BibleProject - The Angel of the Lord - God E9

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

In part one (0:00-7:35), Tim outlines the biblical authors' idea that God is totally transcendent and above creation, but they also work hard to show that God gets involved in human activities through mediators. Tim briefly mentions that there are a lot of old Hebrew traditions surrounding different beings like “the watchers.” These figures are often portrayed in movies like the new Noah movie by Darren Aronofsky. and much of the literature written about them comes from other Hebrew literature and tradition. In part two (7:35-17:25), Tim says that the Hebrew word “malak” means “messenger,” and it's the word used for “angel.” In the New Testament, the Greek word “aggelos” is used, which is then translated as “angel.” Jon asks if they have wings, and Tim says there is no winged angel depicted in the Bible. Tim says there’s a particular elohim/spiritual being depicted in the Bible that is called “malak Yahweh,” or “messenger of Yahweh.” One notable appearance of this character is in the story of Hagar in Genesis 21. The story starts out with Hagar conversing with the Angel of the Lord, but then later she says she had conversed with God (Yahweh). Jon asks if this is a sign of the literary seams of different sources as this story was told throughout the years. Tim says this is possible, but he also wonders if it’s intentional. Is the Angel of Yahweh Yahweh, or is it distinct from Yahweh? Tim thinks it's both. Tim mentions the story in Exodus 23. Yahweh says, “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my name is in him.” Jon asks what it means to have Yahweh’s name in someone. Tim says this is a really unique phrase in the Bible. Tim thinks the point is that there’s a balance beam the biblical authors are walking. They want to present Yahweh as distinct from the Angel of God, but also they can be the same. In part three (17:25-26:55), Tim outlines the story of Gideon in Judges 6:11-23. "The Angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. When the Angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, 'The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.' 'Pardon me, my lord,' Gideon replied, 'but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.' The Lord turned to him and said, 'Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?' 'Pardon me, my lord,' Gideon replied, 'but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.' The Lord answered, 'I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.' Gideon replied, 'If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you.' And the Lord said, 'I will wait until you return.' Gideon went inside, prepared a young goat, and from an ephah of flour he made bread without yeast. Putting the meat in a basket and its broth in a pot, he brought them out and offered them to him under the oak. The Angel of God said to him, 'Take the meat and the unleavened bread, place them on this rock, and pour out the broth.' And Gideon did so. Then the Angel of the Lord touched the meat and the unleavened bread with the tip of the staff that was in his hand. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the Angel of the Lord disappeared. When Gideon realized that it was the Angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, 'Alas, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the Angel of the Lord face to face!' But the Lord said to him, 'Peace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die.'" In this story, the character keeps alternating between “the Lord” and “the Angel of the Lord.” Why is this? Is this just lazy writing, or is it a biblical contradiction? Tim says he thinks this is a strange story on purpose. Tim thinks that this is a human figure that can appear, a figure that is Yahweh but also distinct from Yahweh. The point of this story is to form a mental shelf in the reader's mind that there is a human figure, a messenger who acts as God and also on behalf of God. This figure has “my name in Him,” according to Exodus 23. In Part four (26:55-end), Tim outlines the history of the ideas surrounding this figure. Some traditions and scholars think that this figure is Michael, archangel or chief angel. Tim says there’s a book called “The Apocalypse of Abraham.” It's a second temple Jewish text that tries to give more background on this figure. In that text the figure is called “Ya-ho-el.” In other Jewish traditions, the Angel of the Lord is known as Metatron. The early church fathers believed that this being was a pre-incarnated Jesus. Tim says there are lots of ideas, and the biblical authors, especially the New Testament authors, consider Jesus to be “greater than an angel.” This theme is especially noticeable in the book of Hebrews. To a modern reader, the meaning slips past us, but to an ancient Jewish reader, saying that Jesus was “greater than an angel” or that he was the Angel of Yahweh was equivalent to saying that he was Yahweh. Thank you to all of our supporters! Show Music Defender Instrumental, Tents He’s Always There, Tae the Producer Another Chance, Tae the Producer In the Distance, Tae the Producer He’s Always There, Tae the Producer Produced By: Dan Gummel, Jon Collins. Show Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_of_Abraham

