What the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ugaritic literature, and the Hebrew Bible reveal about Israel’s developing understanding of YHWH.
RAF Editorial Research
The Question Behind the Text
Modern readers frequently approach the Hebrew Bible assuming that ancient Israel possessed the same fully developed understanding of monotheism found in later Jewish and Christian theology.
That assumption deserves examination.
The biblical texts emerged across many centuries, in communities shaped by changing political circumstances, religious practices, and encounters with neighboring cultures. Their descriptions of the divine world are not always identical.
Some passages emphasize YHWH’s exclusive authority. Others portray a heavenly assembly populated by divine beings who deliberate, receive assignments, or stand under divine judgment.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 provides one of the clearest windows into this older religious vocabulary.
The passage describes the Most High distributing the nations and identifies Israel as YHWH’s particular inheritance.
Its significance becomes apparent when the surviving textual witnesses are compared.
The familiar Hebrew reading differs from a version preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That difference is not incidental. It changes the identity of those according to whom the nations were divided.
The evidence raises two related but distinct questions.
First, did the earlier text envision a heavenly assembly of divine beings?
Second, did that assembly originally distinguish YHWH from El Elyon, the Most High?
The first question can be answered with considerable confidence. The second requires a broader historical argument.
1. Reading Deuteronomy 32 in Context
Deuteronomy 32 is presented as the Song of Moses, a poetic warning concerning Israel’s covenantal relationship with YHWH.
The song begins by proclaiming YHWH’s greatness and recalling his care for Israel. It then recounts Israel’s unfaithfulness, judgment, and eventual vindication.
Verses 8–9 look backward to the division of the nations.
The NASB 1995 follows the traditional Hebrew text, identifying the boundaries of the peoples as established according to the number of the sons of Israel.
Verse 9 then identifies Jacob as YHWH’s inheritance.
The movement of the poem is important.
The nations receive their boundaries. Israel receives a particular relationship with YHWH. The passage explains Israel’s special position within a larger arrangement of humanity.
This is not simply a declaration that Israel worships the correct deity while everyone else worships imaginary beings.
The older textual evidence suggests a more complex picture.
2. Three Textual Traditions, Two Different Pictures
The principal witnesses to Deuteronomy 32:8 preserve different readings.
| Textual witness | Reading at Deuteronomy 32:8 |
|---|---|
| Masoretic Text | Bene Yisra’el — sons of Israel |
| Dead Sea Scrolls, 4QDeutʲ (4Q37) | Bene Elohim — sons of God |
| Septuagint, principal Greek tradition | Angelōn Theou — angels of God |
| Some Greek witnesses | Huiōn Theou — sons of God |
The distinction matters.
The Masoretic reading connects the distribution of the nations to Israel’s descendants. One possible explanation involves the traditional number of seventy descendants of Jacob who entered Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:22; Genesis 46:27).
The alternative reading connects the distribution to divine beings.
Under that reading, the Most High orders the nations according to members of a heavenly assembly.
The Greek references to angels need not imply that the Hebrew originally described the same category of beings understood in later Christian angelology. Greek translators could use angelic terminology to represent older Hebrew language about divine beings.
Textual critic Emanuel Tov argues that the Qumran and Greek evidence preserves the earlier reading and that the Masoretic version reflects a subsequent scribal alteration. His explanation accounts for both the manuscript evidence and the theological difficulty posed by the older wording. [1]
The direction of the change is historically intelligible.
A scribe working within an increasingly exclusive monotheistic framework could find a reference to divine beings participating in the distribution of nations problematic.
Replacing those beings with Israel’s descendants would remove that difficulty.
The reverse change is harder to explain.
Why would a scribe introduce a more complicated divine assembly into a text that already referred to Israel?
This does not make every detail of the textual history certain. The precise wording of the earliest recoverable Hebrew form remains debated, and the date of the alteration cannot be established simply from the surviving manuscripts.
