Michael Heiser

Michael S. Heiser was an American scholar of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Semitic languages, with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He worked for many years as a scholar with Faithlife, the maker of Logos Bible Software, and taught at evangelical institutions.

His main academic interest was the Bible's unseen world: the divine council of Psalm 82, the sons of God, the Watchers and the Nephilim. His book The Unseen Realm (2015) and his podcast The Naked Bible brought these readings to a wide audience.

He was also a prominent critic of ancient-astronaut claims. On his website Sitchin Is Wrong he set out, with references to the cuneiform sources, why Zecharia Sitchin's translations did not hold up: that Nibiru is not a hidden planet in Babylonian texts, that 'Anunnaki' does not mean beings who came from heaven to earth, and that a cylinder seal Sitchin read as a map of the solar system does not show one. He died of cancer in 2023.