Ps. 82.7 (the gods' fall)

Indeed / I said,
“You are gods
and sons of Elyon / are you all.
But no! / You will die / like humankind
and fall / like any chieftain. 

If this psalm can be envisioned as a type of court-case, with God the Judge standing to read the ‘complaint’ in the opening, the commission in the second portion, the ‘evidence’ in the third of their failure, then we now move into the sentencing. In order to understand the opening salvo, however, we need to understand the judgment itself. What the gods are now to suffer is death. They are to ‘fall’ from the state immortality and “die like humankind”. It is with that in mind that we should hear the opening words of their being “gods, sons of Elyon”. To be a ‘son of Elyon’ is to be immortal, or deathless. That is the reason the verdict begins in the way it does. Further, and by implication, to be immortal is to also be co-extensive with having a ‘seat of power’. What I mean is that when the gods are robbed of their immortality it is not the case that that is all. Rather, it coincides with their loss of power, of their being ‘cast down’ from their thrones, “falling like any chieftain”. 

Preservation. In the context of the psalm, the gods are consigned to death not as an act of punishment but as an act of preservation. The gods failure had been leading to a growing instability within creation itself; it threatened to upturn the ‘foundations of the earth’ and return it to the watery chaos from which it had emerged. This ‘limiting’ of the gods, then, is an act of compassion toward creation; it prevents the gods from their ongoing act of injustice and as being further agents of chaos. In this way, there is an important reference in this portion of the psalm to the ‘death of Adam’. When it says “you will die like humankind” it could be read as saying “you will die like Adam.” Adam, too, had been a ‘son of God’ (made in his image) and one who would, if obedient, live forever. His failure though led to his death, but, a death that was, ultimately, an act of limiting mercy. It prevented him from growing into a monster. (Just as with the tower of Babel and the dispersal of languages.) The point to much of this is that faithfulness in some manner participates the gods (and Adam) in God’s ‘forever’. (It is profoundly important to note, in this regard, that later Jewish interpreters of this psalm believed that it referred to Israel receiving the Torah at Sinai. It was there that they, for a moment, become the immortal ‘sons of God’ only to lose it immeidatly upon their worshipping the ‘golden calf’ (their ‘fall’)). And within that realm they become the gods of nations, persistent, forever-sons-of-elyon. Their failure, however, leads to their death, yes, but more fundamentally to their removal, their deposing. In order for creation to be restored the gods needed to be cast down. 

Finality. A concluding point to make is that the finality of death leads one to conclude that this psalm is speaking not about a mythical dethronement but a point when the gods of the nations would be deposed and Yhwh would extend his personal rule of Israel to the entire earth. It is then, when the gods fall, that he would be the king over all the nations. This is a fascinating insight into what happened when Christ died on the cross and rose, for it was then that the gods began losing their grip over the nations (prophets fell silent), when the gentiles began to be included within the family of Israel…