On John 10:34-36: Humans or Gods?

We have had to study John 10 when we were concerned about something Jesus teaches about salvation. We are back in John 10 in this series for a different reason. Indeed, we have addressed the matter of the gods in John 10 in the past, but that treatment was brief and left much room for misunderstanding. The goal is to build on the earlier material while retaining the earlier blog entry as a standalone article.

Our ultimate aim is to understand Jesus’ comment to his Jewish interlocutors in 10:34 – 36:

John 10:34-36 ESV
[34] Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? [35] If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— [36] do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?

In this passage, Jesus references Psalm 82 to help his claim. This means that we need to understand the Psalm in its context to understand Jesus’ use of it in John 10. That will help us grasp what John 10:34 – 36 is all about. However, in order to understand Psalm 82, we need to address a few relevant points. We begin with the small matter of heaven and hell.

Heaven, Hell and Double Meanings in Scripture

The Bible employs multiple meanings in talking about heaven and hell. “Heaven” ordinarily refers to the sky and the celestial bodies visible through it. That is the usage in places like Genesis 2:19, Psalm 8:3, and Deuteronomy 17:3. The stars and planetary bodies (which the ancients knew as stars) visible through the sky are also called the host of heaven – host of the sky (Deut 17:3). But “heaven” can also refer to other entities such as God (Daniel 4:26), where God dwells (Genesis 22:11, 15; Deut 26:15), the abode of different divine beings (Isaiah 6:1, 2). 1 Kings 22:19 is worth quoting here:

“And Micaiah said, ‘Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left;”‘

Notice that the use of “host of heaven” here does not refer to stars and planetary bodies but to other divine beings popularly known as angels. (Angels are only one type of many other heavenly beings.) The Bible also uses terms/objects associated with the sky, especially stars, in figurative ways as well (e.g. the morning star).

Now, let us go to hell. There are not as many data points on hell as on heaven, but we still have enough to understand how the term is used. Ordinarily, Sheol refers to the grave, where we typically place our dead bodies (Eccl 9:10). It is the end of life as we know it. Not surprisingly, it is located under the earth (Numbers 16:30 – 33), and it has bars to prevent escape (Job 17:16), an idea that probably emphasizes that dead people do not ordinarily rise again.

But just as with “heaven,” Sheol (translated as Hades in the LXX) also took on new meanings – perhaps, the interaction with the Greek culture has something to do with it. By New Testament times, “sheol” also became the name of the lord of the underworld. Yes, it remains an ordinarily inescapable place. However, some people began to express hope that God would deliver them from Sheol – an observation that may be an example of early Jewish thoughts about a resurrection. Here is Psalm 49:15,

“But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead;
he will surely take me to himself.”

Awareness of multiple layers of meaning can sometimes be required to unpack Bible passages. The famous “gates of hell” in Matthew’s Gospel is an example as we demonstrated in the linked blog entry here.

The Sons of God in the Hebrew Bible

An awareness of occasional double meanings in texts can be beneficial. The Hebrew word (Samayim) rendered “heavens” or “skies” usually also bears other context-dependent meanings. It can refer to Yahweh, Yahweh’s residence, “angels,” etc. Consider the following passage:

Psalm 89:5-8 ESV
[5] Let the heavens praise your wonders, O LORD your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones!

[6] For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD

[7] a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?

[8] O LORD God of hosts, who is mighty as you are, O LORD with your faithfulness all around you?

This passage is quite controversial, as evidenced by the different interpretive options taken by various English translations. But let us see what we may manage to establish.

Ordinarily, one would take – and many readers, in fact, do take – the “let the heavens praise you” language as perhaps a case of praise for God’s astronomical achievement. But that reading is derailed by “the assembly of the holy ones.” Who are these holy ones in the skies? Whoever they are, the passage goes on to tell us that they are “heavenly beings.” Notice that the phrase “O LORD God of hosts” refers not to the stars and planets but to heavenly beings in this context. Indeed, this is how the Lexham Bible translates verse 6:

“For who in the sky is equal to Yahweh?
Who is like Yahweh among the sons of God,”

These heavenly beings who assemble around Yahweh in the skies are also called “sons of God.”

The descriptor, “sons of God,” is found in various places in the Bible. It first appears in Genesis 6, the famous account of the “sons of God” marrying daughters of men. The phrase is also found in places like Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, Psalm 29:1, and Daniel 3:25. These beings are members of God’s divine council or assembly. God involves them in ruling the affairs of his creation. There are several examples of the heavenly council seating to address different businesses in the Bible.

