I don’t recall it being mentioned in the book, but in the documentary film about Heiser’s Demons, he mentions something that is not obvious to a lot of people.
In the New Testament, we see the terminology of spirit beings restricted to “angels” and “demons”. There is little direct mention of how many different classes of creatures are covered under those labels. There’s a good reason for that: the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) was the Bible everyone in the New Testament used. It was an editorial policy of the Septuagint translators to narrow down all the references in Hebrew to spirit beings to those two Greek words. And when it simply could not be done that way, they defaulted to the term usually translated as “gods” in English.
For those who spoke Greek across the Mediterranean Basin, the words for “angel” and “demon” were not restricted to the meanings common in English. So, when Paul wrote those words in his Greek epistles, it is wholly implausible to think he was restricted that way in his own thinking. He would have been familiar with the Second Temple teaching on the Elohim Council in God’s divine courts. Thus, in his letters, Paul often used terms like principalities, powers, etc. He knew that, in Hebrew scholarship, the term “elohim” was, in literal terms, a reference to any eternal being that did not normally have a corporeal form (not to mention it was used symbolically to designate an awful lot of human authorities).
Jesus would have also be aware of that. He never bothered to correct this impression, so it wasn’t an issue worth mentioning in His teaching. We can only guess at His choice of words in His native Hebrew Aramaic tongue, since the Gospels were uniformly published in Greek, so far as we have any evidence. There may be some speculation about Matthew and maybe some unnamed record in Aramaic, but we have nothing to show for it.
There’s been some polemics against Heiser’s writing from Reformed writers in particular. However, these writers cannot be taken seriously. It requires only a small amount of checking to verify Heiser’s sources on, at a minimum, his thesis that the Hebrew scholarship believed in the Elohim Council, and that neither Jesus, nor anyone else in the New Testament, objects to that belief. We are aware that there are plenty of moral issues neither Jesus nor the Apostles addressed simply because they never arose during their ministries. Jesus went out of His way to point out the errors of Second Temple scholarship when it mattered. There’s no point in defending the classical European church theology on this issue, since it is easily traced to serious errors in scholarship.