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

We've been talking about the identity of God in the Bible. How God is not like anything we can know and understand. He's transcendent above all, the creator, totally other. But at the same time, the story of the Bible is about how this God is involved in our world. And cares about it and has gotten his hands dirty in the storyline. And so this seems to be at odds with each other. How can we experience a God that we can't understand? As it turns out, the Bible has a whole palette of paint colors to talk about how God is involved,

sometimes through people here we're going to see sometimes through other spiritual beings. In this episode, we're going to look at how God interacts with humans through angels. Now, we're not going to talk about angels in general. We're actually going to talk about one particular angel. That goes by a particular title in Hebrew, it's the Malak Yahweh, the messenger of Yahweh, which can also be translated the angel of the Lord. And this character has confused Bible readers for thousands of years. And one reason this character is so confusing is that he is so closely connected to God's own identity. In the narratives where this figure appears, it actually, it's hard to tell if it's Yahweh or distinct from Yahweh.

And what does that mean? How can you be something and also be distinct from that thing? It doesn't seem possible, but it's how stories of this character seem to work. Take for example the story of Hagar in Genesis. Hagar has a conversation with someone who by all appearances looks like a normal man. The narrator introduces this figure as the angel of Yahweh. What you think is, oh, it's the messenger representing Yahweh. But then she says who she just ran into. She just says Yahweh. I just had a conversation with Yahweh. Now these stories can feel jumbling and confusing and contradictory.

Don't biblical authors realize the sounds ridiculous? Or maybe they're doing something quite profound. These authors were guided by God's Spirit to portray God in these very complex ways. This is the Bible Project Podcast. I'm John Collins, and today we're going to look at stories about the Angel of the Lord. And wrestle with what this character means for God's complex identity. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

Okay, today on this episode we're going to talk about angels. This is an ongoing series of conversations about God. Yes. And we're at the point in the conversation where we're talking about how does God interact with the world, people in the world. And last two episodes we talked about how God uses human mediators. We talked a lot about Moses. Yep.

And we talked a little bit about the suffering service. Yep. Yeah. And this conversation, we're going to talk about angels. Yes. Angelos. Yeah. In the big umbrella, we're exploring the complex portrait

in the Bible of how God relates to the world and how God acts and carries out purposes and plans and activities in the world. Tim, who's your favorite angel? It's my new baseball. I would say like a baseball player. Isn't that a baseball team? Yeah, the angels. I can watch baseball.

Sorry, guys. And Gals. So we've been looking at human agents that God uses, where the Bible would show a human doing something and then say, that's God doing that. Yeah. Because it's a human functioning that's got to agent. And that conversation about Moses was really impactful for me. I've just never heard that explain that way of Moses embodying the image of God.

So, if you're listening this and you haven't listened those two episodes, I highly recommend it. It'll tee up why we're talking about angels. I think I told you, I got shivers down my spine at one point. When I'm talking about this. It was like, well, this is cool. It is cool. Yeah, the big umbrella is the biblical authors want to both say about the God of the Bible, Yahweh, the Supreme Elohim, that he's transcendent above all, the creator, and ruler, totally other than any created thing. Yeah. But at the same time, this God is intimately involved with the story of this world and cares about it and has gotten his hands, so to speak, dirty in the storyline. And so for some people, those two are in tension with each other, and the Bible has a whole palette of paint colors to talk about how God is involved. Sometimes through people, here we're going to see sometimes through other spiritual beings who are sometimes called Elohim,

sometimes they're called in Hebrew malachim, messengers, or in Greek they're called Anglos, which is also just the word for messenger. But interestingly, that Greek word, Anglos, got carried into English, not translated, but just spelled with English letters. Yeah, and that's where we call it. Angel, or an angel. So angel is actually not a English word. It's a Greek word spelled with English letters. Yeah, there you go.

We're going to talk about the portrait of the angel of Yahweh, the angel of the Lord, who's the main focus. But it's the broader category of angels. Here we go. We talked before about how in the biblical framework of spiritual beings, there's Yahweh who is supreme. And then there's his heavenly host. Yeah, that goes by different names. It goes by the army of the skies.

