangel is not a Tanakh rank. The word shows up in Jude, Michael the archangel, and in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, a voice of an archangel. It is not in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel, which is already a late book, has Michael as one of the chief princes, the great prince standing for Daniel's people, delayed twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia. Gabriel appears looking like a man. The text calls him a man, an ish, before tradition calls him a choir. Raphael belongs to Tobit. The list of seven is First Enoch, a Second Temple vision, not Moses. What Daniel still preserves, and what I care about, is the older chart surviving inside the newer book. Peoples have princes. Persia has one. Israel has one. Greece is coming. That is allotment. It is the henotheist roster wearing a later coat. Sunday school took Enoch's list, Jude's title, and Daniel's princes, and issued one heavenly bureaucracy. Pretty. Later. Not the consonants.

Cherubim are the rank Biglino is boldest about, and I want both readings in the room. In 2 Samuel 22 Yahweh rides a cherub and flies. The temple in First Kings sets two cherubim in the inner shrine, ten cubits high, wings stretching, the kanaf that covers. Biglino reads a something you can sit on and move through the air. Ezekiel then gives wheels beside the cherubim, a wheel within a wheel, and the glory lifting off. He is looking at that and thinking vehicle. The secular file is looking at the same furniture and thinking Syro-Mesopotamian throne guardians, composite creatures, the ark's lid, a king enthroned above the cherubim. Both descriptions are about objects and bodies, not about a mood. I like his mount reading as a live hypothesis sitting on real temple kit. I do not pretend the lexicon says spacecraft, and I do not pretend the pulpit's baby with wings is what the builders carved. Seraphim are a different entry. Isaiah 6. Burning ones. Six wings. A coal to the mouth. A throne room. Later Christian art, and Pseudo-Dionysius centuries afterward, merged cherub, seraph, and archangel into nine choirs. The Tanakh did not. Ezekiel's living creatures get identified with the cherubim inside Ezekiel itself. That is the book editing its own roster. It is still not the word angel.

Shedim are lower, and the text is insulting about it. Deuteronomy 32:17 says they sacrificed to shedim, not to an eloah, Elohim they had not known, new ones their fathers had not feared. Psalm 106 says they sacrificed sons and daughters to the shedim. Biglino's point is the rank. These are not even Elohim. He connects the word to Akkadian shedu, a lesser guardian figure, the kind of power set at a gate, an intermediary rather than a commander. I think that connection is the right neighborhood. The Septuagint then renders the word with the Greek for demon, and the authorized Bibles follow. That is how a lower office in a Semitic company becomes the Christian demon. McClellan has said in public what the lexicon supports. There is no Hebrew Bible term that already means that later demon. Lower office is also not a face I am ranking, and not a people. It is a grade. The verse is angry that the sacrifice went beneath the Elohim, to powers the fathers did not know. Anger at a lower altar is still henotheism. It assumes the higher ones are real.

Under and beside the company are the powers of a house and a landscape, and Biglino's monarchic chapters are honest that Israel kept them. Asherah is Athirat at Ugarit, a consort, and she is also the pole the reformers cut down. The inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud, which he cites, bless by Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah. The same site says Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah. A national god with a consort is an office, not a Halloween story. Anat and Tammuz sit in the same monarchic neighborhood he lists. The host of heaven, the army of the skies, is worshipped by Manasseh inside Yahweh's own temple, and Deuteronomy 4:19 says those powers were allotted to the nations under heaven. Israel is told to stay with its portion. The others are not called imaginary. Seirim, the goat-beings, are who Leviticus 17 tells Israel to stop sacrificing to, and they prowl the ruin poems in Isaiah. Lilith is one line in Isaiah 34, a night creature in an oracle against Edom. The medieval demoness is a later biography hung on a single noun. Azazel in Leviticus 16 is the goat sent to the wilderness, a power or a place of the wild. First Enoch later makes him a teacher of forbidden arts. Teraphim are Rachel's theft in Genesis 31, Laban's household gods, small enough to sit in a saddle, inherited the way a house inherits a hearth. Ruach is its own word. Wind. Breath. A rush that comes on a judge and he fights. I will not fold it into the later Holy Spirit as a third person. A wind on the water in Genesis 1 can be a wind. Biglino pairs ruach with the cherub Yahweh rides. Useful. Not a creed.

The giants have a chapter in his book and a page on this desk already. The sons of the Elohim, the daughters of the Adam, a spy report in Numbers about bodies that looked huge. That is the Earth Adam's neighborhood, a superior build and a flood tale. I am not retelling it inside the roster. A rank can include the claim that some bodies were not ordinary. The claim does not need a pigment chart, and it does not need me to merge the Nephilim with every later giant story on earth.

So the structure I actually use is this. A company of Elohim. An allotting Elyon. National powers with lands and tempers. Messengers who show up in rooms and on roads. Princes of peoples who are not yet archangels. Throne creatures the temple carved, which Biglino is willing to read as mounts and which I keep as a hypothesis on top of the carving. Shedim beneath the Elohim. House gods, a consort, goat-beings, a night creature, a wilderness goat, an army in the sky that was allotted and not denied. A ruach that is not automatically a person. Christianity's angel manual is a beautiful later building. It is not this roster. The next page is what happened when a cult promoted one member of the company into the only one, and then had to invent a phantom so the promotion would have an opposite. I am still reading the names. A new inscription can move a rank. I would rather move it than defend a choir I was handed.