The remarkable observation, which also arguably obfuscates a proper understanding of the use of this term in the Hebrew Bible, is that the New Testament primarily uses “sons of God” for human believers in Christ. This fact probably partly explains why many want to read passages like Genesis 6 and Psalm 89 as referring to humans. But we need not do that. Part of the New Testament reality is that God is reconstituting the assembly of the “holy ones” to include human believers in Jesus and the other faithful heavenly/angelic sons of God. That’s why Paul speaks of our “adoption” as “sons of God” – there were sons of God before humans came to be. God will replace the sons who fell with the Devil with humans.

Let me make a few additional divergent points here. When Paul says humans will judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3), he refers to the sons of God who disobeyed – faithful angels need no condemnation. Also, the term often translated as “saints” is precisely the word rendered as “holy ones.” Newer translations are dropping “saints,” which prevents readers from seeing the continuity of thought with the Old Testament. Lastly, readers have probably noticed seemingly incongruous uses of “sons of God” in the New Testament in contexts that involve women (Romans 8:14, 19, Matthew 5:9, Luke 20:36). The point is not to be anti-women. The point is to retain a connection to the Old Testament’s theme of sons of God who are genderless. That’s the destiny of human believers in Christ.

To summarize the main point, “sons of God” in the Hebrew Bible often refers to heavenly beings who are members of God’s court. In other words, they are judges of some sort. God appointed them to that role as he saw fit. The New Testament authors, who were aware of that theme, extended the idea to cover the future destiny of human believers in God.

The Gods in the Divine Council

It is probably no exaggeration that Psalm 82 is one of our churches’ many “forgotten passages” today. Yet, this Psalm has been described as one of the most important passages in the whole Bible. It is also one about which some scholars are losing hope of ever satisfactorily resolving its various parts. Some of the content of the Psalm is familiar to churchgoers because Jesus referenced it in John 10, and both its use by John and its original setting have been hotly debated. There are two relevant camps of scholarship on the passage: those who insist that the Psalm refers to humans, judges or kings, and those who argue that the text refers to gods other than Yahweh. The Psalm itself is relatively short, and I shall try to address the main points in this piece. To the beginning then:

Tehillim (Psa) 82:1 CJB
Elohim [God] stands in the divine assembly; there with the elohim [judges], he judges:

I am using the Complete Jewish Bible version to highlight some key points. Notice that the Hebrew text of verse one has two classes of “elohim” in it. As I detailed elsewhere, elohim is not a proper noun. In the Hebrew Bible, “elohim” may refer to Yahweh, the gods of ancient Israelites’ neighbors, the spirit of a dead human, or angels. Hebrew grammar rules, as well as contexts, help determine what the referent of elohim is. In this verse of Psalm 82, the first occurrence of elohim refers to Yahweh (partly because of the use of singular verb) while the other occurrence refers to other beings.

Humans or Gods?

Here is where the debate begins: what other beings – divine or human? The more familiar view is that the beings are humans. One assumed advantage of this reading is that it avoids the question of “polytheism” where we have many gods running the show. However, that reading does not deliver as much as it promises. First, the Hebrew Bible has other examples of Yahweh ruling amid other elohim (or gods). Perhaps the clearest example concerns the Hebrew Bible’s account of the judgment of Ahab in 1 Kings 22. Ahab had become a terrible king, and Yahweh was ready to cut him off from the earth for all the atrocities unrepentantly committed. Strangely, however, instead of Yahweh pulling Ahab’s plug to vaporize him from the matrix that is the earth, Yahweh, in a divine council or court, appears to defer to the elohim in attendance on how to proceed:

1 Kings 22:19-21 NRSV
[19] Then Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. [20] And the Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ Then one said one thing, and another said another, [21] until a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, ‘I will entice him.’

The passage goes on to depict Yahweh as approving of the idea of the spirit who said he would entice Ahab to his death.

There are other examples such as in Isaiah 6, Zechariah 3, and Daniel 7. The careful reader of the Old Testament would notice that typically when the God of Israel is depicted, he has a plethora of divine beings around him. That idea may have even informed Elisha’s confidence in 2 Kings 6:16. The New Testament continues the same view. In fact, Revelation chapters 4 and 5 primarily reuse well-known Old Testament images and ideas. (See our treatment of the divine council of Revelation 4 and 5 here.)

Second, if we define our terms correctly, the question of polytheism will not arise. If polytheism is belief in multiple gods, then that is not the picture we see of the ancient Israelites (when they were at their best behavior, of course); they trusted in Yahweh. But they definitely affirmed that there were other gods that the other nations ran after. The polemic that became a title, “The Most High God,” partly resulted from interactions with neighbors and trying to prove who really ran the show. It is worth stressing that God constituted the divine council. He sovereignly chose to run the show with the input of some of his created beings even as he remained omniscient. In Ahab’s death example above, for instance, God knew that the earlier suggestions of the members of the council would not achieve the goal. The moment a solid idea was put forward, he knew it would work. The picture is a God who is secure in himself and willing to share his rule with his elohim.