Yeah, the host of heaven. was by the army of the skies. Yeah, the host of heaven literally just the army of the skies Walk around church and start talking about the armies of the skies and see people people And you be like what is in the Bible? And then the roth of called sons of God sons of Elohim sons of Elohim. Yeah, and sons of the Elohim plural yep, what else was there holy ones the holy ones yep the sons of the Elhem, plural. Yep, what else was there? Holy ones. The Holy ones.

The Council of the Holy Ones, it's in Psalm 89. Book of Daniel, they are referred to twice, three times as the Watchers. Mm, the Watchers. The Watchers, which is a whole thing, right? Yeah, and then that term has a afterlife in later Jewish texts in the second temple period. Later biblical authors, excuse me,

non-biblical authors, Jewish authors who want to explore and speculate about the makeup of the divine council and their names and the hierarchies of angels and call them the watchers. And then I think that made it into the Noah movie. Oh, I never saw the Noah movie. Darren, Aaronowski, pretty sure. I know it was a lot about the whole sense of God.

Yeah, mostly that book was mostly that movie was based off of, yeah, later, Jewish literature that was speculating about older biblical stories. So angels. So the word, both in Hebrew and in Greek, simply means messenger. And we know this because there are as many humans in the old and new testaments called angels. Angels, messengers. Yeah. Because they're acting as messengers. Yeah, that's right. In fact, there's a book of the Bible where a prophet is called by this Hebrew word, this is the book of Malachi. Malachi is just the Hebrew word for angel. Malachi, my angel, my messenger.

His name means my messenger. Malachi. So the reason why we refer to him as angels, instead of sons of God or Elohim, it's the dominant term in the New Testament. It's the dominant term in the New Testament. It's the dominant term in New Testament. Yeah, yeah. It's not the dominant term in the old, in the Hebrew Bible. Oh, okay.

There's a variety of terms. No one term is used more than another, but in the New Testament, the Greek word, Anglos, yeah. Keep it simple. Yeah, so they basically, they do what we talked about a few episodes ago in the Divine Council. There are gods, emissaries,

his messengers, delegated authorities to go do stuff, usually carry messengers. And do they have wings? No. There are no winged angels called Anglas or Malat in the Bible. There are winged creatures. In the Bible. Seraphim. Yep. But they're not humanoid. They're like they're multi-form usually many animals There might be a human hand or a foot in there There's no winged human angels. Yeah, how did we get that in the yeah? I wanted I should do some well. I mean if they're gonna fly around they need wings Right, but they're not depicted as flying. They just appear. They just appear. Yeah, they disappear

Sometimes they appear and people think that they're just humans. Yeah. So if anything, they look like normal humans. Yeah. Now they can appear. Sometimes they're glowing. One like in Luke and the famous shepherd scene in Luke. Oh, they're in the sky.

One's in the sky and then behind him is an army of heaven, the host of heaven. Oh. Announcing the birth of the Messiah. Yeah. But yeah, there's no explicit depiction of wings on any of these beings. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Anyway, I'm working hard.

Anytime we come across a children's book with my boys... Just to let them know. Just like guys. That's not the Bible. It's not the deal. You can't take the wings from the angels, man. That's just like... It's just a thing.

It's like saying there's no Santa. Just the feathered wings. Yeah. Okay. So, however, here's something that's interesting. There is one particular messenger, spiritual messenger being that goes by a particular title in Hebrew, it's the Malak Yahweh, the messenger of Yahweh.

