Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening! Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast, everyone. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. And Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, which we will get to in the second part of our show.

So tonight we begin a four-part series—that’s right: four-part series—on the Christology of the Old Testament, and first we’re going to be talking about the Angel of the Lord. The Angel of the Lord is mentioned dozens of times in the holy Scriptures, yet the identity and nature of this figure remains kind of fuzzy for a lot of Christians. Is he an angel like one of the heavenly hosts? Is he a symbol of Jesus Christ? Is he the Son of God himself? Does he have a body? Is this figure compatible with trinitarian theology? So if you’ve ever wanted to take a really thorough look through the Scriptures to understand what this phrase means and who this is, stick with us tonight.

So let’s start by looking at the words themselves. So, Fr. Stephen, where does this phrase, “the Angel of the Lord,” come from linguistically, like the actual words?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there we go! Good night, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So also, I just want to say, if you’ve never wanted to take a really thorough look through the Scriptures to understand who the Angel of the Lord is, you should also stay.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, please.

Fr. Stephen: Because there will be dad jokes and other stuff that might entertain you.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And also, I hereby guarantee now that this episode will be 97% less horrifying than the last one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. Yeah, we had a number of people contact us about the last episode, the monster mania episode, and say that they were actually experiencing nightmares afterwards—despite the parental advisory that I gave at the beginning of the episode!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that we reiterated repeatedly. Our content warning. So, yeah, to dig into it a little more, when we talk about the Angel of the Lord, “Lord” here is of course standing in as the English translation of “Yahweh,” so we’re talking about the Angel of Yahweh, the God of Israel. So there’s a bunch of different pieces to that. I think the first piece—we’ll do it word by word, so the first word is “the.” And it’s important that we’re talking about the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of Yahweh, the definite article, as it were. That there are places—there are bunches of places—in the Scriptures that talk about an angel of the Lord, without a definite article. An example of that is, in Matthew 1:20, we’re told that an angel of the Lord comes to St. Joseph the Betrothed, to tell him about the conception of Christ and that it’s of the Holy Spirit. And someone out there may be ready to say, “Yeah, but in verse 24 it says the angel of the Lord,” but the Greek article is not a definite article.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s more of a demonstrative, like “this” or “that”: “that angel.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s referring back to say: the same one, the same one that was mentioned before. That’s the anaphoric use of the Greek article, for the language nerds out there.

Fr. Andrew: And you know who you are.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but in Hebrew, the ha- prefix in hamalakh Yahweh, is a real live definite article. We talked about this before when we talked about the Satan in the book of Job. So this is indicating a particular, a very particular being, not just a good angel or an angel that is loyal to Yahweh or serves Yahweh—there’s lots of those, but this is one particular, the big one.

Fr. Andrew: The angel.

Fr. Stephen: So then the next word is “angel.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that comes, of course—the English word, “angel,” mind you—from the Greek angelos, which simply means “messenger.” Like, that’s really all that the word itself means. We tend to think of it as a species, but it really is the name of a job: angelos, a messenger. And it comes from that word that means “news,” so it’s someone who delivers news is what the word means, angelos.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Hebrew word behind that also means messenger; the Hebrew word that’s used, malakh, also refers to a messenger or an angel in the spiritual sense. And using it in that spiritual sense, by the way, is not confined to the Hebrew Scriptures. That term is used for the sort of lower-level spirits that serve pagan gods, like in Ugaritic epic poetry; it’s fairly commonly used in that regard.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can find it in a lot of Semitic religious stuff, even that’s current in the Middle East. I think it’s either the Yazidis or one of those religious groups there that there’s a lot of discussion about malakh as an angel term.

Fr. Stephen: And as you mentioned and as we talked about when we went through the ranks of angels, these aren’t species. These are roles; these are job descriptions, the different ranks. It’s what they do, what their service to God is about. And that’s in part because angels don’t reproduce after their kind, the way people and animals and plants do.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is kind of what species… that’s the actual boundary of species, is this reproductive sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that means that each angel is in a sense sui generis; each one is its own genera. It doesn’t go into species, so it’s its own type of thing. But so all that tells us, right off the bat, is that the Angel of the Lord, this particular being, is a spiritual being of some kind—that’s really all that sort of tells us—who at least one of this being’s functions is to convey messages from the divine realm.

Then we get to “of the.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Is this too granular? No.

Fr. Stephen: No, you should see my dissertation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this isn’t the show where that question is every really applicable.

Fr. Stephen: But so, I mean, if you think about it, “of” in English can mean a whole lot of things.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it can mean possessive, it can mean associated with, it can mean… Yeah, just…

Fr. Stephen: Constituent, so you can say, this is the mug of Fr. Stephen: it’s possession. Or you can say this is a mug of coffee; that doesn’t mean coffee owns the mug. It’s talking about what is in the mug. So “of” is very versatile, so it gets used as a punt all the time in Bible translation, because there are a lot of complex constructions, so like the Greek genitive—this is for the nerds again… And in Hebrew often there’s just sort of an attributive position, where you just put two nouns sort of next to each other, and by placing them in those positions they are related to each other. And there’s all kind of nuance in determining exactly how they’re related. And if you’re translating and you don’t want to weigh in and take a strong position, you could just put, like: “of.” Let the reader figure out “of” in what sense.

So there are at least two senses of “of the” in this case, or “of,” really, because it’s “Yahweh” not “the Lord,” technically. So there’s two senses of “of,” at least, that are valid. One of those is that possessive sense, because there are places in the Old Testament where Yahweh the God of Israel refers to the Angel of the Lord as “my angel.” So that’s clearly a possessive. Reading it as “Yahweh’s angel,” that’s one valid way to read it.

But it’s also valid to read it as almost like an attributive adjective, so that it would be something like: this is the Yahweh Angel.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or the Lord Angel.

Fr. Stephen: So that, you’d say what would that mean? Well, that gets developed in Second Temple literature. There’s a lot of literature in the Second Temple period—so this about between 500 BC and 70 AD—that there is a figure, this sort of angelic figure, this prominent angelic figure, who in some texts, like the Apocalypse of Abraham, is called Yahoel, which means: this is an angel whose name is Yahweh God. So it’s an angel, but it’s named God’s Name. [Laughter] So that’s a development of this reading of the Yahweh Angel. And as we go through tonight and look at these different passages and different texts in the Old Testament where the Angel of the Lord appears, I think some of why this is and where such an odd-sounding idea would come from will become more obvious.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, like we said, this phrase gets used in piles and piles of places, and we’re going to look at probably most of them, I think. But if you look at them, then a picture emerges. I think that’s the important thing. Once you realize that these are all referencing one figure, then it becomes much clearer.

Fr. Stephen: And you have to, as we talked about very early on in the first couple podcasts—you have to get out of your head the idea that ancient Jewish folks and ancient Israelites were unitarian monotheists, that they were monotheists at all and that they thought that God was only one Person, because if you have that in your head, then finding out that they believed there was an angel named Yahweh God, there’s no way to put that together.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It doesn’t work.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to see how much that doesn’t work in the Old Testament. So, that is, again, a modern thing, based partially in Rabbinic Judaism and partially in 19th-century German idealism, read back into ancient Israel and ancient Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, a bunch of people just marked their bingo cards as soon as you said that, Father! [Laughter] We should put out Lord of Spirits bingo cards. That’s an idea. Right now there’s a fan making one. Right now!

Fr. Stephen: And who will complete the system of German idealism? [Laughter] Fichte couldn’t do it… Anyway, so that is to say, there is idea that this Angel of the Lord figure represents not just an angel or a special angel, but an especially divine figure, and that, then, also gets attached in various places—a lot of places in Second Temple literature, but one place we’re about to talk about in the Old Testament itself—that gets then attached to traditions about the Messiah. And that includes in Isaiah 9.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so this verse, it’s Isaiah 9:6 or 9:5, depending on whether you’re reading a translation from the Hebrew or the Greek. And this is one that a lot of people know, because you hear this around Christmas typically, and I think that this is very memorably used as the lyrics to the Messiah by Handel. So, you know, it goes like this: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called”—and here’s where there’s a little bit of variation—“wonderful counselor”—that’s what it says in the Hebrew, or “angel of great counsel”—that’s what it says in the Greek—“mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace.”

So that’s interesting; they’re not quite the same. The Greek is clearly not simply translating that Hebrew, although, as you’ve probably—I think you’ve remarked in the past, it seemed that the Greek Old Testament in a lot of ways seems to have been translating a different, a slightly different manuscript tradition than what we know of in extant Hebrew stuff in a lot of ways, and this would seem to be one of those instances, where it’s not exactly the same phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and there’s a way to get from one to the other, but we’ll talk about that a little later. So they connected to the Angel of the Lord and the word “wonderful,” or that’s translated here as “wonderful.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “wonderful counselor,” although sometimes you see that as “wonderful-comma-counselor,” which—in Hebrew, there’s no commas.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s no punctuation at all.