Notice also that the words of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 do not constitute a denial of the existence of other gods: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
The English Standard Version adds an alternative rendition of this verse in a footnote: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” So, the Shema’s point is that there was only one God for Israel, and he was Yahweh. Now, let us return to Psalm 82:

Tehillim (Psa) 82:6-7 CJB
[6] “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges], sons of the Most High all of you. [7] Nevertheless, you will die like mortals; like any prince, you will fall.’”

This is a well-known idea among churchgoers because of John’s use of it. In its original context in Psalm 82, the elohim being addressed are the same ones in the divine court seated in verse one. These elohim appear to have failed in their role as judges and the cosmic order has suffered as a result. They favor the wicked and deny justice to the fatherless and the poor – perhaps, with the help of human rulers. McClellan observes that the “maintenance of that order was absolutely the purview of each nation’s patron deity” (844), dismissing the human view of the gods in question. It is such a big deal because Yahweh does not call the divine assembly to warn these other elohim. Instead, he pronounces a judgment on them. Yahweh had decided to revoke the elohim’s immortality so that they would die as humans do. Verses 6 and 7 make for an awkward reading if we suppose the elohim are humans. Of course, we established earlier that “sons of God/the Most High” in the Old Testament in contexts like Psalm 82 refers to divine beings.

If Yahweh judges these wayward elohim by sentencing them to death, what would then happen to the governmental vacuum that will result? In other words, since these elohim are judges apparently doing the important task of directing the affairs of the world, what happens if they are no more? The Psalmist ensures there will be no confusion:

Tehillim (Psa) 82:8 CJB
[8] Rise up, Elohim, and judge the earth; for all the nations are yours.

Some translations say God will inherit the nations. So, Yahweh will judge the earth in the meantime. Perhaps it was too early for the Psalmist to know, but New Testament writers will later recognize that glorified humans will play a role in filling the governmental vacuum created by the sentencing of the wayward elohim. Humans will be members of God’s reconstituted divine council in the eschaton.

John 10: Context of the Claim

John 10 is a chapter full of nuggets, and we have had reasons to park on a portion of the chapter in the past. In this piece, we are interested primarily in verses 34-36. In this pericope, Jesus’ Jewish audience asked him to tell them plainly if he was the anticipated Messiah. In response, Jesus says he had already told his interlocutors that he was the Messiah, but they did not believe him. Then, Jesus said to this Jewish crowd that he and his Father are one – a comment that the audience unmistakably understood as Jesus claiming to be divine, leading them to pick up stones to kill him. Before they could cast the stones, Jesus, wanting to ensure that they were still on the same subject of his messiahship, reminded them that he had shown them many miracles in God’s name and asked for which miracle the Jews were going to stone him.

Recall that the conversation began with the Jews enquiring about Jesus’s messiahship. Well, one predicted way the Messiah would be recognized was by miraculous works (Isaiah 61, Luke 4:14 – 28). That was why when John the Baptist questioned whether Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus performed miracles at that moment and told John’s messengers to tell John what they had witnessed (Luke 7:18-23).

The Jewish audience replied by saying they didn’t question the miraculous works of Jesus but his claim to be God while a human. Then, Jesus said,

John 10:34-36 NRSV
[34] Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? [35] If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— [36] can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?

As readers should recognize, Jesus here quotes from Psalm 82 apparently to further buttress his claims of divinity and messiahship. When he said, “If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods,’” Jesus directed his audience (and us) to the Psalm and its context. So, to whom did the word of God come?

Strands of the Human View

As mentioned earlier, scholars and general readers have understood that question in two ways. The majority view is that the “gods” here are humans. There are different strands of this view. One strand sees those to whom God’s word came as referring to the Sinai event when Moses received the Torah on behalf of ancient Israelites. This reading appears to be further supported in that Jesus specifically asked, “Is it not written in your Torah?” If this view is correct, the “gods” in question will be Moses and the Israelites. The word “gods” then becomes a synonym for “humans.” Besides, another strand of the human view sees the relevant event as that depicted in Exodus 18, the encounter of Moses and Jethro. In the Hebrew text, the word “elohim” is used a few times in this passage. Moses is doing his best to teach the Torah to the Israelites and will eventually appoint judges among the Israelites to adjudicate matters according to the Torah. Seeing that “Torah” and “elohim” feature together in this passage just as they do in Jesus words in John 10, some scholars believe that the passage is a possible candidate for understanding Jesus’ comment.

