THE ANGELS OF THE VISIONS
Zec 1:7 - Zec 6:8

AMONG the influences of the Exile which contributed the material of Zechariah’s Visions we included a considerable development of Israel’s belief in Angels. The general subject is in itself so large, and the Angels play so many parts in the Visions, that it is necessary to devote to them a separate chapter.

From the earliest times the Hebrews had conceived their Divine King to be surrounded by a court of ministers, who besides celebrating His glory went forth from His presence to execute His will upon earth. In this latter capacity they were called Messengers, Male’akim, which the Greeks translated Angeloi, and so gave us our Angels. The origin of this conception is wrapped in obscurity. It may have been partly due to a belief, shared by all early peoples, in the existence of superhuman beings inferior to the gods, but even without this it must have sprung up in the natural tendency to provide the royal deity of a people with a court, an army and servants. In the pious minds of early Israel there must have been a kind of necessity to believe and develop this-a necessity imposed firstly by the belief in Jehovah’s residence as confined to one spot, Sinai or Jerusalem, from which He Himself went forth only upon great occasions to the deliverance of His people as a whole; and secondly by the unwillingness to conceive of His personal appearance in missions of a menial nature, or to represent Him in the human form in which, according to primitive ideas, He could alone hold converse with men.

It can easily be understood how a religion, which was above all a religion of revelation, should accept such popular conceptions in its constant record of the appearance of God and His Word in human life. Accordingly, in the earliest documents of the Hebrews, we find angels who bring to Israel the blessings, curses, and commands of Jehovah. Apart from this duty and their human appearance, these beings are not conceived to be endowed either with character or, if we may judge by their namelessness with individuality. They are the Word of God personified. Acting as God’s mouthpiece, they are merged in Him, and so completely that they often speak of themselves by the Divine I. {Jdg 6:12 ff.}

"The function of an Angel so overshadows his personality that the Old Testament does not ask who or what this Angel is, but what he does. And the answer to the last question is that he represents God to man so directly and fully that when he speaks or acts God Himself is felt to speak or act." Besides the carriage of the Divine Word, angels bring back to their Lord report of all that happens: kings are said, in popular language, to be "as wise as the wisdom of an angel of God, to know all the things that are in the earth." {2Sa 14:20} They are also employed in the deliverance and discipline of His people. {Exo 14:19-20; Exo 12:23, etc.; Jos 5:13} By them come the pestilence, and the restraint of those who set themselves against God’s will.

Now the prophets before the Exile had so spiritual a conception of God, worked so immediately from His presence, and above all were so convinced of His personal and practical interest in the affairs of His people, that they felt no room for Angels between Him and their hearts, and they do not employ Angels, except when Isaiah in his inaugural vision penetrates to the heavenly palace and court of the Most High. {Zec 6:2-6} Even when Amos sees a plummet laid to the walls of Jerusalem, it is by the hands of Jehovah himself, and we have not encountered an Angel in the mediation of the Word to any of the prophets whom we have already studied. But Angels reappear, though not under the name, in the visions of Ezekiel, the first prophet of the Exile. They are in human form, and he calls them "Men." Some execute God’s wrath upon Jerusalem (Ezekiel 9), and one, whose appearance is as the appearance of brass, acts as the interpreter of God’s will to the prophet, and instructs him in the details of the building of City and Temple. {Eze 40:3 ff.} When the glory of Jehovah appears and Jehovah Himself speaks to the prophet out of the Temple, this "Man" stands by the prophet, {Eze 43:6} distinct from the Deity, and afterwards continues his work of explanation. "Therefore," as Dr. Davidson remarks, "it is not the sense of distance to which God is removed that causes Ezekiel to create these intermediaries." The necessity for them rather arises from the same natural feeling which we have suggested as giving rise to the earliest conceptions of Angels: the unwillingness, namely, to engage the Person of God Himself in the subordinate task of explaining the details of the Temple. Note, too, how the Divine Voice, which speaks to Ezekiel out of the Temple, blends and becomes one with the "Man" standing at his side. Ezekiel’s Angel-interpreter is simply one function of the Word of God.

