Divine-Council Index

A comparative CC0 index of the divine council across the ancient traditions — presiding figure, council term, members, function, and primary reference, with links to the digitized texts. CSV and JSON.

CC0-1.0 · public domain · updated 2026-07

Attestations
11
Traditions
6
Formats
CSV · JSON
License
CC0-1.0
CSV One row per attestation — opens in any spreadsheet. JSON Self-describing: columns + rows.

Across the ancient Near East and its heirs, the gods do not act alone — they convene. An index of that recurring institution, the divine council: for each attestation, the presiding figure, the council term in its own language, the members, the function, and the primary reference — each row linked to the digitized text where the library holds one.

Traditions covered

Ugaritic (the assembly of El in the Baal Cycle), Hebrew (Psalm 82, 1 Kings 22, Job, Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 6), Babylonian (Enūma Eliš, Atra-ḫasīs), Second Temple (the Book of the Watchers), Hurrian-Hittite (the Song of Emergence), and Latter-day Saint (the premortal council of the Book of Moses).

What it's for

The scholarly case that Israel's God was once one voice in a council — argued by Frank Moore Cross, E. T. Mullen, Mark S. Smith, and Michael Heiser — rests on passages scattered across a dozen corpora in five languages. This index gathers the core attestations into one sortable table, as CSV and JSON, free to filter, merge, and cite.

How Wheel of Heaven reads it

Line the councils up and a single institution shows through the local vocabulary: a presiding figure, a bounded body of "sons" or "holy ones," and decisions — over kingship, over the nations, over the fate of humankind — taken in assembly rather than by fiat. The Wheel of Heaven corpus reads that institution as one and the same referent across the traditions: the Council of the Eternals, the governing body of the Elohim civilization, of which the biblical bene elohim and the Ugaritic sons of El are the compressed cultural memory. The same council that, in the flood dataset, is recorded deciding on the reset.

Also available on

This dataset is also published, CC0, on two open-data platforms — the same files, mirrored for reach and preservation:

Cite this dataset

Zinsfuss, Zara. Wheel of Heaven Divine-Council Index. Wheel of Heaven, 2026. CC0-1.0. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/datasets/divine-council-index/

@misc{woh-divine-council-index,
  title  = {Wheel of Heaven Divine-Council Index},
  author = {Zinsfuss, Zara},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {CC0-1.0 public domain},
  url    = {https://www.wheelofheaven.world/datasets/divine-council-index/}
}