These views suffer from similar problems. First, they do not explain Psalm 82 sufficiently. In that passage, as we already pointed out, the “gods” were in a divine court proceeding that Yahweh chaired. In other words, the council held in heaven. Also, it is a passage that condemns the said gods for ruling corruptly. This is not a testimony that applies to Moses at Sinai or afterward. Most importantly, the human view does not elucidate John 10 but arguably confuses the story. Once again, in John 10, Jesus claimed that he and the Father are one, which is undoubtedly one of the most explicit statements about Jesus’s divinity claim – so clear that his Jewish audience considered it blasphemous. Therefore, it does not help the claim for Jesus to turn around and say, “Oh, no, you guys are misunderstanding me. All I’m saying is that we all – you guys and me – are all gods, as the Torah says.” In other words, the human views would have Jesus back-pedaling on his claims, and this should be concerning to all who believe Jesus to be God. As John 10:38 shows, Jesus does not soften his claim at all. On the contrary, he heightens it when he says, “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father” – a comment that elicited a similar response from the audience as the first.

It may be worth mentioning that the human view had its origin in Rabbinic Judaism’s midrashim (commentaries) on Psalm 82 in the second century AD (Neyrey, 655). In other words, these commentaries were produced about a century after the Jesus event. Furthermore, as modern scholarship in Judaism has revealed, Rabbinic Judaism began partly as a reaction to the first-century Jesus movement (Golan and Postell). The new Judaism sought to cleanse the ancient faith of the bastardizations Jesus supposedly introduced. Hence, it should be no surprise that the Rabbis would settle for an interpretation of Psalm 82 that would dilute the claims of Jesus and his disciples.

The Heavenly Being View

If the Human view is misguided and hinders the understanding of relevant portions of John 10, does the divine view fare any better? Yes, indeed. Psalm 82 is best understood at face value. The gods in question are corrupt heavenly beings under Yahweh’s judgment. So, the ones to whom the word of God came were the elohim. The word of God that came to them was a word of judgment; the divine elohim would become mortal and die as a human does. Notice that Jesus’ “written in the Torah” comment does not undermine this view. First, the Psalms are not properly part of the Torah (or law), yet that is where Jesus’s quote is found. So, unless one wants to say Jesus was mistaken in thinking that the quote was in the Torah, “the law” here is used broadly to mean “the Scripture.” A similar usage is found in John 12:34 and 15:25.

Besides, the gods view strengthens Jesus’s argument in John 10. The argument would proceed in two ways. First, Jesus reminds his Jewish audience that their own scripture affirms the existence of gods – so they should not be dismayed beyond belief about his divinity claim. Notice that Jesus’s comment that “the Father consecrated and sent” him “into the world” further supports the claim that he is elohim who was with the Father prior to being sent into the world. Remember, elohim is a residential term. Also, notice that the argument going from “gods” (35, “if it calls them gods”) to “son of God” (36, “I am the Son of God”) does not undermine the claim. In Psalm 82, these terms are used synonymously:

Psalm 82:6 ESV
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;”

So, “gods” and “sons of the Most High” mean the same thing in this formulaic Jewish poetic parallelism.

Second, having reminded his audience about the Hebrew Scripture’s affirmation of the existence of gods, Jesus could then take the argument back to where he started – that he and the Father are one:

John 10:37-38 ESV
[37] If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; [38] but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Once again, Jesus invites his audience to judge if a mere human could do the miraculous works that the Messiah was supposed to do. If they judge that humans cannot do the works, they should believe the works, which would somehow lead them to the realization that the Father was in Jesus – a claim that probably would not have been controversial per se. But Jesus did not stop there. He also said he was in the Father, so the audience wanted to seize him again to stone him. So, the audience understood that Jesus’ claim is not merely that he is an elohim but that he was the Most High among the elohim.

Works Cited

Broshi, Golan and Seth Postell. “The Christian Roots of the Jewish Faith.” YouTube, uploaded by One For Israel Ministry, 28 March 2024, https://youtu.be/fmtvhvH-s40?si=Y_CsdDHDf7qyB0gE

Daniel McClellan. “The Gods-Complaint: Psalm 82 as a Psalm of Complaint.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 137, no. 4, 2018, pp. 833–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1374.2018.452196. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.

Neyrey, Jerome H. “‘I Said: You Are Gods’: Psalm 82:6 and John 10.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 108, no. 4, 1989, pp. 647–63. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3267185. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.