Nevertheless, the cumulative evidence strongly favors a reference to divine beings as the earlier reading.
A manuscript distinction worth preserving
The relevant Qumran witness is 4QDeutʲ (4Q37).
In a 2026 article, Mikhail G. Seleznev documents how an alleged additional witness, 4QDeutᑫ, entered scholarly discussion despite the relevant fragment not actually existing. The error continued circulating even after official manuscript publications clarified the situation. [2]
This correction does not overturn the textual case for divine beings.
It demonstrates why manuscript identifications must be checked rather than repeated from secondary summaries.
3. The Divine Assembly in the Ancient Near East
Deuteronomy 32 becomes more intelligible when placed alongside religious literature from ancient Ugarit, a city on the Syrian coast whose surviving texts preserve important Northwest Semitic religious traditions.
The Ugaritic texts describe a divine world organized around El, a senior deity associated with authority, fatherhood, and the divine household.
Other divine figures participate in that household, including Athirat, commonly associated with the biblical name Asherah, and Baal, the storm deity.
In KTU 1.4 VI, the Baal Cycle refers to seventy sons of Athirat.
The number is significant, although it should not be treated as a verified census of seventy individually identifiable deities.
It belongs to the language of divine family and cosmic order.
The Hebrew Bible also preserves a tradition of seventy nations in Genesis 10.
Scholars including John Day and Nicolas Wyatt have examined the possible conceptual relationship between these traditions. [3]
The comparison is persuasive because it involves more than a coincidental number.
Both bodies of literature describe divine order through family and assembly imagery. Both operate within a cultural environment where peoples and territories could be understood in relation to particular deities.
This does not demonstrate that the author of Deuteronomy 32 copied a specific Ugaritic tablet.
The stronger conclusion is that both texts participate in a recognizable Northwest Semitic religious world.
Deuteronomy 32 therefore does not appear in a cultural vacuum.
Its imagery of nations, divine beings, and allotment has intelligible ancient parallels.
4. Were El Elyon and YHWH Originally Distinct?
This is where the historical investigation becomes more demanding.
Deuteronomy 32:8 identifies the distributor of the nations as Elyon, meaning Most High.
Verse 9 identifies Israel as the portion belonging to YHWH.
One interpretation understands these verses as preserving an older distinction between two deities.
Under this reconstruction, El Elyon occupies the senior position within the divine order. The nations are distributed among divine beings, and YHWH receives Israel.
Mark S. Smith develops this interpretation within his broader reconstruction of Israelite religion. He argues that YHWH and El were initially distinguishable in some early traditions before becoming identified within Israelite worship. [4]
Daniel O. McClellan likewise reads Deuteronomy 32:8–9 as evidence for an earlier divine-council arrangement in which YHWH appears subordinate to Elyon. [5]
This reconstruction has substantial explanatory power.
It accounts for the allotment language, the distinction between the names in consecutive verses, and the similarities to Northwest Semitic divine-family traditions.
It also fits a wider historical picture in which Israelite religion developed within, rather than independently of, the Canaanite cultural environment.
But an important objection must be addressed.
The alternative reading
Michael S. Heiser argues that Deuteronomy 32 need not distinguish YHWH from El Elyon.
The preceding verses already identify YHWH as Israel’s creator and father. In the song’s present literary form, descriptions associated with El can be applied directly to YHWH.
Under this interpretation, the Most High and YHWH are the same deity.
YHWH distributes the nations among subordinate heavenly beings while retaining Israel as his own inheritance.
Heiser accepts the earlier textual reading involving divine beings but rejects the conclusion that YHWH must therefore have been one of El’s subordinate sons. [6]
This is a serious counterargument.
The passage never explicitly states that YHWH is a son of Elyon.
Nor does it directly say that Elyon handed Israel to YHWH.
Those conclusions emerge from the relationship between the allotment language and the comparative evidence.
The distinction matters because the manuscript reading and the historical reconstruction are not the same claim.
