Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Was the King of Israel Called God??
Yesterday I showed that beings other than God could be called God in the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish literature. It seems strange, but there it is. I continue now with an especially important case in point: the king of Israel. In this case there doesn't seem to be much ambiguity about the matter. Again, this is from my book How Jesus Became God. ****************************** Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that the Israelite notion that the human king could be considered in some sense divine ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh.[1] Even in Egypt, where the king was God, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars. But he was a God. In Egyptian and Roman circles, there were levels of divinity. So too, as we have seen, in Jewish circles. Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the [...]