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Updated: May 26, 2025
+377+. In the exercise of these functions they were often not to be distinguished from the higher and lower deities. King Saul, on the eve of a great battle, having failed to get an answer from the national deity by the ordinary legitimate methods, had recourse to necromancy and obtained from the ghost of Samuel the information that Yahweh had refused to give.
Angels are constantly spoken of as "men," and, including even the Angel of Yahweh, are spoken of as discharging the various functions of human life; they eat and drink, walk and speak. Putting aside the cherubim and seraphim, they are not spoken of as having wings. On the other hand they appear and vanish, exercise miraculous powers, and fly.
Similarly the "man" who wrestles with Jacob at Peniel is identified with God. In Isaiah vi. the seraphim, superhuman beings with six wings, appear as the attendants of Yahweh. Thus the pre-exilic literature, as we now have it, has little to say about angels or about superhuman beings other than Yahweh and manifestations of Yahweh; the pre-exilic prophets hardly mention angels.
The phrase Mal'akh Yahweh may have been originally a courtly circumlocution for the Divine King; but it readily became a means of avoiding crude anthropomorphism, and later on, when the angels were classified, the Mal'akh Yahweh came to mean an angel of distinguished rank.
The polytheistic view continues; to the thinkers of the time there was no more difficulty in conceiving of a single headship along with many deities of particular functions than was felt by Hebrew prophets who recognized the existence of foreign deities, with Yahweh as a superior god, or by the modern Christian world with its apparatus of angels, saints, and demons alongside of the supreme God.
Man may assign his ideals to some superhuman source because he is convinced that this source has selected him as its interpreter; but the fact that he has thought and judged in this moral way is indubitable, while his theory that Yahweh is speaking through him is merely an expression of the religious view of the world common to the time.
For strength was in the unconscious, and when a nation paused to ask of itself its right to Empire, its Empire was already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle and mobile!
Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice.
The fact that his people had diviner instincts than had He whom they worshipped as God, showed that "Yahweh" was only the guardian spirit of the great and wonderful Hebrew race. The greatest discovery of the past century, far greater than any revelation of science or knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern research is the discovery of a God of Love.
Nevertheless we may well suppose that the popular religion of ancient Israel had much to say of superhuman beings other than Yahweh, but that the inspired writers have mostly suppressed references to them as unedifying. Moreover such beings were not strictly angels.
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