Fr. Andrew: So the Hebrew is—I’m going to mispronounce this, but: pele yaats or something like that, and then the Greek is megalis voulis angelos, which, for people who know a little bit of Greek, that’s pretty clearly: the great counsel angel, megalis voulis angelos. So, yeah, that’s what it says there in Isaiah 9.

Fr. Stephen: And send your pronunciation hate mail to frandrewdamick at ancientfaith dot… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we do get occasionally. We do!

Fr. Stephen: Mostly about how you say, “Lafayette, Louisiana,” though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true!

Fr. Stephen: You just can’t do that aa. You just don’t like it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’m not from there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this idea of this angelic being there, you see this is listed here within these messianic titles, clearly in the Greek and I think even in a sideways way even in the Hebrew, like there’s a place the Greek is getting at. But the way it’s expressed there is the angel of great counsel. Now, to be clear, this is c-o-u-n-s-e-l, counsel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not “council” like the divine council.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’d be neat if it was the other one, but it is c-o-u-n-s-e-l, like my other podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! [Laughter] The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen: Spelling note. So this is connecting that Angel of the Lord figure not only to the Messiah but also to this idea of the counsel, the deliberations, the will, the expression of the will of God. So even though it is c-o-u-n-s-e-l, that is not unrelated to the divine council (-c-i-l), in that the council (-c-i-l) is where those deliberations and those things take place, that are then announced by the messenger, by the angel.

And so that piece of the Angel of the Lord tradition is actually one that’s referenced a lot, both inside the New Testament and outside the Scriptures, but it’s done in this kind of sub rosa way, where people don’t necessarily notice it. They kind of gloss over it, because it requires either paying a lot of attention to detail in the New Testament or reading a lot of stuff that nobody but me ever reads outside of the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or all the people in our Facebook group who are constantly asking for a list of those books that you can read at home.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. Well, they do buy them…

Fr. Andrew: Kudos to you guys.

Fr. Stephen: ...but if they’re honest, how many have read how much of them?

Fr. Andrew: Hey, don’t call me out, Father! [Laughter] I’m working on them.

Fr. Stephen: “Of the buying of books, there is no end.”

Fr. Andrew:  It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Our shelves will speak out against us on the day of judgment. [Laughter] And that tradition—the way that tradition shows up most obviously in the New Testament is in references to the Torah being given by or through angels.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, which is—I mean, that’s one of those things that’s said very clearly in the Bible, but I think a lot of people just walk right by it. Like you said, it’s a detail that unless you notice these kind of details, it may not register, and that’s especially because there’s no place in the Bible where it sort of really lays it all out, and where you might expect it, if you’re looking for the Bible to be some kind of textbook, there in Exodus, it’s not said there. It’s not said that angels gave the Torah to Moses, but it’s referenced later, like Acts 7:53, where you’ve got St. Stephen, just as he’s about to be stoned, he says to the leaders of the Jews, “You who received the Law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.” That’s Acts 7:53. So, I mean, it’s right there in the Bible. You don’t even have to go to Second Temple literature to get this, or patristic sources or whatever; it’s right there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And now notice there, they’re angry and they stone him to death, but none of them say, “What are you talking about?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s actually… St. Stephen’s sermon there, his final sermon in Acts 7, is full actually of these little tidbits—this is just one of them—these pieces of Second Temple tradition and things that he and all of the people listening to him had just received as part of their religion, part of their way of life, part of their practice, and they didn’t sit there and distinguish: “Well, now, that’s just a tradition I heard; this is what’s actually in the Bible, and here’s this other…” They don’t make that distinction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Stephen went to school with St. Paul, with Rabbi Gamaliel, and you see St. Paul do the same thing all the time, just referencing these things, as if they were right there in the Old Testament—and they’re not in the Old Testament, in the actual text that most of us would consider canon, at least. And there’s a similar reference—speaking of St. Paul—in Hebrews 2:2.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is another one where he says, “For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution,” so that’s a dependent clause, and then the next thing he says is: “How then shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” He’s making a contrast; he’s saying: if this is this serious, then, boy, now that salvation’s come, what are you going to do to if you neglect that? But, yeah, “this message by angels proved to be reliable,” namely, the law of Moses.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if you’re going to use that construction rhetorically—“if A, then B” to try to prove B—then your audience has to all accept A.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, A is assumed.

Fr. Stephen: So that means, again, all the readers, all the hearers in Hebrews are just expected to acknowledge: “Oh yeah, the Torah, declared by angels. Yup.” Again, this isn’t even a thing where there’s been this new New Testament revelation, as if this is a gap that’s being filled in, St. Stephen or St. Paul had a vision or something, or the Holy Spirit led them to this additional detail, that kind of thing, because we find this everywhere in Jewish sources outside of the New Testament also.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so Josephus, who is a writer that actually probably a lot of Protestants are aware of—for whatever reason, he’s kind of popular among a lot of Protestants—as, I think, because he’s a witness to a number of things that are in the New Testament, but he’s not Christian; he’s a Jewish writer. So in his Antiquities of the Jews, in book 15, paragraph 163, he says—and he’s just sort of telling the story—“We ourselves have learned from God the most excellent of our doctrines and the holiest part of our law by angels or delegates,” or one translation I saw said, “by angels or ambassadors.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Josephus, who’s a Pharisee who becomes an apostate, basically…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he collaborated with the Romans.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he eventually declared that Rome was the Messiah, so that’s about as apostate as you can get for a first-century Jew. But he has this, too, and so this is, in The Antiquities of the Jews, what Flavius Josephus is doing is he’s laying out the history of the Jewish people and their way of life to his Roman patrons. That’s whom he’s talking to when he says, “We ourselves have learned from God the most excellent of our doctrines…” So this is how he’s explaining and expressing the origin of the Torah to these Roman Gentiles who know nothing about Judaism. So this is just an accepted thing, again.

The only place where we get this—as we mentioned, we don’t get this laid out in Exodus; Exodus doesn’t lay out there being angels involved in the giving of the Torah—

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why when you watch The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, it’s him alone on the side of the mountain, and the voice of God: “Moses!” [Rumble] The letters shine up on the tablets, and they just fall out of the stone. [Laughter] Which I love; I mean, I love that movie, but no, yeah, because it’s not laid out in Exodus that these angels are present, and yet you have these other references, not just in the New Testament, but other literature from the period.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the place where you find sort of this in narrative form is in the book of Jubilees, which, unless you’re Ethiopian, is not part of your Old Testament, but which was a hugely influential work. It was the… At Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, in terms of number of copies of different texts that we’ve discovered there, number one is Genesis, number two is 1 Enoch, number three is the book of Jubilees. And when you read Josephus’ History, he incorporates a lot of details from the book of Jubilees, so it’s very clear it was an influence on him, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and for those of you who have not read Jubilees, it’s basically a retelling of Genesis, from a different angle. It’s essentially those same events.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, a little expansionist, incorporating some other stories and details.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this reference in Jubilees, right in the end of the first chapter, and in the very very beginning of the second one. I’m just going to read it real quick, because I think it’s important to just hear how this fits into this narrative. It says this:

And the Lord will appear to the eyes of all, and all shall know that I am the God of Israel and the Father of all the children of Jacob and King on Mount Zion for all eternity, and Zion and Jerusalem shall be holy. And the Angel of the Presence who went before the camp of Israel took the tables of the divisions of the years from the time of the creation, of the law, and of the testimony of the weeks of the jubilees according to the individual years, according to all the number of the jubilees, according to the individual years, from the day of the new creation, when the heavens and the earth shall be renewed, and all their creation according to the powers of the heaven and according to all the creation of the earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord shall be made in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, and all the luminaries be renewed for healing and for peace and for blessing for all the elect of Israel. And that thus it may be from that day and unto all the days of the earth.

And the Angel of the Presence spake to Moses according to the word of the Lord, saying, “Write the complete history of the creation, how in six days the Lord God finished all his works and all that he created and kept sabbath on the seventh day and hallowed it for all ages and appointed it as a sign for all his works.”

I’ll just say this. It’s interesting to me that that bit at the end, you get Moses being told, “Write down the creation,” which—this is probably a question that some people have ever asked themselves is: Okay, so the tradition is that Moses writes Genesis, but who was there during the six days of creation to write that down? And this is Jubilees’ explanation, is that Moses gets told this by this Angel of the Presence, and therefore then he’s able to write it down, because Moses was not an eyewitness of the creation of Adam and Eve. Shocking, but he was not there! [Laughter] And Adam, as far as we know, didn’t write anything down.