Okay. That figure appears in the New Testament, the Anglos of the Lord, the angel of the Lord. Okay. And this seems to be a particular Elohim, a particular spiritual being, who is so closely connected to God's own, Yahweh's own identity, is the angel of Yahweh. And in the narratives where this figure appears, it actually, it's hard to tell if it's Yahweh or distinct from Yahweh. So, for example, one of the first stories where this figure appears is in Genesis 16,

the story of Heghar, the Egyptian slave that got abused by Abraham and Sarah. And so, she's run out of the house, she runs away, she's out in the wilderness, and the angel of Yahweh found her by spring of water. He starts having conversation with her, hey, Gar, what are you doing out here? Well, I'm Sarah's maid servant, and she's being lame. I'm fleeing, I'm running from her. So he has this whole conversation where he's like, you're pregnant with Abraham's child now,

I'm going to bless the child, I'm going to protect you, I'm with you, go back, I'm with you, I got you. And so her response to this conversation is then she called the name of Yahweh who spoke to her and then she names God. You are a God who sees or in Hebrew, El Raleigh, before she said, I've remained alive even after seeing him. There you go. So she conflates the angel of Yahweh with Yahweh himself. Exactly. Yeah. The narrator introduces this figure as the angel of Yahweh,

which you think is, oh, just it's a messenger representing Yahweh. But then when she says who she just ran into, she just says, Yahweh, I just had a conversation with Yahweh. Okay. Could they just not decide which character they want to put in there? Well, it's fascinating. So there's been multiple explanations for some people

in an earlier phase of biblical scholarship when people who are really interested in the composite nature of biblical texts. Many, and this is true, Many of biblical stories and books and poems are themselves. Patchwork subsist. Yeah, I quilt. Yeah.

Pre-existing materials that have been brought together and composed and sewn together, so to speak. So that's true. Very demonstrable, in many cases. So some people thought that these differing titles were... Came from different traditions.

Yep, were signs of the literary seams of different sources. The problem is that... When the seamstress eventually tiring it out. Totally, I mean, you have to say, okay, yeah, the seamster... The seamstress. The seamstress was not capable of producing a coherent text, you know, adapting the names so that it would be the same character, which I suppose that's possible theory.

Hardly any two scholars have come up with the same theories about what the original quote pieces were, there's immense, becomes really speculative. They are composite, but people debate on where the seams are. And then we're just side stepping the question of, is there something intentional happening here? And I've come to the conviction that like eight times out of ten, there's something intentional literally.

As the portrait of this angel of Yahweh character keeps going on, you see the same pattern in all the stories. That this angel is Yahweh and distinct from Yahweh. And somehow for the authors these stories, they're not just... That's important for them. Yeah, they keep developing this. Yeah. Which is a weird thing to be like, oh this is important. Where does this come from?

Okay, let's keep going. In the first sets of commandments that is related to get it Mount Sinai in Exodus 23, near the end of the first major block of laws. God says, Hey, I'm going to send you guys into the Promised Land. This is Exodus 23, first 20. And Yahweh said, Behold, I'm going to send an angel, a malach, messenger, before you to guard you along the way, and to bring you into the place that I've prepared. Oh, so in all these other places,

God Yahweh himself said he would do that. Now he says I'm an ascended angel to do it. Watch yourself before him. Obey his voice, which is normally something Yahweh would say about, obey my voice. Obey his voice. Don't rebel against him because he's got a high bar. He won't pardon you because my name is in him. What does that mean? So we'll talk about the name, but somehow the name is one of these attributes of God that begins to take on a distinct life. Because you call upon the name of the Lord, you can be delivered by the name of the Lord, you can be delivered by the name of the Lord in the Psalms.

So what's the name? Yahweh. So there's something like Yahweh's name is so utterly unique among all names. It's like God can take his stamp, his uniqueness, can become a metaphorically spoken of as a thing that you put in him. My name is in. My name is in him.

And look at the logic. That's not like a normal turn of phrase in Hebrew. No, no. This is not normal. This is said of no other. My name is not in Moses. Like God never says that. Right.

Moses speaks in the name of Yahweh, like prophets speak in the name. But no one ever has someone's name in them. God's name, or else, Moses's name. Very unique turn of phrase. And when God says, my name is in this angel, it's connected to this angel being described in ways that elsewhere are described Yahweh himself. Obey his voice.

