Divine-Council Index

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), Sumerian (the assembly that judges Enlil in Enlil and Ninlil), Second Temple (the Book of the Watchers), Hurrian-Hittite (the Song of Emergence), Greek (the Olympian agorḗ of the Iliad), Roman (the concilium deorum of Ovid's Metamorphoses), Egyptian (the Great Ennead of The Contendings of Horus and Seth), Norse (the rökstólar of the Völuspá), Hindu (the devasabhā of the Mahābhārata), 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 the table was built

Each row is an attestation of a divine council in a primary text — named in the Source text column with a Reference locator. A passage is included when it depicts a deliberative assembly of divine beings (not a single deity acting alone) and names enough of the institution's features to populate the columns. Several rows can share a textual family — the Hebrew Bible contributes several distinct passages — because each is a separate attestation, not a re-reading of one. Where the corpus has digitized the source, the Read in link points into the Wheel of Heaven library.

The columns capture the council as an institution: the council term in its own language, the presiding figure, the members, and the function the passage assigns the body. A blank cell means the feature is unstated in that source.

This is version 1.1 of the index. Version 1.0 gathered eleven attestations across six traditions; 1.1 adds six more — Sumerian, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, and Hindu — for seventeen attestations across twelve traditions. It is CC0 and extensible; additions should preserve the "deliberative assembly, named in a primary text" rule so every row stays a citable attestation rather than an inference.

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.

This concordance is one family of the broader Myth Index, which lines up nine motif families — flood, divine council, theomachy, creation of humans, and more — in a single spine table with Thompson Motif-Index cross-references.

Also available on

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

• Hugging Face — huggingface.co/datasets/wheelofheaven/divine-council-index
• Kaggle — kaggle.com/datasets/zarazinsfuss/divine-council-index