Fr. Stephen: And people forget, because—and it’s not St. Jerome’s fault; he meant well—but because we’ve got that “law” word now, instead of referring to the Torah, we refer to “the law of Moses” all the time, and so we forget that Genesis is part of it, because we’re thinking of law as in commandments, so we think, “Oh, that’s like that Leviticus stuff, like Deuteronomy; that’s the Law.” But the whole thing is the Torah, the whole thing is the nomos, the whole thing is the lex, including Genesis, so that’s where it starts.

This also means, of course, that the Angel of the Presence was there when God created the world—which will be important next time: vague foreshadowing. [Laughter] Also, in the little more immediate foreshadowing, we have here… We saw in these first couple quotes this idea that there were angels, plural, who sort of mediated the Torah, but here we see that it’s—there are angels, but there’s one angel in particular, called the Angel of the Presence, and he’s also—the first time he’s mentioned in the quote you just read, identified as the one “who went before the camp of Israel.” And so that is less vague foreshadowing for what we’re going to talk about in the second half.

But this Angel of the Presence, this singular figure, gets referred to in the third reference in the New Testament to the law being given by angels that we haven’t mentioned yet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so this is Galatians 3:19-20. St. Paul says:

Why, then, the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.

Fr. Stephen: And so St. Paul has just been talking about Abraham and Abraham’s seed, and so that’s what he means by: “Why the law? Why the Torah? Why is the Torah given?” It’s given because of transgressions, to handle, to deal with sin, to deal with transgressions, to manage sin and pollution and uncleanness, until the singular offspring of Abraham, the one who is the heir of the promises to Abraham. Until he comes, the law is there. And then the Torah is put in place “through angels by an intermediary.” Now, if you stop at the end of verse 19, you might be tempted to think that intermediary is Moses. Moses is the mediator of this covenant. But if that’s what St. Paul has in mind, then verse 20 doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he says, “Now an intermediary implies more than one, but God is one.” So he’s saying that the intermediary is God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. In addition to the angels plural, there is this intermediary figure called in Jubilees the Angel of the Presence, the single intermediary figure. But St. Paul wants to make clear: Yes, we’re referring to this figure as an intermediary between God and Moses, but we’re not implying that this intermediary is not God or is in some way separate from Yahweh the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you listened to our episode about Abraham, you know that the seed, the ultimate seed that St. Paul is referencing here, the seed of Abraham, is Christ. That’s who’s being referenced here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so if we understand what St. Paul is saying, he’s saying that Christ gave the Torah to manage and deal with sins and transgressions until he came. That’s literally what St. Paul is saying. And so if anyone is wondering: Where does this come from? If it’s not in the text of Exodus, and we’re not going to say that Jubilees is “inspired” or something—which is fine to do if you’re Ethiopian; you can just say, “Well, there you go”—

Fr. Andrew: It is in your Bible.

Fr. Stephen: But for the rest of us, where does this idea come from? It does actually come from the text of Exodus if you read it very closely, and you read it in a big chunk, because this comes out of what seems to be an obvious contradiction in Exodus 33. Part of the issue with how we tend to read the Bible in general is that we only read it in little pieces. We read it one story at a time—which is good. It is good—you have to understand the parts in order to understand the whole; we have to read the pieces—but we also need to sometimes read the whole, like read the whole thing, so that we put the pieces together and see how the piece before relates to the piece after, because there’s a lot of meaning that comes out of that. And this is an example of that in Exodus 33.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in Exodus 33:11, in the first half of the verse, very famous passage: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses, face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” Right, so he’s talking to Moses face to face.

Fr. Stephen: And “the Lord” there is “Yahweh” in the Hebrew. “Yahweh spoke to Moses face to face.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which—I always point this out when people say, “Well, no, you can’t… No one saw God in the Old Testament,” and I’m like: “It said that he spoke to him face to face, right there!” Okay, so yeah, not too many verses down now—again, this is Exodus 33; this is verse 20 now, and this is God speaking. “But, he said, you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”

Fr. Stephen: To Moses. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: To Moses, yeah, so what’s the explanation there? It says that God used to speak to Moses face to face as man speaks to his friend, and then later on God says, “You can’t see my face because you’re going to die, Moses.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, nine verses later.

Fr. Andrew: Same chapter!

Fr. Stephen: And this is— It’s important that it’s so close, because, again, our 19th-century German friends will rear their hoary heads, and von Rad and all of them will show up and say, “Well, that’s ‘cause those are separate traditions that contradict each other, and they’ve all been edited together.” It’s like: Okay, but this is nine verses apart.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like no one would have noticed that, that there’s this “contradiction” written into it?

Fr. Stephen: None of these literary geniuses who crafted the Torah, one of the great works of the ancient world even from a secular perspective, noticed that they contradicted themselves nine verses apart. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Literally the most-read text in human history, and they didn’t notice it.

Fr. Stephen: Which is pretty absurd. So, instead, what you see here is—and this is one of many passages that we’re going to be talking about not just tonight but in this four-part series, where you see that there is— that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is unseen and cannot be seen and have someone live. In his holiness he cannot be beheld by sinful humanity; he cannot be approached by sinful humanity. And yet, at the same time, people see Yahweh, talk to Yahweh, eat with Yahweh. So there is a Yahweh who is unseen and there is a Yahweh who is seen, and they’re not two—as St. Paul makes clear in verse 20: they are not two different gods; they are both one Yahweh, the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Because God is one.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is where—again, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is where the whole concept of two hypostases, that later develops into three in the doctrine of the Trinity—this is ancient. This isn’t something they dreamed up in the fourth or fifth century, as some kind of Platonic logic puzzle at the councils so that somebody could claim authority because they didn’t like— I don’t know what the conspiracy theory is.

Fr. Andrew: Nor even something brand-new in the New Testament either.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there is this idea: There is this figure—there is this second figure—who is Yahweh the God of Israel but who is also a second Person, a second figure. And one of the ways that this figure is spoken of is the way we’re speaking about him tonight, as the Angel of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. So we’re going to go to break very soon, but before we go to break, we had someone call in and leave us a message with a question very specifically about what we’re talking [about] tonight, and so we have a message from Kyle who called in from Ireland.

Kyle: Hello, Fathers. My name is Kyle; I’m from Ireland and loving the show. Thank you very much for it. My question is about the Angel of the Lord, and I’ll keep it short. Are we to think of the Angel of the Lord as the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, in a post-resurrectional body? Thank you very much! Bye!

Fr. Andrew: All right, so do you have an answer for that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Dun dun dun dunn! Okay, let’s go to break!

Fr. Andrew: All right, welcome back, everybody. I always like to end with a cliff-hanger. We haven’t done that in a while. But like the Voice of Steve said, you’re welcome to call in. We want to talk to you about the Angel of the Lord. Okay, so, I mean…

Fr. Stephen: Before we begin, I just want to say it was very good of you to record that book promo from within Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right? That’s what it sounds like!

Fr. Stephen: Underwater somewhere…

Fr. Andrew: That was from an interview that I did… It’s been a few years, and I think I did that over the phone, before I had the magical tower of podcasting in which I now reside.

Fr. Stephen: Like a rotary phone? Where you have to tap the thing and say, “Give me Greenville 6-5000”? Like that kind of thing?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all our ancient Gen-X listeners know what that is. But we’re the last generation to see them, it’s true. [Laughter] So, right. So Kyle asks this question: Is the Angel of the Lord the second Person of the Trinity in a post-resurrectional body? Yeah, and you said, “Yes.”

Fr. Stephen: I stand by that.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I think it’s worth noting that… Why is that true? Well, it’s because… [Laughter] It’s because, just in brief, what exactly does it mean to be “in heaven”? What does it mean for Christ to be present? When exactly is he? And I meant “when” on purpose. We often describe him as being incarnate without change; that’s the phrase used a lot in our liturgical services. So that’s a lot of what’s going on there, and in a future episode we are actually going to try to tackle some of these real mind-bending concepts that play into why this is the case, because otherwise what are we talking about? Because it’s clear that he’s embodied in the Old Testament, as we’re going to see—but then to say that that’s not his post-resurrectional “body” suggests that he was incarnate as something else for a while. I mean, that’s kind of the only place… Or that he made himself felt by, I don’t know, force fields or something? I don’t know where else you can go with that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, and, just to riff on it a little—take a tea break or something while I riff, if you need to—

Fr. Andrew: All right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Unless you’re one of our Calvinist friends, you don’t think that Christ’s body is often someplace somewhere as opposed to being other places. A little bit of a cheap shot, but they know what I’m talking about.