His ability to pardon. Yeah, he will bring you into the Promised Land. He will lead you through the wilderness. You're like, oh, I thought it was Yahweh leading with the Tabernacle and the pillar of cloud and fire. Now, couldn't he just be really, just being rhetorical about how important this angel is? Yes. Yes. That you're going to follow. Yep, that is possible. There aren't any other traditions in the Torah about an angel being the one leading them. It's the arc of the covenant symbolically. It's true. Representing God's glory and the fire and the cloud. So that's another interesting thing. What would whatever Jeremiah and Esther Israelite see? As they're wandering

through the wilderness, they would see the fire in the cloud, at least that's how the narrative presents it. And that's a tangible thing. So we're back to this balance beam. So is that fire in cloud, Yahweh? No, but also, yes. You can't reduce Yahweh to that fire in cloud, because he dwells above the heavens and he's everywhere,

but in another sense, that is him. There you go. Here, let me show you one last story, because this one will spin your brain. Alright, this is from the story of Gideon. Actually, I printed it out for you. I put all the keywords in bold. Why don't you read it? And just when you come to these titles for who's acting, you're talking. Just pay attention to it.

So, judges 6-11. Then the angel of Yahweh came and sat under the oak that was in Ophra, which belonged to Joash, the Abiyah's right. Ab belonged to Joash the Abiyah's right. Abiyah's right. Abiyah's right. Yeah. As his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press in order to save it from the media nights, the angel of Yahweh appeared to him and said, Yahweh is with you, Ovalent Warrior. So stuff right there. The angel of Yahweh appeared and said, Yahweh is with you. Yahweh is on your side. So based off of the earlier stories, when it seems like the angel of Yahweh is Yahweh,

why doesn't the angel say, I am with you. I am with you. Oh, so that's interesting. Okay. So the narrative is clearly presenting the angel of Yahweh, at least at this point, as distinct, it's talking about Yahweh in the third person. Okay. Angel of Yahweh come, and that makes sense. A messenger from Yahweh in the third person. Okay. Angel of Yahweh come and that makes sense.

A messenger from Yahweh. Yahweh is with you. Yeah. Then Gideon said to him, oh my Lord, if Yahweh is with us, why then has all this happened to us and where are all his miracles which our fathers told us about saying, did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? But now Yahweh has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian. Yahweh looked at him and said, Have you ever noticed this before? Yahweh looked at him and said,

go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you? He said to him, oh Lord, how shall I deliver Israel? Behold my family is the least in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father's house. But Yahweh said to him, surely I will be with you and you shall defeat Median as one man. I will be with you. Mmm. It's notice his conversation with his character begin.

The angel of Yahweh appeared, Yahweh is with you. Now, couldn't you just say like, well, this is an example of the Bible just being full of errors, it's just some silly book. Okay, that's one explanation. That's one explanation. So the question is that a probable explanation. Is that explanation more probable than these are literary ninjas?

And they know exactly what they're doing. So Gideon said to him, if now I have found favor in your site, then show me a sign that is you who speak to me. Please, do not depart from here until I come back to you and bring out of my offering and lay it before you. And he said, I will remain until you return. Then Gideon went in and prepared a young goat, an unleavened bread from the effab flower. Is that like an un-amount? An un-amount. And he put the meat in a basket, in the broth, in a pot, and brought them out to him under the oak and presented them. That's such a strange story.

The Angel of God. Of Elohim. Oh, the Angel of Elohim. Yeah. So it's not the Angel of Yahweh anymore, it's the Angel of Elohim. Yeah, at least in this... Yeah. The Angel of Elohim.

Said to him, take the meat and the unleavened bread and lay them on this rock and pour out the broth, and he did so. Then the angel of the Lord, the angel of Yahweh, put out the end of the staff that was in his hand and touched the meat and the unleavened bread and fire spring from the rock and consume the meat and the unleavened bread. Well, then the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. Okay, so we've have the angel of the Lord of Vanished. Yeah, his sight. Mm-hmm. Okay, so so we've have angel of Yahweh shows up. Yahweh is with you. And then yeah, it's bouncing around. It's like

he says, wait, Yahweh is abandoned us. The next line is then Yahweh looked at him. All of a sudden he's talking with Yahweh. They're talking about Yahweh. And then he leaves, he gets this snack and then he comes, he's offering. And he comes back and he always there he comes back. Oh, no, and the angel of Elohim. Elohim. That's right You always said I'll stick around yeah Yeah, he said he's sticker here. He comes back and he comes back and it's the angel of the angel Yep, and then he's referred to as the angel of Yahweh Then the fire on the rock and then the angel of Yahweh vanity vanishes, okay? So the angel of Yahweh is gone now