The older text’s reference to divine beings is strongly established.
The conclusion that YHWH originally occupied a subordinate position within El’s household is a strong but contested historical inference.
The final literary form of Deuteronomy 32 may already reflect the identification of YHWH with the supreme deity, even if an older tradition behind the passage distinguished them.
The evidence supports taking that historical development seriously without pretending that the earliest stage can be reconstructed in every detail.
5. Psalm 82 and the Changing Divine Council
Psalm 82 supplies another important comparison.
The psalm portrays God standing in a divine assembly and rendering judgment among beings called elohim.
Verse 6 identifies those addressed as gods and sons of the Most High.
The beings are condemned for unjust judgment and told that they will die like mortals.
The psalm concludes with a call for God to judge the earth and inherit all nations.
This imagery is difficult to reduce to a generic statement about Israelite religious leadership.
An interpretation identifying the condemned figures as human judges has a long history and remains defensible within some theological readings.
However, the combination of divine assembly language, heavenly sonship, judgment, and inheritance of the nations strongly favors an interpretation involving divine beings.
Psalm 82 also raises an important historical possibility.
Deuteronomy 32 portrays the nations being distributed.
Psalm 82 portrays unjust rulers being judged and calls for divine authority over all nations.
Read together, the texts can be understood as reflecting a movement from distributed divine jurisdiction toward the universal authority of Israel’s God.
That interpretation is strengthened by other biblical depictions of heavenly assemblies, including 1 Kings 22:19–23, Job 1–2, and Psalm 89:5–7.
Yet these passages need not have originated in the same period or from communities with identical religious assumptions.
Their relationship must be reconstructed, not assumed.
The strongest historical observation is that the Hebrew Bible preserves divine-council imagery in several distinct literary settings.
Later monotheistic theology did not simply erase every trace of that imagery.
Instead, the language could be retained and reinterpreted within increasingly exclusive claims about YHWH’s authority.
6. Deuteronomy 4 and the Reinterpretation of the Nations
Deuteronomy 4:19–20 provides a particularly revealing comparison.
The passage warns Israel against worshiping the heavenly bodies, which are described as allotted to the peoples under heaven.
Israel, by contrast, has been taken by YHWH as his own people.
The similarity to Deuteronomy 32 is striking.
Both passages distinguish Israel from the nations through divine allocation.
Both connect that distinction to YHWH’s particular relationship with Israel.
But the language of Deuteronomy 4 places the arrangement within a framework emphasizing YHWH’s exclusive authority.
Rather than describing the nations as distributed according to divine sons, it describes heavenly bodies allotted to the nations.
This can reasonably be understood as a reinterpretation of older cosmic-allotment traditions.
It does not require the conclusion that the two passages were written by the same author or composed at the same time.
Nor does it provide an exact date for the transition.
What it does demonstrate is that the biblical tradition contains different ways of explaining Israel’s place among the nations.
The development toward explicit monotheistic declarations becomes especially pronounced in texts such as Isaiah 44–45.
There YHWH is not merely Israel’s deity or the highest member of a divine assembly.
He is proclaimed as the only God.
The historical movement is not necessarily a neat progression in which every Israelite community abandoned older beliefs simultaneously.
Religious change rarely occurs so uniformly.
Different understandings can coexist, compete, and be preserved within the same developing literary tradition.
7. What This Evidence Does—and Does Not—Establish
The evidence supports several conclusions.
First, the earlier reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 almost certainly referred to divine beings.
The Qumran manuscript, Greek traditions, literary context, and comparative evidence converge strongly on this conclusion.
Second, Israelite religious language preserves substantial continuity with older Northwest Semitic traditions.
The divine assembly, heavenly sonship, and cosmic allotment are not uniquely Israelite inventions detached from the surrounding culture.
Third, the identification of YHWH with the supreme deity developed within a historically complex religious environment.