Fr. Andrew: They’re used to it from you by now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Calvinists. You can hit that bingo spot now, too. We’re used to the realization that when we talk about heaven we’re not talking about a place—a place up in the sky or a place somewhere far off or a place anywhere—that we’re talking about an aspect of reality, a spiritual aspect of reality that isn’t a different place. Place, extension, and distance, and space is something that we experience in this created world and is experienced very differently by angelic beings and by God and by bats.

But we’re not used to, or as used to, thinking about time in the same terms; that just as they’re not, like, a direction you could point, like: “Heaven’s that way,” or GPS coordinates for heaven—that would be ridiculous—you likewise can’t— What time is it in heaven? What time zone is heaven in? What would that even mean? Like, the whole way we reckon time is based on the movements of the earth and the sun and the moon and the planets. So those time categories don’t fit either; they don’t fit any better. So there are—and we’ve used this terminology before—eternal realities; there are eternal truths, so that we can talk about Christ being slain before the foundation of the world, and we can talk about—St. Paul could say to the Christians in and around Ephesus that they are already seated with Christ in the heavenly places, while they’re suffering on this earth.

So there is this eternal reality, and that eternal reality enters into our human experience at certain points within our human experience. Time and space are descriptors and categories that frame our human experience and allow us to order it. So when Hebrews says that Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever, it means the “yesterday” part.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not just Christ is never going to change, but he never did. That’s why the Fathers and our hymnographers are so clear: Christ is incarnate without change or alteration.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it kind of underlines the notion that he is the firstborn over all creation as well, not just in that place of being firstborn, the one who distributes the inheritance, but that he is also the firstborn.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so that’s hard for us to wrap our brains around, because they’re human brains, and we experience everything in terms of time and space and other categories of phenomenology. But we have to accept that that’s for us humans—that’s not for angels and it’s not for bats and it’s definitely not for God. And Christ is God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so in the second part of the show, we’re going to be talking some more about this figure, the Angel of the Lord, but now from a kind of a different angle, and particularly this angle is the angle of—we’re not referring to St. Michael: that’s what this is about. [Laughter] So just kind of keep that as a framing device in your head, that it’s not St. Michael. I mean, we love St. Michael, we’re big fans of St. Michael, we really need him, but this is not St. Michael.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is… There are a number of appearances—we’re going to go through pretty much all of them—of the Angel of the Lord in Old Testament, but in this second half, there is one… You can’t even really call it an appearance because it’s an arc; it’s a narrative arc covering close to a century of time within the Scriptures in which the Angel of the Lord is directly involved. So this second half is going to be talking about that narrative arc that involves a whole bunch of different humans, but also the Angel of the Lord. So that kind of arc begins with the Angel of Yahweh not so much appearing but being designated and described by God in Exodus 23.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in Exodus 23:20-21, God says this:

Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice. Do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my Name is in him.

That’s kind of a weird thing to say there at the end.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! And, remember, this is the pay-off of that mention in Jubilees that the angel of the presence who gave the Torah is the angel who led the camp of the Israelites.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the one who went before them. So this is the same figure.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is whom Jubilees was talking about. Jubilees is saying this angel figure is the one who also gave the Torah. So a couple pieces—as you mentioned, that “my name is in him,” there’s a tendency by some folks, including some folks online, that whenever they see “Name” with a capital N—the Name of the Lord, or even in Hebrew the Name of Yahweh—they interpret that as meaning “Yahweh”: that means the four consonants, the Tetragrammaton, that’s what that means.

Fr. Andrew: The word itself, in other words.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the actual four consonants. And there are a number of places, this being one of them, where that understanding just doesn’t make any sense. So if “I will put my name in him” means the four consonants, like, what does that mean? Inside of him? It’s going to be written somewhere, the name “Yahweh”? The four consonants are going to be written internally? I guess angels don’t have internal organs, but… Maybe they do; I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense, and there are other places where it talks about the Name of Yahweh protecting people, and that doesn’t mean they’re going to write it in the sand as a magical charm and no one will be able to cross the consonants written in the sand or something to protect them. This isn’t some kind of ritual magic thing. It’s talking about something else.

“Name” with a capital N there is referring to something else, and specifically it’s referring… Name, someone’s name in the ancient world, also means their identity. We still use it that way in English: This person made a name for himself, or he has a good name in the community, meaning his reputation, his identity, how he’s seen. And there are lots of places where that’s obviously what’s going on with that term, so people will appeal to God in the Old Testament—when they know they’ve done wrong, they know they’ve been wicked, and they’re seeking God’s forgiveness—and they’ll say, “Pardon us,” like the people of Israel: “Pardon us. Do not be wrathful with us—for your name’s sake. So that the nations won’t speak badly about you, that you brought us out of Egypt and then killed us all in the desert. Show mercy on us for the sake of your reputation if nothing else. We don’t deserve it. Don’t let your name be dragged through the mud.” [Laughter]

But that idea of identity is important, and so when Yahweh the God of Israel says he’s going to put his name—“The place where I will put my name,” referring to the tabernacle and then the Temple in Jerusalem—that’s the place where he is going to be; that’s what he means. So when he says that his name is going to be in this angel, this being who’s going to lead them, that means that his identity, who he is, is going to be in him.

And that, then—we see elements of this in the New Testament with reference to Christ in a couple of different ways. So in one sense, when we talk about the name being placed in the tabernacle and in the first Temple, there’s this—we’re bringing it back—theophanic glory cloud—as I’m inclined to do—shows up and appears.

Fr. Andrew: Nice!

Fr. Stephen: And that’s a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, just as the pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke is this manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. So we see, for example, in John 1:33, the way in which St. John the Forerunner knew who Jesus was, knew who the Messiah was, according to him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is what John the Forerunner says:

I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize me with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the symbol that’s given to Moses to say, “This is how you will know my angel, who this is, who is going to lead you through the wilderness into the land,” is the same sign that’s given to St. John the Forerunner to identify Jesus in that sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Name, the Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we also see, in terms of the Holy Spirit dwelling within Christ, not only the references to himself as a temple, but this is what’s going on. You note in that last part of the verses we read from Exodus: “Do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my Name is in him.” That this is going to be serious now if you rebel against him; because he’s going to be with you, you are going to be more accountable, and there will not be forgiveness if you rebel against him. This makes sense of one of the passages that gets people really worried in Mark that’s also paralleled in Matthew.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this reference to: if you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, then it’s not going to be forgiven you. I remember when I was young, growing up in low-church Protestant circles, people trying to figure out what exactly is the sin that is the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? because if you commit that one, well, there’s no forgiveness! And you know, you’re on your way to hell as a result. Kind of missing the point here, which is that it’s an emphasis on the divinity of Christ and on the Holy Spirit as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that because was in their midst, literally, directly there, speaking to them, that their rebellion against him, their accusing him of being demon-possessed in both of those cases, that rebellion is not going to find forgiveness. They are more accountable now than they would be if he was not there, which he says repeatedly in St. John’s gospel. “If I had not come to you, you would not have sinned.”

But so we mentioned that there are a couple ways in which that—the Name being present, the identity of God being present in Christ—is expressed. The other way is that there are a series of references in St. John’s gospel—in St. John’s gospel, 14:11 and 20 and 17:23 and a few others—that talk about the Father being in Christ, that the Father’s in him. This is the same idea that is being expressed in the Old Testament. So in the Old Testament here, to be clear, this figure is being described, the Angel of the Lord is being described in the same terms that Christ is described in the gospels.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of co-inhering, so to speak, of the Persons of the Trinity with one another.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he is now going to be leading Israel out of Egypt and into the wilderness. And we actually see him exercising this role in a few places, and again it’s easy to skim over these and not notice. And there’s one of these in Exodus 14:19-20, and this is where Pharaoh’s armies have sort of started now chasing after Israel, after Israel has left Egypt, and Israel has come to the Red Sea, and now they’re kind of between a rock and a hard place: They’ve got the Red Sea on one side—and we’ve talked about how... that death is involved with that: so they’ve got the Reed Sea, they’ve got death on one side—and they’ve got Pharaoh and his armies on the other side, and they’re sort of squished in between. And Yahweh talks to Moses and says—he hears his voice and says that he’s going to protect him, and to gather the people next to the sea, and then, in verse 19, this happens.

Fr. Andrew: Which, again, is not in the Charlton Heston film. [Laughter] Which it should be. I mean, come on! Okay, so Exodus 14:19-20:

Then the Angel of God, who was going before the host of Israel, moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel; and there was the cloud and the darkness, and it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night.

