Psalms 82:1
Psalms 82:11God presides in the divine assembly; He renders judgment among the gods:
Watchtower teaching takes the elohim of Psalm 82 to be corrupt human judges of Israel, called "gods" only metaphorically because they exercised delegated authority. This reading is the standard JW deflection of , where Jesus quotes : Jesus is taken to be merely observing that Scripture sometimes calls humans "gods," so calling himself God's Son was no blasphemy — but did not assert deity.
opens the divine council scene: God takes his place in the divine assembly, and in the middle of the gods he judges. The elohim are not humans — places them "in the heavens" among the "sons of God," and the punishment in v7 ("you will die LIKE men") is meaningless if they were already men. Elohim is a category that includes Jehovah and other spiritual beings, and the worship test settles which category Jesus belongs in: every loyal angel refuses worship (), every rebel god is judged for accepting it (), but Jesus accepts worship and the Father commands it (). He fits no created-elohim category.
The NWT main text reads "in the middle of the gods" — faithful to the Hebrew elohim. But a footnote glosses elohim as "judges," which is the reading Watchtower theology requires to defuse the polemic. The footnote contradicts v7 itself, where the threat that the elohim "will die like men" presupposes beings who are not already mortal. The footnote is an interpretive overlay, not a translation of the Hebrew.