Human gods

Many OT scholars emphasize the commonalities between Ancient Near Eastern and biblical cosmologies. While recognizing a similarity, Guthrie rightly points to the radical difference in this comment on Psalm 82 and Genesis 1 ( Theology as thanksgiving: From Israel’s Psalms to the church’s Eucharist , p. 36):

These passages “are asserting that Yahweh, the God of Israel, has done away with the divine beings that figured so prominently in the world view of the ancient Near East, and that Yahweh has chosen to assign to human beings the significant role occupied by divine beings in ancient Near Eastern mythology . . . . the doctrine of the ‘image of God’ in humanity set forth in Genesis 1 has to be understood in terms of role and function, not in terms of ‘being’ in some abstract sense. That dominion over the creation exercised by the cosmic ruler through the various gods in the view of the ancient New East has now been assigned to human beings.”