Many of the features of Ezekiel’s Angels appear in those of Zechariah. "The four smiths" or smiters of the four horns recall the six executioners of the wicked in Jerusalem. {Zec 1:18 Eze 9:1 ff.} Like Ezekiel’s Interpreter, they are called "Men," and like him one appears as Zechariah’s instructor and guide: "he who talked with me." But while Zechariah calls these beings "Men," he also gives them the ancient name, which Ezekiel had not used, of Male’akim, "messengers, angels." The Instructor is "the Angel who talked with me." In the First Vision, "the Man riding the brown horse, the Man that stood among the myrtles, is the Angel of Jehovah that stood among the myrtles." {Zec 1:8; Zec 1:10-11} The Interpreter is also called "the Angel of Jehovah," and if our text of the First Vision be correct, the two of them are curiously mingled, as if both were functions of the same Word of God, and in personality not to be distinguished from each other. The Reporting Angel among the myrtles takes up the duty of the Interpreting Angel and explains the Vision to the prophet. In the Fourth Vision this dissolving view is carried further, and the Angel of Jehovah is interchangeable with Jehovah Himself; just as in the Vision of Ezekiel the Divine Voice from the Glory and the Man standing beside the prophet are curiously mingled. Again in the Fourth Vision we hear of those "who stand in the presence of Jehovah," {Zec 3:6-7} and in the Eighth of executant angels coming out from His presence with commissions upon the whole earth. {Zec 6:5}

In the Visions of Zechariah, then, as in the earlier books, we see the Lord of all the earth, surrounded by a court of angels, whom He sends forth in human form to interpret His Word and execute His will, and in their doing of this there is the same indistinctness of individuality, the same predominance of function over personality. As with Ezekiel, one stands out more clearly than the rest, to be the prophet’s interpreter, whom, as in the earlier visions of angels, Zechariah calls "my lord," {Zec 1:9, etc.} but even he melts into the figures of the rest. These are the old and borrowed elements in Zechariah’s doctrine of Angels. But he has added to them in several important particulars, which make his Visions an intermediate stage between the Book of Ezekiel and the very intricate angelology of later Judaism.

In the first place Zechariah is the earliest prophet who introduces orders and ranks among the angels. In his Fourth Vision the Angel of Jehovah is the Divine Judge "before whom" Joshua appears with the Adversary. He also has others standing "before him" to execute his sentences. In the Third Vision, again, the Interpreting Angel does dot communicate directly with Jehovah, but receives his words from another Angel who has come forth. {Zec 2:3-4} All these are symptoms, that even with a prophet, who so keenly felt as Zechariah did the ethical directness of God’s word and its pervasiveness through public life, there had yet begun to increase those feelings of God’s sublimity and awfulness, which in the later thought of Israel lifted Him to so far a distance from men, and created so complex a host of intermediaries, human and superhuman, between the worshipping heart and the Throne of Grace. We can best estimate the difference in this respect between Zechariah and the earlier prophets whom we have studied by remarking that his characteristic phrase "talked with me," literally "spake in" or "by me," which he uses of the Interpreting Angel, is used by Habakkuk of God Himself. {Hab 2:1; cf. also Num 12:6-9} To the same awful impressions of the Godhead is perhaps due the first appearance of the Angel as intercessor. Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah themselves directly interceded with God for the people; but with Zechariah it is the Interpreting Angel who intercedes, and who in return receives the Divine comfort. In this angelic function, the first of its kind in Scripture, we see the small and explicable beginnings of a belief destined to assume enormous dimensions in the development of the Church’s worship. The supplication of Angels, the faith in their intercession and in the prevailing prayers of the righteous dead, which has been so egregiously multiplied in certain sections of Christendom, may be traced to the same increasing sense of the distance and awfulness of God, but is to be corrected by the faith Christ has taught us of the nearness of our Father in Heaven, and of His immediate care of His every human child.

