You Shall Die Like Mortals

"I said, 'You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High.' Nevertheless you shall die like men, and fall like one of the rulers" (Psalm 82:6-7). Some readers take this verse as proof that the "gods" of Psalm 82 were merely human judges all along. The sentence itself argues the opposite.
It would be a strange, almost meaningless thing to declare that a human being will "die like a human" — the statement only carries any force at all if the beings addressed are not normally subject to death, and are now, as a judgment, being sentenced to become mortal. There is, moreover, no other passage anywhere in the Old or New Testament that actually calls Israel's human judges "elohim"; the appointment of judges in Exodus 18 never applies that term to them, even in passing. By contrast, Psalm 89:5-8 uses nearly identical language — "the assembly of the holy ones," "the council of the holy ones," beings compared to Yahweh among "the sons of the heavenly beings" — and locates the scene explicitly "in the skies," among the heavenly host, not in Israel's earthly courts. The human-judges reading is often motivated by discomfort with any plurality of spiritual beings in Scripture, out of a sincere concern that it might threaten monotheism.
It need not. Yahweh's sovereignty over every other elohim, none of whom are his equals and all of whom are accountable to him without exception, is not polytheism — it is the very opposite, a hierarchy that only makes sense if there is one supreme judge over every lesser being in the room. The sentence handed down in verse seven is not describing ordinary human mortality at all; it is stripping immortal, rebellious beings of the very thing that once set them apart, reducing them to the common fate of the creatures they were supposed to protect.