So there’s this… He becomes the rear-guard, so to speak, so that Israel can escape.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and here next to the water we see the voice of the Father; we see the Angel of Yahweh, Christ; and we see the Holy Spirit in the pillar of cloud, all manifest here by the water—hint, hint for January.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: But also, right, it’s this—all three are as one, acting to protect Israel, to protect the people of God. And there is a place in the New Testament that very directly interprets this angel as being Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is kind of hidden, again, hidden with translation issues, and we’ll explain exactly why this is the case. So this is Jude, verse five—there’s only one chapter, so this is Jude 5.

Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

Now the reason why this is a little hidden is because a lot of translations of the Bible, up to, what, maybe a few decades ago, said, “The Lord who saved a people out of the land of Egypt,” but here it’s “Jesus.” So what’s going on? Why should it be—why should the translation be “Jesus”? Clearly those are two different words, even in Greek.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, yeah. Of course, “the Lord” could there mean Jesus.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not wrong; it’s just not as specific as it could be.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not specific, right. So basically what happened is we found a bunch of much older manuscripts. Well, not “a bunch”; we found some much older manuscripts of St. Jude’s epistle. And these older ones we found all have “Jesus” there, all have the name “Jesus” there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’ve got Jesus standing there on the shore of the Red Sea.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s now pretty clear—it’s so clear now that there’s really nobody out there who’s arguing for “Lord” except for maybe some King-James-only folks—I shouldn’t say “nobody”; there’s somebody out there arguing everything on the internet.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] True!

Fr. Stephen: But in terms of New Testament scholars, there’s nobody really arguing that that’s not “Jesus” there. And it’s fun to watch people who don’t like talking about Christ in the Old Testament bend over backwards into bizarre yoga positions to try to explain what this is talking about, including—I won’t name the person; they name themselves frequently enough—but trying to argue that it’s talking about Joshua, like Old Testament Joshua.

Fr. Andrew: Right, who—

Fr. Stephen: Who I guess in his mind saved people out of Egypt—and then killed them all in the desert…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “afterwards destroyed those who did not believe.” That’s what it says there in Jude 5.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So, yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Because “Joshua” and “Jesus” are the same name is the claim. I mean it is: they are the same name, but they’re trying to claim it was Joshua, who was the servant of Moses and becomes his successor, who did this, but that doesn’t make any sense in the whole verse.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is very clearly talking about this figure, who led the people out of Egypt and then who, as we’re going to see some examples of in the third half, destroyed a lot of those who did not believe. So a big part of this—moving on in Exodus 23, after what we read already about the angel—Yahweh the God of Israel, in talking to Moses, goes on to outline sort of what this is going to be about. We read up to the warning where if you rebel against him it’s not going to be forgiven, but then in verse 22 he makes a promise in the other direction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he says this:

But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

Which is interesting—you notice the shift there. “If you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.” Again, this close association between the Father who’s speaking and the Angel of the Lord that’s being sent out in front of the armies.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they’re completely on the same page. And this is… Again, the way this is going to get put by the Fathers is one nature, one will, one energy, but they’re saying and doing the same thing, as Christ is going to say over and over again in St. John’s gospel. He does what the Father does; he says what the Father says.

But the call here, then, the promise is if the people of Israel align themselves with that will and that energy, with what God is doing in the world and with—their desires… If they align themselves and participate in it, then they will be on the same side as Yahweh the God of Israel. He will be their God; he will be the enemy to their enemies, the adversary to their adversaries. He will lead them into battle. They won’t be on their own, and won’t be subject to superior numbers. But God, in the person of the Angel of Yahweh, will lead them.

And this isn’t just sort of a hypothetical thing about adversaries, because, in the next couple verses—in verse 23, those adversaries get listed!

Fr. Andrew: Right, like these are actual battles that are about to happen. So verse 23:

When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces.

No neutral ground. Don’t bow down to their gods—hello?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, folks, here’s the giants.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, Amorites.

Fr. Stephen: So gigantomachy here is the purpose of the exodus. It’s not just: I’m going to free some slaves and give them a nice place to live.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re being sent out.

Fr. Stephen: They’re sent on a mission to remove these giant clans. And notice here how blotting them out is defined. Blotting them out is not defined as exterminating their DNA. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s about overthrowing their worship, breaking their pillars in pieces: this is about destroying temples and stuff. It’s about getting rid of the gods and the paganism, the actual practices of worshiping these gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the religious rituals that constitute these people groups.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and of course if you end the rituals, then the people groups don’t exist any more.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They dissolve into other people groups—preferably Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, ideally.

Fr. Stephen: So this is sort of the beginning of that arc that we mentioned at the beginning of this half, that now we have this figure who’s going to lead them. So now we’re going to check in in the book of Joshua, sort of in media res, for the beginning of—not really the beginning, but early on in those battles that we just heard about, specifically in Joshua 5. And the first part of Joshua 5, before we get to the Angel of the Lord, is this… We’ve just crossed the Jordan River. The Jordan has parted in front of the people when they brought the ark of the covenant to it. They’ve passed through the Jordan on dry ground, and they’re now going to begin the conquest proper; they’re now going to face off with these giant clans.

And so what does Joshua do with the people? Well, what was Moses told to do? If you want the Angel of Yahweh to lead you into battle and defeat your enemies, then you need to align yourself with Yahweh the God of Israel. And so he does that by, first, circumcising the people, and then they celebrate the Passover.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you might wonder: Wait, I thought that these people were circumcised, right? Explains in Joshua 5:4:

And this is the reason why Joshua circumcised them: all the males of the people who came out of Egypt, all the men of war, had died on the way after they had come out of Egypt.

What that means is that the ones who had been circumcised, they didn’t actually circumcise their own sons, meaning they became unfaithful to Yahweh. They were not doing the thing that you were supposed to do for people to be in the covenant, and so this is a renewal of that covenant which includes both the entrance into the covenant via circumcision and then the fulfillment of what it means to really be Israel, which is: You celebrate the Passover. Because that’s what made them—that’s what constituted them as a nation in the first place. And then it gets repeated over and over again, perpetuated.

Fr. Stephen: Just as the giant clans are constituted by their demonic rituals, it’s circumcision and the eating of the Passover that constitute Israel generationally. And then that, we’ve talked about before—and I’m sure we’ll talk about again—how that turns into baptism and the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Baptism and receiving the Eucharist in the Church is what constitutes the Church as a people, as a nation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so, yeah, getting the people ready now, renewing their faithfulness to God, bringing them back into alignment with him, and then this happens.

Fr. Stephen: They align themselves with God, and then… Who shows up, as promised?

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, yeah. Verse 13 of Joshua 5: “When Joshua was by Jericho—” And I’m going to read a few verses here.

When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold! A man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” And he said, “No. But I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, “What does my Lord say to his servant?” And the commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy,” and Joshua did so.

Lots of fun stuff there!

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so we have to take note here, with this passage, that there is, within the Tradition of the Orthodox Church—there is a minority position, as you alluded to in your intro to this half—that identifies this figure, the commander of Yahweh’s hosts, as St. Michael. There is at least one synaxarion that does that. I think there’s a hymn. I know there’s a couple of Church Fathers who do. Now this is a minority position, but we’re trying to be good corporate citizens here. [Laughter] Model good behavior.

When we’re talking about the Tradition of the Church and we’re talking about the writings of the Church Fathers and we’re talking about our liturgical tradition, that doesn’t represent a range of options for us. That’s not how you do it; that’s not how any of this works. The way this works is, we want to orient ourselves within the Tradition as a whole, and so that means, if we’re going to say that some part of the Tradition that conflicts with other parts of the Tradition got it wrong, we have to then explain how. We have to give an explanation of: Well, where does this minority report come from? Or at least: Why is that minority report not correct? And so that’s what we’re now going to endeavor to do: is to try to show, from this text, why we would agree with the majority position in the Orthodox Tradition that identifies this with the Angel of the Lord and with Christ, starting all the way back with St. Justin Martyr, St. Justin the Philosopher, in the second century, in terms of Church Tradition, and before that in Jewish writings.

So there are three details here in those three verses you read that we’re going to point at. The first one is that Joshua sees him with this drawn sword next to Jericho, which they’re about to attack—spoilers. [Laughter] You may have heard that story, the one with the walls.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I sang a song about this when I was quite young. [Laughter] Along with many other children in the Sunday school.

Fr. Stephen: Little known liturgical fact that I’m sure all of the liturgics scholars listening will vouch for: The reason we go around things three times instead of seven is that if we did seven, they would collapse.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Who would collapse—the walls or us?