The relationship between YHWH and El is not adequately explained by assuming that all biblical authors employed identical theological categories.
The reconstruction of an earlier distinction between YHWH and El is supported by meaningful cumulative evidence, although its precise history remains disputed.
Fourth, the textual evidence does not establish that Israel’s religious leaders deliberately invented YHWH to justify conquest.
That would require evidence concerning political intentions, religious manipulation, and historical causation that Deuteronomy 32 does not provide.
Religious traditions can develop, merge, and acquire new meanings without every development representing a conscious fabrication.
Nor does the evidence establish the metaphysical nonexistence of YHWH.
Historical scholarship can investigate the development of claims about a deity. It cannot directly determine whether that deity exists beyond the communities making those claims.
These are different categories of inquiry.
8. Reading the Bible as a Historical Collection
The central problem in discussions of Israelite monotheism is often not the evidence itself.
It is the expectation imposed upon that evidence.
If readers assume that every biblical text must express the same theological system in precisely the same terms, differences become problems requiring harmonization.
If readers assume that every difference proves deliberate deception, the same evidence becomes ammunition for an equally predetermined conclusion.
Neither approach adequately respects the historical record.
Deuteronomy 32 is valuable precisely because it preserves a religious world that later readers may find unfamiliar.
The Most High distributes nations. Divine beings participate in the structure of that world. Israel occupies a distinctive position as YHWH’s inheritance.
Later biblical writings develop increasingly explicit claims about YHWH’s universal authority and exclusive divinity.
The evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Israel’s understanding of the divine world underwent historical development.
What remains open is the precise sequence, timing, and theological significance of every stage.
The responsible task is not to erase that development.
It is to investigate it.
Restoring an understanding of ancient faith requires recovering the conceptual world in which its texts emerged, even when that world differs from the theology inherited by later communities.
That is not an argument against careful biblical interpretation.
It is the foundation of it.
Omnia in Christo.
Notes and Scholarly References
1. Emanuel Tov, “The Sons of Israel or God? – Deuteronomy 32:8,” TheTorah.com, August 24, 2023, updated October 9, 2026, https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-sons-of-israel-or-god-deuteronomy-32-8. See also Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 513–18.
2. Mikhail G. Seleznev, “From the History of the LXX and Qumran Studies: The Birth, Death, and Posthumous Existence of an Alleged Deut 32:8 Fragment of 4QDeutᑫ,” Vestnik Drevney Istorii 86, no. 3 (2026): 589–92, https://doi.org/10.7868/S3034525126030030.
3. John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, JSOTSup 265 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 23–24; Nicolas Wyatt, “The Seventy Sons of Athirat, the Nations of the World, Deuteronomy 32.6b, 8–9, and the Myth of Divine Election,” in Reflection and Refraction: Studies in Biblical Historiography in Honour of A. Graeme Auld, ed. Robert Rezetko et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 547–56.
4. Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 32–33, https://academic.oup.com/book/12858.
5. Daniel O. McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, Ancient Near East Monographs 29 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2022), 125–26, https://cart.sbl-site.org/books/062832C.
6. Michael S. Heiser, “Are Yahweh and El Distinct Deities in Deut 32:8–9 and Psalm 82?,” Hiphil 3 (2006), https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lts_fac_pubs/278/. See also Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001): 52–74.
7. Innocent Himbaza, “Dt 32,8, une correction tardive des scribes: Essai d’interprétation et de datation,” Biblica 83, no. 4 (2002): 527–48, https://doi.org/10.2143/BIB.83.4.3200324.
8. Primary texts: Deuteronomy 4:19–20; 10:22; 32:1–43; Genesis 10; 14:18–22; Psalm 82; Psalm 89:5–7; 1 Kings 22:19–23; Job 1–2; Isaiah 44–45; Ugaritic KTU 1.4 VI. Biblical references follow the NASB 1995 unless otherwise indicated. Text-critical readings are identified separately.
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