He's gone. All right, keep reading when Gideon saw that he was the angel of Yahweh What yep, that's right when Gideon saw that he was the angel of Yahweh Yeah, he knew the whole time right no, I guess not suddenly he's realizing that was the angel of Yahweh when Gideon saw that he was the angel of Yahweh. When Gideon saw that he was the angel of Yahweh, he said, Alas, O Yahweh, Elohim, for now I have seen the angel of Yahweh face to face. Yahweh said to him, peace to you. Now what he's like saying from the sky or something. Peace to you, do not fear, you shall not die. And then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord and named it Yahweh is shallow peace. Yahweh is shallow. What on earth?

So okay, so so the angel the Lord appears getting doesn't realize it's the angel of The Lord mm-hmm. He just thinks it's some yeah some dude. Yeah, because the angel says, think some human walks up to get in. Some human like the person. A human walks up to get in. Under the oak that was in Ophrah. Yep. And says, yeah, always with you. And he's like, what?

Yeah, if you always with us, then why are we hiding from the millionites and making our bread and secret and they're taking advantage of us? Like, why doesn't he take care of us like the stories I've been told? Exactly. And then the narrator says.

The narrator says Yahweh looked at him, but he still doesn't realize it's Yahweh. Apparently, go deliver the people. And he, Gideon said to him, so we're not told yet. So when Gideon thinks he's gonna go make this offering, he doesn't know he's transacting with Yahweh himself. He thinks he's... Apparently he thinks that, well, he says,

give, show me a sign that it's you speaking with me. Oh yeah, what does that mean? So, he begins to get a hunch. And is it a hunch that I'm speaking to a divine messenger here? Okay. So, he goes and does this stuff. He's making this figure prove. Yeah, that he is.

Which fits in perfectly with Gideon's story. So he comes back and then fire consumes the, you know, all the stuff on the rock. Yeah. Then gone. Then Gideon. He's like, whoa, that was the angel of Yahweh. Yes, but that ended the story.

The angel of Yahweh, the human who was there speaking to him, disappears. And Gideon's like, oh, and what he says is, alas, oh Yahweh, God, I've seen the angel of Yahweh. Then Yahweh said to him, it's okay, you're not gonna die. So apparently the angel of Yahweh is a human figure who can appear and disappear and is distinct in the narrative from Yahweh. But not really. But not really because earlier when that angel was on the scene, sometimes it's the angel of Yahweh.

You don't say he's not distinct from Yahweh. There's such a blurring. Totally, exactly. But there is some kind of distinction because the angel of Yahweh in the story can piece out, vanish. But Yahweh is still there. But apparently Yahweh is still there talking to him afterwards. What is happening? So I'm just showing you the story and the same experience you're having is the same experience. Hundreds of thousands of people have had for two thousand years. Are you with me?

But it's right there. So you can either say this author has no clue. This is just a jumble. Or does seem like a jumble in a way. It kind of reads like someone who has such short-term memory. They don't remember what part of the story they're in. They're just going with it anyways. Yeah. And I just, you know, I've come to a place. It's so clear to me that these biblical authors, there's no word that's unintentional. This is just one piece of a much larger pageant connected to physical beings, human beings that appear, and they are called here, the angel of Yahweh, but then they become indistinguishable from Yahweh. And the biblical authors seem to want us to foster that idea.

This is a human figure who can appear and disappear and is Yahweh, but is also distinct from Yahweh. There's only one other messenger, angel figure, who could fit the bill. It's the one described in Exodus 23. My name is in him. I'm just saying these texts, there's many more we could go through, but they give you once again they're creating a shelf in your brain for a it's not a human, it's a nelohim, right? It's a messenger. Angelic messenger that appears to look like a human and is distinct from Yahweh, but then in other parts of the story that same figure is Yahweh. These texts create a huge conversation that goes back thousands of years. And what you see in the Jewish literature of the second temple period is there are many different suggestions for who this figure is.