Fr. Stephen: Maybe both! ¿Por qué no los dos? [Laughter] But so this drawn sword—seeing this figure with a drawn sword—this is imagery that’s used elsewhere in the Old Testament, both before and after. And so that the instance before, or instances before—well, they’re connected—is in Numbers 22, which is the story of Balaam and his donkey, which we’re going to talk more about in the third half—teaser—but there the Angel of the Lord appears, and he has this drawn sword, and that’s one of his identifiers. A later one is in 1 Chronicles 21:16—we’re also going to talk about that one in the third half in more detail—but there also the Angel of the Lord appears with a drawn sword.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to David.

Fr. Stephen: And then the third time where this drawn sword imagery appears is in Ezekiel 21. Really, that’s all through the chapter, but verses four and five and verse 28, and there it’s Yahweh himself who has drawn his sword and has a drawn sword.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I mean you can see… There’s an icon of Christ with a sword which is, I mean, it’s this. You know, it’s funny: I sometimes see that icon used in contexts where I think people intend it to be this sort of… I don’t know. [Laughter] Like: “Here, look: Here’s Jesus with a sword! Back away, heretics!” But that’s not what’s going on in any of these passages.

Fr. Stephen: Quick judgment on Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But so that’s point one in our case, that that imagery is imagery that’s used for the Angel of Yahweh and for Yahweh himself elsewhere in the Old Testament where it’s used, and so that’s an identifier of this figure. Second point is that Joshua falls on his face on the earth and worshiped him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he doesn’t say, “Get up, man. I’m not… I’m just like you.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, as we see angels do frequently.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’ve been known to do that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the Scriptures. So if someone is going to say that this is St. Michael, they have to then explain why St. Michael here is allowed to receive worship, why he doesn’t say anything. And then the third point is the actual response when he worships him. Rather than saying, “Don’t,” is—the commander of the Lord’s army says, “Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy,” which is an exact quote of what the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of Yahweh, says in Exodus—which we’ll also be talking about in Act III.

So each of those three verses, in various fairly clear ways, identifies this as the Angel of the Lord over against St. Michael. And so that’s why we take that position within the Tradition, and think you should, too.

Fr. Andrew: But we’re not going to come to your house and beat you on the head if you don’t.

Fr. Stephen: I might…

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Stephen might, but, no.

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] No, I’m on probation.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! You’re under orders. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that’s, then, sort of the mid-point of this arc. So the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of Yahweh, leads them through the wilderness, leads them into battle in the conquest. So all that stuff that happens in Joshua that you can read about in my recent book, all of that stuff is being led by the Angel of the Lord—keep that in mind—is being led by Christ, all that gigantomachy. And then we get to the end of that arc in the second chapter of the book of Judges.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So this is Judges 2:1-5.

Now the Angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim and he said:

I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give your fathers. I said, “I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.” But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? So now I say I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.

As soon as the Angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the people of Israel, the people lifted up their voices and wept, and they called the name of that place Bochim, and they sacrificed there to the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Bochim means “weeping.” That’s why they called it that: the weeping place, the place of weeping.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s been with them all this time, they did the thing he told them not to do, and so he leaves and says, “You guys are now going to lose. Your enemies are going to overtake you, and their gods are going to be a snare for you.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this is the exact wording from back in Exodus 22.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! “The thing I told you not to do—you did it.”

Fr. Stephen: Destroy all of those idols and everything, because if you don’t, they’ll be a snare to you. And so here, you went and worshiped them, and now they’re going to be a snare to you. [Laughter] So it’s exactly concluding that arc.

But we see here the Angel of the Lord travels from one place to another. It’s not just he appeared at this one place; he travels from one place to another, meaning he has continued to be with them this entire time. He has continued to be with the people of Israel this entire time, until now when he leaves. Notice also that when the Angel of the Lord speaks here, when the Angel of Yahweh speaks here, he speaks in the first person. He says, “I brought you up from Egypt and brought you to the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said I will never break my covenant with you. So now I say I will not drive them out before you.” So this is all first person. Your average angel, even archangels—St. Michael, right?—don’t speak in the first person this way, because St. Michael didn’t make any oaths to Abraham or any promises. He didn’t make the covenant; it’s not his covenant.

So the Angel of Yahweh is speaking in the first person as Yahweh here, saying he did things, not just in terms of “Yahweh said he would bring them out of Egypt,” now the Angel of Yahweh is saying he brought them out of Egypt, but also he’s saying he did things that Yahweh did back in Genesis with Abraham in terms of the promises of the covenants. So there are plenty of places. We don’t need to list them; there are plenty of places in the Old Testament where, of course, Yahweh himself said he brought them and was going to bring them and did bring them out of Egypt. It’s the beginning of the Ten Commandments.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s like one of the classic things. “Hey, everybody, remember me? I’m the one who brought you out of Egypt.” This is God talking about himself. Over and over again he defines himself this way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but here it’s the Angel of Yahweh saying that in the first person. Because of the idolatry, he now departs.

I want to add one note here, because we talked about this in terms of the dynamic between the flood and the Tower of Babel, that God didn’t want to destroy humanity again, and so he had to leave. So even in the Angel of the Lord leaving, remember that lack of forgiveness, those dire consequences for rebelling against him while he was there—so his departure is itself a mercy for this rebellious people.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, because you don’t want to be doing that stuff right in his face.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s better if he’s not there, if that’s what they’re going to do.

Fr. Andrew: And, you know, honestly, this is a sort of a handing them over to Satan. They’re being ensnared by these false gods, and they’re going to suffer for that, the point being to help bring them to repentance.

All right, well, that is our second half, and we’ll be right back with a third half right after this break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! This is the third half of the show. Before we get into the third half, I actually wanted to just pass on a question that we got on Facebook, which I replied to the asker, but I just think it might be useful for people to hear. It’s not totally on-topic, but it’s kind of generally about the show. So Bradley asks this; he says, “I have a sincere and curious question. What is your guys’ all-time favorite Bible translation in English, as in, the most accurate for linguistic and hermeneutic studies and for following along with this podcast?” What I told him is that we often quote from the ESV, but probably just as often or maybe not quite as often, we’re reading your translation, Father.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Which is not commercially available and therefore does not help him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, he lists off… In his question, he says, “I own the OSB, KJV, Douay-Rheims, Knox, NKJV, RSV-CE, NRSV-CE, NAB, NABRE, NIV, ESV, NLT, Jerusalem Bible, and Revised Jerusalem.” I don’t see the Wycliffe Bible in there, Bradley. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The B-i-b-l-e, that’s the book for me. [Laughter] Yeah, so you got most of them. It kind of depends on what you’re doing. He said he wanted most accurate. If you’re going to do—and I know you’ve heard me do this before—if you want to do more deep digging in Bible study and you’re not able to do the original languages, which is most people who want to do more studying—and that’s fine; that’s okay—I usually recommend that people get an NET full-notes version.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, if you haven’t seen— And, by the way, you can check this out yourself online, if you just simply go to netbible.org, you can see what the content is. And what that is is—for instance, if you turn to John 1, you see this tiny little text in the middle at the top, and that’s the biblical text, and then reams of translators’ notes underneath it, which is what—I mean, that’s what this book is: it’s piles and piles… Now, that’s not to say that we would necessarily agree with everything that’s in the notes, but you can see what they’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s what’s important, and that’s why it’s important that you get the full-notes edition. I don’t think the translation by itself is a huge improvement over the ESV or the RSV or a number of other English translations, but those notes, if you get the full notes, kind of lets you behind the curtain as an English reader into what they’re doing so that you can see what they’re doing and decide whether you agree with them or not, which you don’t get with most translations. They kind of show their work. And because the scholars who did that and put it together made it public domain, you can get print copies relatively cheaply.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I have a decent hardcover one that I got for $35 or something like that, I think. But remember, make sure you get the one that says, “NET Bible with full notes.”

Fr. Stephen: With full notes edition. So that’s really good. In terms of if you’re just going to read a translation and you don’t want to dig into notes like that, the thing that’s probably the closest is still the old NASB, not the newer edition they did recently—it’s okay, the newer edition—but, yeah, sort of the NASB classic is fairly, woodenly literal—fairly—to the point that some of the sentences are unwieldy and hard to read. So that’s something. The ESV, which—I’ll let you in on the big secret, because I like doing this—the ESV is the RSV.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just updated a little bit, isn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. 96% of the text is identical between the RSV and the ESV; the other 4% are updates like that thing in Jude 5 that we talked about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we were reading from the ESV just now.

Fr. Stephen: That’s based on new textual finds, and Dead Sea Scrolls, where they updated some things in the Old Testament. And those Dead Sea Scrolls updates in the Old Testament mostly bring it closer to the Greek, so from an Orthodox perspective: Great, right? And the RSV is already—the RSV is the first major English translation of the Bible that had Orthodox input into the translation. A lot of folks don’t know that. So, yeah, the ESV. Because the ESV was the basis for the Reformation Study Bible, it’s gotten this rep as being, like, the Calvinist translation, but it’s really not; it’s just the RSV. That’s just propaganda. [Laughter] Hopefully, that’s helpful a little.

