The land of elyon how to#
The land of elyon series#

Asaph is in the heading of a dozen poems, all of which have interesting content (Psalms 50, 73–83). The heading of this poem isn’t too troublesome.

įor you shall make your estate among all the nations.” //

I added quotation marks to help you follow the trail.Įlohim stands in the assembly of El / A midst the deities he indicts: //Ģ “How long will you judge perversely / an d to the wicked will you show favor!? // (Selah)ģ ‘Champion wretched and orphan! / L owly and poor vindicate! //Ĥ Rescue wretched and needy! / F rom the hand of criminals extricate!’ //ĥ They never knew and do not see / in darkness do they go about /Īll the foundations of the earth are being shaken!” //Ħ “I had declared: ‘You are divine beings!’ / and: ‘You all are sons of Elyon!’ //ħ But (now), like humanity shall you die / and like any of the rulers shall you fall.

In this case, first speaks the narrator, then Elohim (who at one point quotes El Elyon), then El Elyon (who at one point quotes himself). I always say, if you care about a case, follow the quotes, who’s speaking and who’s quoting whom. Also, “El” and “Elyon” are the same god, “El Elyon” actually, and El Elyon is a different god than Elohim (Yahweh). Stay with me here: The poem says “Elohim” instead of “Yahweh,” but they’re the same god. Gods in those days used aliases and you have to keep track of who’s who. But only the writer of Psalm 82 gives an account of the change from many gods to Yahweh (and El Elyon). Heck, one text has it all in plain sight: El Elyon divided up the world among the gods, but Yahweh selected for himself a landless people, “Jacob” (an alias for “Israel”), to help them thrive (Deuteronomy 32:8–14 if you don’t trust me, and you shouldn’t, go to the bottom of this case file). Plenty of biblical writers talk about divine councils and gods running the world. If that was too much, here’s the quick version. Yahweh is the last god standing in effect. With no gang of gods to run anymore, he goes into retirement. The father and manager of the gods, El Elyon, is still around he just becomes redundant. Three, the poem doesn’t even say that when it was all over, Yahweh was the only god left. It says that originally there were many gods, each running its own territory and people, but then Yahweh took over for all of them. It does not say that people once thought there were many gods, then decided actually there is only one. Second unusual aspect: the poem presents the moment when Yahweh becomes the only god running the world. But the reader doesn’t watch a performed scene they read the text and conjure its scene in their own mind.

It’s set up like a journalist holding a video-camera: first they introduce what is happening, then they allow the camera to capture the scene directly, so the viewer hears and sees what is unfolding in real time. But this poem is dramatic it portrays an event in the present. One, most poems in the Book of Psalms are either lyrical, in which someone expresses a sentiment in the present, or narrative, in which someone tells an event in the past. Three things make this a unique case for me.

The land of elyon series#

Its form is also classic, a series of lines that are similar in length, and each line has mainly two but sometimes three balanced parts (Bible sleuths call it parallelism).

The land of elyon how to#

Its theme is that Yahweh is just and he knows how to manage the world. When you first look at this case, it looks run-of-the-mill, boilerplate, like so many other poems in the Book of Psalms.