This figure is given name. Some people think it's Micheal, the Michael. But yeah. In a later Jewish literature. Because that name means my name is L. Who is like L? Who is like L? Yeah, that's right.

So Michael, Archangel, an Archangel. What does that mean? Archangel. A Chief Angel. A Chief Angel, who isn't Yahweh, but is so... He's up the pecking order. He's the top of the Elohim. He's the chief of staff.

Yeah, chief of staff. Yeah. He's not the commander of chief. Yeah. That's a conception. So there are many Jewish scholars and they wrote books. There's a second temple text called the Apocalypse of Abraham. It creates a whole bunch of

visions and poems that Abraham sees when he's sleeping, when he falls asleep, in the Covenant ceremony in Gen. 15. This is a very Jewish way of generating commentary on the Bible, but they do that by retelling biblical stories and inserting their own reflections on the scriptures into the character's minds and speeches. It's actually a lot like modern movies about the Bible. They're not just repeating the Bible. They insert lots of new dialogue. Like what's movie thinking about?

Oh, well, like Noah. It's a good example. Or like the Exodus movie. Or there are some like Jesus movies that just use- Stick to the- Stick to the- Yeah. But there have been others that try and develop the story more. So, those are modern versions. They're doing the same thing.

Children's books do this all the time. In that text, Apocalypse of Abraham, this angel is called Yahoo-L. It combines Yahweh and L-L into a figure called Yahoo-L. Okay. In later Jewish literature, this figure called Yahoo L. Okay. In later Jewish literature, this figure is called Meditron. Meditron.

Yeah, it's a Greek word spelled with Hebrew letters. I'm not. Sounds like a transformer. It's awesome. It's called Meditron. It's the chief angel. Wait, wait, I thought Mikhail was the chief angel. Yeah, for some Jewish people who wrote texts,

but other Jewish people who wrote texts call them Medjohn. And then my favorite, there's a Dead Sea Scroll that thinks it's Melchizedek. Which was an actual dude, a human? Yeah, it was a human, but they think that actually he was an angel appearing as a human to Abraham. And it actually calls him the chief angel who's going to bring God's mediate God's judgment

and destroy the wicked in the final battle. So all that to say is these texts generated a huge amount of conversation in throughout the history. What's like a typical evangelical or Protestant? Somewhere in the second century, in the writings of the early church fathers, they pick this up and they assign it to pre-incarnation Jesus. This is Jesus appearing pre-incarnation. Again, I want to get the horse in front of the cart.

We haven't met Jesus yet. So we haven't got to our, in our conversation, Jesus yet. But I'm just saying, once again, just like Moses creates a shell for a human who becomes so merged with God. He begins to take on attributes of God. Here it's like the other direction. It's an Elohim, a spiritual being, that is so represents Yahweh, but it also appears as a human. Right?

It's like that, but it's on the other side. And so it's creating shelf space in our minds for a creature that is Yahweh, but is distinct from Yahweh at the same time. These authors were guided by God's Spirit to portray God in these very complex ways. Very complex. Yeah. And these ways approach boundary lines that make exclusive monotheists a bit twitchy, at least modern monotheists. So there's a character, the angel of Yahweh. And when you say angel of Yahweh, you should be picturing a human figure.

And in the story of the burning bush, it's a flaming human figure. That's pretty intense. Yeah. Yeah, he says he's going to look at why the bush is not burned up, and then what he ends up seeing is a human figure in there but another time which is a lot like what people see in the story of the fight Daniel and the friends fiery furnace that's right anyway and then other times the angel of Yahweh like in Genesis was just hanging out by spring of water and the wilderness we don't know what he looks like there,

but Haggar is talking with him. We never know if Haggar realizes. Well, no, because what she says is, then she called the name of Yahweh who spoke to her, you're a God who sees, and she said, hold the cow, I'm still alive. Oh, okay. That was Yahweh.