Fr. Andrew: My approach is, as so many people, I just own a lot of Bibles. Because, I mean, we live in an era in which owning a lot of Bibles or even having a bunch of them on your phone is not hard and not really that expensive. I think it’s just worth it, especially if you’re really trying to get underneath the language a little bit, to do that. But there’s no silver bullet, unfortunately. That’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there is no perfect Bible. Even if I did, from scratch, do my own translation of the whole Bible, there would be plenty of people who would disagree with it, and they’d probably be right about some of the disagreements. So I did the old NT Wright line that when he started teaching, he used to tell everybody at the beginning of his classes, “Ten percent of what I’m about to teach you is wrong. I don’t know what ten percent, or I would fix it. Just keep that in mind.” And he said after he’d been teaching for 20 years, he started saying, “20% of what I’m about to teach you is wrong…” [Laughter] So, same applies to me. I get things wrong; that’s not news to most listeners, I don’t think. So there will never be sort of a perfect Bible translation, because no individual is perfect to do it and no committee has ever done anything well in the history of mankind.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. So hopefully that helps Bradley, and probably helps a lot of other people, too. I hope at least somewhat. So in the third half we’re going to simply talk about a bunch of other times that the Angel of the Lord shows up, but I think it’s important to just go over these, just so we get some… Again, the whole point is to get a broad picture of who the Angel of the Lord is, as depicted in holy Scriptures, and this is the first of four parts of Old Testament Christology episodes that we’re going to have.

All right, so the first one we’re going to look at is from Exodus 3, and this is a big one. I mean, this is a really, really famous one. This is where Moses sees the burning bush. So Exodus 3:1-6:

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses,” and he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Do not come near. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

The first thing I want to mention here, just in terms of setting, because I think this is important, if you listen closely, you’ll notice it says that Moses went to Horeb, the mountain of God, and saw the burning bush. You might think to yourself: Wait a minute. I thought the burning bush was at Sinai. And you would be correct! [Laughter] Because, if you’ve listened to our sacred geography episodes, you’ll know that the mountain of God is wherever God has made that mountain be being the mountain of God. So that means that the burning bush which Moses saw at Horeb is being the burning bush that is on Mount Sinai right now that’s in the monastery there on Sinai. So it is the same—it is being the burning bush. But I just wanted to point that out, because a lot of people are like: “Oh yeah, the burning bush is at Sinai.” Yes, it is, but it also was at Horeb, at this point in Exodus 3.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so for our purposes here in terms of the Angel of Yahweh, in verse two there of Exodus 3, it’s the Angel of the Lord who appears to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush, and then God calls to him out of the bush.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, verse four, right.

Fr. Stephen: And then he says that he’s the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: Very clearly, the Angel of the Lord is God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there is a reason. It is not pure metaphor; it is not allegory that when you see an icon of Moses at the burning bush, you see Christ in the bush. You see Christ enthroned in the lap of his mother, the Theotokos, surrounded by the cherubic throne, because Christ there, in Moses’ day, is enthroned both on his human mother and on the throne of God, because he is God and man. But, yeah, that’s not a weird anachronism, that’s not symbolic in a vague, frou-frou sense—that is who called to Moses from the bush.

Fr. Andrew: Like if this were a map, this would be a “You are here.” It is all those things at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: And as we alluded to in the second half, that what is said here about taking off the sandals, for the place you’re standing on is holy ground, is the exact same thing the commander of the Lord’s hosts says to Joshua when Joshua falls down in worship, meaning it’s the same person talking.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and has the same expectations of how to respond to him.

Fr. Stephen: And what makes it holy ground is not that this is some kind of sacred locale.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Moses stumbled upon some ancient shrine.

Fr. Stephen: It’s because God is there, on there, it is become holy ground. It’s because his presence is there; you’re now in his presence. This means that the same thing is true with the commander of Yahweh’s hosts with Joshua when he says that. It’s because God is standing there in front of him that it’s holy. And Moses is, here, afraid to see God, even though…

Fr. Andrew: It says he hid his face.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s one. Here’s one—we’re getting into the book of Judges here. People love it when I talk about the book of Judges. [Laughter] They’re so thrilled, every time I bring it up. This is actually in Judges 6, and so this is… There’s this cycle that repeats all through the book of Judges that we saw. The cycle starts when the Angel of Yahweh starts. He leaves, and then, because of that, because God is not there fighting their battles for them, these foreign oppressors come in. They sin; the foreign oppressors come in and conquer them. Being conquered is bad, and so they cry out to God for deliverance and at least make a show of repentance. God raises up a judge to deliver them; they are delivered; they go back to sinning. It’s sort of this endless cycle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, over and over and over. And it gets worse as you go.

Fr. Stephen: Through Judges, it gets worse and worse; it’s a downward spiral, yeah. And this part of the cycle, here in Judges 6, it’s the Midianites, who are Edomites and Ishmaelites. These are the people who actually Moses’ wife was, but they’ve come and are now oppressing part of Israel, and the people right before the part we’re going to talk about in Judges 6:7-10, they cry out for deliverance. God sends a prophet, a human prophet to them, who says, “Yahweh the God of Israel has heard you. He is going to deliver you.” And then in verse 11, he sends the Angel of Yahweh [who] then appears to Gideon, for Gideon to be the guy who’s going to do this, even though Gideon himself is not so keen on it necessarily.

And so what we read there in Judges 6:11-24, sort of briefly is the Angel of the Lord appears—and the Angel of Yahweh appears—and Gideon speaks to him, and then verse 14 says, “Then Yahweh turned to him and said…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, interestingly, in the Greek, it says, “The Angel of the Lord turned to him and said…”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Greek smooths it out, at least one; there’s two versions of Greek Judges, but we won’t get into all that. Anyway. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But the point being that the Angel of the Lord is closely identified with Yahweh here in the whole Gideon story.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Angel of Yahweh appears, and then Yahweh turns and says to him. And then Yahweh speaks again to him in verse 16, and then Gideon goes to get some food to show hospitality, and then it’s the Angel of Yahweh again who’s the actor who extends his staff that he’s carrying and touches it to the food that’s sitting on a rock, and the food goes up in flames as a sacrifice, as a burnt-offering, and the smoke and flame goes up to heaven, and the Angel of Yahweh disappears. When he disappears, Gideon’s like: “Oh no, I’m going to die,” because—

Fr. Andrew: Because he’s seen God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then Yahweh, who’s apparently still there, corrects him and says, “No, you’re not going to die. You’re okay.”

Fr. Andrew: “Don’t worry.”

Fr. Stephen: “Do not panic.”

Fr. Andrew: “Do not fear. You shall not die.”

Fr. Stephen: “Now go destroy the local shrine to Baal.” But we won’t continue the rest of that story until another time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, perhaps another day.

Fr. Stephen: But so you see there that, once again, there’s this interchange, as there was a the burning bush, as we’ve seen in some of these other instances between the Angel of Yahweh who, by virtue of being referred to as the Angel of Yahweh, the Yahweh Angel, is distinguished from Yahweh, but also is identified with Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: God, and then God-also-God.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s only one God, yeah. [Laughter] And so now we’re going to go into lightning round.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a whole bunch of appearances quickly.

Fr. Stephen: Which will not be that fast, because it’s still us, but… And we’re just going to sort of cover briefly the other appearances and references to the Angel of Yahweh in the Old Testament. The first one, actually, as you’re going through the Old Testament, is actually in Genesis 16. The first person who encounters the Angel of Yahweh in Scripture is actually Hagar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the handmaid of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who is, you know, pregnant by this point with Abraham’s son.

Fr. Stephen: And has been cast out, because she was jealous. This is that Hagar, not the one from Final Fight, who became the mayor of town.

Fr. Andrew: And not Hagar the Horrible.

Fr. Stephen: No. So she’s cast out by Sarah and abused, and the Angel of Yahweh comes to her to strengthen her and care for her, show her mercy and tell her that her son also is going to be the father of a mighty nation and is going to be like a wild donkey, which is not recommended. If someone you know has a baby, going to them and saying, “May your son be like a wild donkey in the desert,” probably won’t be taken as a blessing. [Laughter] But in this case it was.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so the next one, then, is— And we talked about this scene a lot in our Abraham episode, but this is the sacrifice of Isaac, where you get the Angel of the Lord speaks from heaven. This is in Genesis 22, twice, in verse 11 and 15. It says, again, the Angel of the Lord spoke to him, “Stop.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is not a case where there was a difference of opinion, like Yahweh wanted him to sacrifice Isaac and the Angel of Yahweh didn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, no.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They were on the same page. So the Angel of Yahweh is here, carrying out what Yahweh’s intent was, because one will, one activity. So then we already alluded to this one in Numbers 22.

