Psalm 82 opens with a scene most readers have never been shown. “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” The English “divine council” is doing quiet work there, because the Hebrew underneath it is more vivid: עֲדַת־אֵל (adat-El) — the “assembly,” or “congregation,” or “council,” of El. And אֵל (El) is the oldest name for God in the Semitic world, the ancient word for the high God. So the picture the psalm paints is precise and startling: the God of Israel stands up in the council of El, and there, surrounded by beings the Hebrew flatly calls “gods,” he renders judgment.

The idea of a high God presiding over an assembly of lesser divine beings was the common furniture of the ancient world Israel lived in. We can read it in tablets dug up at Ugarit, on the Syrian coast — older than most of the Hebrew Bible — which describe the great god El convening his assembly of divine sons on his holy mountain. And once you start looking, the Hebrew Bible itself is full of this heavenly court. The prophet Micaiah sees “the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him.” In Job, “the sons of God” come and present themselves before the LORD. The psalms speak of God as feared “in the council of the holy ones.” This is not a fringe notion smuggled in from outside; it’s a recurring scene. God has a court, and אֵל is the name attached to its assembly.

On the divine-council reading of Psalm 82 — the one most modern Hebrew Bible scholars favor — that is exactly what the psalm depicts: a session of the heavenly court. God rises in the adat-El to judge subordinate divine beings he had set over the world’s affairs, beings who ruled corruptly, perverted justice, and are now stripped of their standing and sentenced, shockingly, to “die like men.” A textual detail in Deuteronomy 32 sharpens this further: where the traditional Hebrew says God fixed the nations’ boundaries “according to the number of the sons of Israel,” the Dead Sea Scrolls read “sons of God” and the old Greek reads “angels of God” — God parceling out the nations among divine beings, keeping Israel as his own portion.

It’s worth being careful here, because to a modern ear this can sound like polytheism creeping into the Bible — and that’s not what its careful defenders claim. The whole point of Psalm 82 is the opposite: the Most High stands up and judges these beings, sentences them, strips them, can make them die. They are radically subordinate, creatures of his court, answerable to him. אֵל in the fullest sense stands utterly alone; the council exists precisely so that he can sit in judgment over it. The assembly of El is not a parliament of equals. It’s a courtroom, and God is on the bench.