She realized it. Yeah. That's the reaction when people realize they were around Yahweh, they're like, why am I not dead? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like happy go have cup coffee with Yahweh. It's like holy cow. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. And then you have that description We looked at where Yahweh says, hey, I'm an appointing angel and you're like, oh yeah, another Elohim to guide you through the wilderness. Wait, I thought you were going to do that personally. Yeah, my name is in him. So there's this character, the angel of Yahweh, in which it is distinct from Yahweh,

because it is the angel of Yahweh, this spiritual being that appears as a human who is not Yahweh or distinct from Yahweh. Yeah, distinct from Yahweh. That's the point. He is Yahweh, but also at the same time, somehow, in some way distinct. And in which way is just to be very clear, in which way is distinct? Ah, just by the kind of the angel of Yahweh. Angel representing Yahweh. It's not like Yahweh in disguise. Call themself the messenger. Ah, yeah, that's possible. It's possible. But it seems like there's something to say. The stories are saying, this human figure appears. This human being isn't some total of Yahweh's identity. Yahweh is still greater and above all. This is a localized expression of Yahweh,

but it's not all that Yahweh is. So it's Yahweh and it's distinct from Yahweh. Yeah, okay, okay. I'm tracking. Yeah. I'm tracking, hmm? Finally. Over the years, I've chosen really carefully

to stick to certain language. When I talk about these things, because this is an area that's right for misunderstanding, and you can see why it's not easy to sort out. Okay, so that's the Angel of Yahweh figure. And once again, like all these, as we're laying the groundwork, what we're going to see is that the New Testament authors

are going to draw upon this shelf space of a figure, the language and ideas about a figure that is Yahweh, but is a human figure who is also distinct from Yahweh. I mean, you just see where this is going. And so this is another set of images and ideas. Already in here, the Old Testament, you have a category of the one God Yahweh, having a manifestation of Himself that is in some way distinct from Yahweh called the angel of the Lord.

But in essence, it's always. But who in essence is Yahweh? Yeah. And so this, so I see what's happening here to him. I get it. Yeah, like the language of Trinity, or the paradigm of Trinity in that there can be one God who appears in different persons.

Like that isn't just something that all sudden later the apostles were like, yeah, maybe this is it. We'll just kind of run with this. It's something that they saw in the Hebrew Bible. And so when they had to try to come to grips with what Jesus really was, they realized, oh, well, it's already here. That's right. Yeah, not fully baked and not fully, again, it's always gonna be they appropriate categories

from the Hebrew Bible and then make a layer of claim and meaning that breaks or overexedes those earlier categories too. But this one comes the closest, I think, to giving you a framework for one and more than one at the same time. Yeah. And then, is there any evidence that the apostles thought the angel of Yahweh was Jesus?

Hmm. What you have is a text where the apostles will quote from, he breathiable texts, a text passages in the Old Testament, sometimes Yahweh, sometimes the angel of Yahweh, and they'll use the word Lord in Greek, but it's clear in the context they're using that word to refer to Jesus. So Jesus, all of a sudden, starts being the one that all of these Old Testament Yahweh texts refer to, and it's sometimes the Yahweh, sometimes the angel of Yahweh. And you kind of have to just sort through them and you go through them. The thing is the New Testament authors were really concerned actually to make clear to their Jewish contemporaries that they didn't think Jesus was an angel.

And they didn't think Jesus even was an exalted archangel. The Book of Hebrews comes out of the gate, it's winging on that one. And it strikes modern readers as, okay, Jesus is more powerful than angels. Oh, cool. But right, in the second temple period, this was a major, major conversation going on. Because saying Jesus was an exalted angel would be comfortable,

it would fit. You'd be like, okay, you're just one other Jewish sacked that. Yeah, totally. Like, yeah, they've got an angel with... Like, you're an important angel, you think he's named Jesus. We think he's named Meditron. Let's cook down at the Dead Sea, think he's Mukhisadak. But...

That's all agreed to disagree. Yeah, that's right. But then the moment you begin saying, no, Jesus is the angel of Yahweh, He's Yahweh, then you've stepped the boundary line. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Bible Project podcast. The Bible Project is a non-profit in Portland, Oregon. This episode was edited and produced by Dan Gummel, and today's music was made special by Tay the Producer.

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