The intercession of the Angel in the First Vision is also a step towards that identification of special Angels with different peoples which we find in the Book of Daniel. This tells us of heavenly princes not only for Israel-"Michael, your prince, the great prince which standeth up for the children of thy people" {Dan 10:21; Dan 12:1} -but for the heathen nations, a conception the first beginnings of which we see in a prophecy that was perhaps not far from being contemporaneous with Zechariah. {Isa 24:21} Zechariah’s Vision of a hierarchy among the angels was also destined to further development. The head of the patrol among the myrtles, and the Judge-Angel before whom Joshua appears, are the first Archangels. We know how these were further specialized, and had even personalities and names given them by both Jewish and Christian writers.

Among the Angels described in the Old Testament, we have seen some charged with powers of hindrance and destruction-"a troop of angels of evil." They too are the servants of God, who is the author of all evil as well as good, {Amo 3:6} and the instruments of His wrath. But the temptation of men is also part of His Providence. Where willful souls have to be misled, the spirit who does so, as in Ahab’s case, comes from Jehovah’s presence. {1Ki 22:20 ff.} All these spirits are just as devoid of character and personality as the rest of the angelic host. They work evil as mere instruments: neither malice nor falseness is attributed to themselves. They are not rebel nor fallen angels, but obedient to Jehovah. Nay, like Ezekiel’s and Zechariah’s Angels of the Word, the Angel who tempts David to number the people is interchangeable with God Himself. Kindred to the duty of tempting men is that of discipline, in its forms both of restraining or accusing the guilty, and of vexing the righteous in order to test them. For both of these the same verb is used, "to satan," in the general sense of "withstanding," or antagonizing. The Angel of Jehovah stood in Balaam’s way "to satan him." {Num 22:22; Num 22:32} The noun, "the Satan," is used repeatedly of a human foe (1Sa 29:4; 2Sa 19:23 1Ki 5:18; 1Ki 11:14, etc.). But in two passages, of which Zechariah’s Fourth Vision is one, and the other the Prologue to Job (Zec 3:1 ff., Job 1:6 ff.), the name is given to an Angel, one of "the sons of Elohim," or Divine powers who receive their commission from Jehovah. The noun is not yet, what it afterwards became, {1Ch 21:1} a proper name; but has the definite article, "the Adversary" or "Accuser"-that is, the Angel to whom that function was assigned. With Zechariah his business is the official one of prosecutor in the supreme court of Jehovah, and when his work is done he disappears. Yet, before he does so, we see for the first time in connection with any angel a gleam of character. This is revealed by the Lord’s rebuke of him. There is something blameworthy in the accusation of Joshua: not indeed false witness, for Israel’s guilt is patent in the foul garments of their High Priest, but hardness or malice, that would seek to prevent the Divine grace. In the Book of Job "the Satan" is also a function, even here not a fallen or rebel angel, but one of God’s court, {Job 1:6} the instrument of discipline or chastisement. Yet, in that he himself suggests his cruelties and is represented as forward and officious in their infliction, a character is imputed to him even more clearly than in Zechariah’s Vision. But the Satan still shares that identification with his function which we have seen to characterize all the angels of the Old Testament, and therefore he disappears from the drama so, soon as his place in its high argument is over.

In this description of the development of Israel’s doctrine of Angels, and of Zechariah’s contributions to it, we have not touched upon the question whether the development was assisted by Israel’s contact with the Persian religion and with the system of Angels which the latter contains. For several reasons the question is a difficult one. But so far as present evidence goes, it makes for a negative answer. Scholars, who are in no way prejudiced against the theory of a large Persian influence upon Israel declare that the religion of Persia affected the Jewish doctrine of Angels "only in secondary points," such as their "number and personality, and the existence of demons and evil spirits." Our own discussion has shown us that Zechariah’s Angels, in spite of the new features they introduce, are in substance one with the Angels of pre-exilic Israel. Even the Satan is primarily a function, and one of the servants of God. If he has developed an immoral character, this cannot be attributed to the influence of Persian belief in a Spirit of evil opposed to the Spirit of good in the universe, but may be explained by the native, or selfish, resentment of Israel against their prosecutor before the bar of Jehovah. Nor can we fail to remark that this character of evil appears in the Satan, not, as in the Persian religion, in general opposition to goodness, but as thwarting that saving grace which was so peculiarly Jehovah’s own. And Jehovah said to the Satan, "Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan, yea, Jehovah who hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee! Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?"