Something similar is said to have happened to Moses. The death of Moses is described in cryptic terms in the Bible where we learn that he died alone and no one ever knew the location of his grave (Deut. 34:5–6). Later Jewish writers maintained that he was taken up to heaven to dwell. And so, for example, in the apocryphal book of Sirach we learn that God made Moses “equal in glory to the holy ones, and made him great, to the terror of his enemies” (45.1–5). He thus is equal to the angels. Some authors think of him as even greater than the angels, as in a book attributed to a person known as Ezekiel the Tragedian, who indicates that Moses was given a scepter and summoned to sit on a throne, with a diadem placed on his head, so that the “stars” bowed down to him. Recalclass="underline" stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they.
To summarize our findings to this point: the Angel of the Lord is sometimes portrayed in the Bible as being the Lord God himself, and he sometimes appears on earth in human guise. Still other angels—the members of God’s divine council—are called gods and are made mortals. And yet other angels make their appearances on earth in human form. Still more important, some Jewish texts talk about humans becoming angels at death—or even superior to angels and worthy of worship. The ultimate relevance of these findings for our question about how Jesus came to be considered divine should already begin to become apparent. In one of the important studies of early Christian Christology, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado states a key thesis: “I propose the view that the principal angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking . . . provided the earliest Christians with a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God without having to depart from their monotheistic tradition.”9 In other words, if humans could be angels (and angels humans), and if angels could be gods, and if in fact the chief angel could be the Lord himself—then to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form.
Divine Beings Who Beget Semidivine Beings
IN CHAPTER 1 WE saw a common theme in pagan mythology: divine men who were born of the union of a mortal and a god (such as the lusty Zeus). There is nothing exactly like this in ancient Jewish texts, probably because such human passions as sexual desire and lust were regularly deemed completely unsuitable for the God of Israel. Anger and wrath, yes; sexual love, no. Especially if it involved such scandalous activities as rape.
But there is something roughly analogous even in Judaism—not with God himself, but with some of his divine minions, the sons of God, the angels, who are occasionally said to have had sex with mortals and had superhuman offspring. We find the first intimation of some such thing in the early chapters of Genesis.
In a tantalizingly terse passage in Genesis 6, we learn that the “sons of God” looked down upon the earth and saw beautiful women whom they desired. “And they took wives for themselves of all that they chose” (6:2). More specifically, “the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them” (6:4). God was not pleased with this state of affairs, so he decided to limit human life to 120 years and, immediately afterward, decided further to be rid of the whole lot of them by bringing the flood, which only Noah and his family survived. And who were the offspring of these unions of the sons of God and human women? We are told that the “Nephilim” were on the earth in those days. These are the offspring, “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:4). The word Nephilim means “those who have fallen.” In the book of Numbers they are said to have been the giants who originally inhabited the land of Canaan (13:3). Putting all this together, one can see that divine beings—the sons of God—had sex with women on earth, and their semidivine offspring were giants. I am calling them “semidivine” both because they were born of the unions of divine beings and mortals and because they do not actually live in the heavenly realm like other divinities. But they are superior to other humans—giants who made fantastic warriors, for rather obvious reasons. As a side note, I think we can assume that in order for the sons of God to make these women their wives, they had to assume human shape. Here again, then, we have divine beings appearing as humans; and what is more, we have them generating yet other superhuman beings. This is a Jewish version of the pagan myths.
A fuller exposition of this account in the book of Genesis can be found in another Jewish apocalypse attributed to that mysterious figure of biblical history Enoch. The noncanonical book of 1 Enoch is a complicated collection of different texts that have been spliced together by later editors. The first portion of the book, called the Book of the Watchers, comprises chapters 1–36. It originally appears to have existed independently of 1 Enoch itself; scholars typically date it to the third century BCE. A good portion of the Book of the Watchers is an exposition of the brief but suggestive episode about the sons of God in Genesis 6; in 1 Enoch these figures are called the Watchers (chaps. 6–16). Unlike in Genesis 6, here they are also explicitly called “angels.”
We are told that there were two hundred of these errant angels, and we actually learn the names of their leaders, such angelic greats as Semyaz, Ram’el, and Tam’el. In this account the two hundred descend to earth onto Mount Hermon, they each choose a wife, and they have sex with her. The offspring who result are giants indeed: we are told that they were 450 feet tall. As such huge beings, these giants have ravenous appetites; they eventually run out of food and so start eating humans. No wonder God was not pleased.
The angelic beings, the Watchers, perform other illicit activities. They teach people magic, medicine, and astrology—some of the forbidden arts—and they instruct them in metallurgy, so they can make both jewelry and weapons. Three of the angels up in heaven—Michael, Surafel, and Gabriel—look down, see what is happening on earth, and issue a complaint to God about it. God responds by sending the flood to destroy the giants (and everyone else). The Watchers are then bound and cast into a pit in the desert where they are to live in darkness for seventy generations until they are sent into eternal fire on the day of judgment. Enoch is instructed to pronounce judgment upon them: “you used to be holy, spiritual, the living ones, possessing eternal life; but now you have defiled yourselves with women and with the blood of the flesh of begotten children, you have lusted with the blood of the people” (5.4).10 In this Jewish version, the divine beings are condemned for doing what Zeus did in the pagan stories.
The text goes on to explain that “now the giants who are born from the union of the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth. . . . Evil spirits have come out of their bodies” (15.8–9). This appears to be an explanation of where the beings who were later called demons came from. And so here we have a view even closer to that found in the pagan myths: the offspring of the union of divine and human beings are more divine beings—in this case the demonic forces that plague the world.
Other Nonhuman Divine Figures
THERE ARE OTHER FIGURES—APART from God himself—who are sometimes described as divine in ancient Jewish sources, both the Bible and later writings from near the time of Jesus and his followers. The first is modeled on a figure found in an enigmatic passage of scripture, Daniel 7, a figure that came to be known as “the Son of Man.”