Fr. Andrew: Balaam.

Fr. Stephen: This is Balaam and his donkey, and here is where—one of the places where the Angel of Yahweh appears with a drawn sword, standing between Balaam, who’s coming to curse Israel, and Israel, much the way the angel stood between the Egyptians and Israel.

Fr. Andrew: And what’s fun about this is that Scripture says it’s the donkey that sees him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the donkey sees him and wants to turn back, and Balaam is sort of beating the donkey, trying to get it… “Stupid donkey!” Balaam is actually mentioned in extrabiblical inscriptions. He was sort of a Canaanite folk hero: Balaam, son of Beor.

Fr. Andrew: A big deal.

Fr. Stephen: He was this great prophet/wizard/sage-type.

Fr. Andrew: And the Scripture gives the vision of the uncreated God to the donkey and not to Balaam.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, so the idea is that the donkey—insert your other word for “donkey” here—has more wisdom and spiritual insight than the great prophet Balaam. And then that leads to Balaam getting sent back by the angel, when he finally sees him, to the king who hired him, and then Balaam does the thing where he tries to curse Israel and ends up keeping blessing Israel. And there’s this whole sitcom moment with the king saying, “Stop blessing them!” “I meant to curse them!”

Fr. Andrew: “Sorry, I’m trying!”

Fr. Stephen: “I’m giving her all she’s got!” [Laughter] Anyway. And just because people, again, love to hear me talk about this, in Judges 13, before the birth of Samson, the Angel of Yahweh shows up to announce Samson’s impending birth and to try to explain things to Samson’s father. And in their whole interchange between him and Samson’s father, you really get clued into how far gone Israel is at this point and how little understanding they have of the Torah and of the things of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a weird, weird exchange!

Fr. Stephen: Where Samson’s father, in particular, keeps wanting to worship the Angel of Yahweh in addition to Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he thinks it’s some other god in front of him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so the Angel of Yahweh keeps saying, “Yahweh is going to do this,” and he says, “Okay, but what’s your name so we can worship you also and sacrifice to you also?” And it’s like… You’re not getting this! [Laughter]

But this is the place where, finally, the Angel of Yahweh says, “Why do you ask my name? For it is wonderful.” Same word, pele from the first half.

Fr. Andrew: Wonderful counselor.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, so there’s this whole interchange, and they clearly, over and over, Samson’s father doesn’t get it, ends up naming him after Shemesh, the pagan sun-god. That shows you that he never really gets it. But he does appear there. So this is the second time after Genesis 16 with Hagar where the Angel of Yahweh appears to announce an impending significant birth, which is interesting in and of itself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So then there’s another one where the lesson, the take-away is: Don’t take a census when you’re not supposed to.

Fr. Stephen: That shouldn’t actually be your take-away.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, okay, all right. God sends a plague.

Fr. Stephen: That’s sort of like: The meaning of Genesis 3 is don’t eat fruit.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] This is the part where I mention that the English word “apple” was once a generic term that meant “fruit,” by the way. So it was an apple, just not necessarily a modern apple. Okay, so there’s two parallel accounts: 2 Samuel 24:16, 1 Chronicles 21:16. I’ll read the 2 Samuel one.

And when the angel stretched out his hand to Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord relented from the calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, “It is enough. Now stay your hand.” And the Angel of the Lord was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

And it’s a similar kind of thing in 1 Chronicles 21:16, but it’s David in this case, seeing the Angel of the Lord, and he has the drawn sword in his hand and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the point of the thing with the census is that it was for taxation and military recruitment.

Fr. Andrew: Money and power.

Fr. Stephen: And it represented a lack of trust in God to go forth and fight the battles, because it’s like: No, I need more troops and I need more money, relying on his own devices. So then the Angel of Yahweh appears and interacts with Elijah at a couple of points in 1 Kings (or 3 Kingdoms) 19 and 2 Kings (or 4 Kingdoms) 1. And what’s interesting about those places is he comes and speaks with Elijah, and it’s sort of paralleled in those same passages by the word of Yahweh coming to Elijah—foreshadowing.

Fr. Andrew: That’ll be in our next episode, everyone, by the way.

Fr. Stephen: Bar Yahweh coming to Elijah and communicating with him. And then there is good old 2 Kings 19:35 and Isaiah 37:36, which is…

Fr. Andrew: Where you get 185,000 dead Assyrians.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, which is a good start. No— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: The Assyrians were particularly wicked and bloodthirsty.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I mean the context is that they’ve laid siege to Jerusalem to come carry people off.

Fr. Stephen: After destroying the northern kingdom.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the ten tribes, and now they’re after Jerusalem. So there’s this episode where they’re camped around Jerusalem, they’re laying siege to it, they stop up the water as one does, they stop all the food being brought in—siege, right, to make them surrender—after which they’re going to do very, very horrible things to all of them that we won’t describe here, because I made a promise that this wouldn’t be like last time. [Laughter] And sort of overnight, the Angel of Yahweh goes through the camp and slaughters the Assyrian army, so when they wake up in the morning, everybody’s dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s what it says. It says:

That night, the Angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 of the camp of the Assyrians. When people rose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Now in the historical record, this actually… There’s actually mention of this in the historical records, I should say. So this isn’t one that the local atheist usually goes after, because there actually is some back-up on this one, that something happened. Now they’re going to come up with a very naturalistic explanation of it, and we’re going to talk about what that is here in a second, because the Assyrian records themselves say that they went, they laid siege to Jerusalem—and then they left.

Fr. Andrew: They left, right.

Fr. Stephen: Which—the Assyrians don’t normally do that. Like, they don’t start laying siege to a city and then just be like: “Eh, nah, I’m not feeling it.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, of course, in their own records, they’re not going to say, “We suffered this humiliating defeat and so we had to leave.”

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not what you write into the history books.

Fr. Stephen: “We returned home victorious.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, glorifying your people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. I mean, the ancient Egyptians were especially bad at this. There were battles where they lost huge numbers of troops and massive amounts of territory and returned home victorious according to their own records. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s not too different from our own day. “We won! We totally won!”

Fr. Stephen: “At worst it was a tie.” [Laughter] And so, in terms of other records… So Josephus talks about this—Josephus has come up a couple times tonight—and Josephus says he’s referring to Egyptian chronicles that he has access to, because the big rivals to the Assyrians during that period were the Egyptians. The Egyptians were the other super power during that period. So the Egyptian chronicle, according to Josephus, indicates that rats entered the camp and the rats, Josephus says, ate their bowstrings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is kind of a weird detail, but there you go.

Fr. Stephen: So they got up… Now, we’ve been dealing with church mice lately, and they will eat through stuff, but that would be kind of bizarre if they all just woke up and were like: “Aw man, no bowstrings! Well, I guess we’ve got to forget the siege. Didn’t bring any other weapons.” But what modern historians basically do with this is they say, “Well, wait a second. Let’s think about this.” They blocked up the water sources—that’s in and out, right? So they’re basically blocking up the sewers; they’re blocking up the sources of fresh water.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that’s what you do when you lay siege.

Fr. Stephen: So what lives in the caves and sewers and tunnels under a city? Rats. So if you stop them up, the rats aren’t going to have food either. They’re going to come swarming out through holes. And rats carry the plague. Technically, fleas on rats carry the plague, but rats bring disease. And so the generally accepted sort of secular explanation for this is that the Assyrians had to break the siege because there was a plague outbreak in the camp. Now, this is not necessarily opposed to what the text says, because when we talked about 2 Samuel and we talked about 1 Chronicles, where the Angel of the Lord appeared with a drawn sword, that was in the context of a plague striking Israel. So this could be referring to a plague, but just saying that the plague was not like an accident; it was not a sort of natural occurrence, because there were plenty of sieges that were laid and no plague outbreaks, but that this plague outbreak was the result of the Angel of Yahweh coming to protect the people of God, because they repented and aligned themselves with God’s will.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the ancient sources are not incompatible with each other.

Fr. Stephen: And so then finally, as the big tease for our next episode… Well, there is briefly: if you look at Psalm 34:7 and 35:5-6 (or 33 and 34 if you’re in the Greek numbering), the Angel of Yahweh is referred to there as camping about and protecting the righteous, defending the righteous, as this sort of military figure.

And then finally—here’s the segue—Zechariah 1, the Prophet Zechariah has this discussion with someone, and so the question is: Who is this person? Because in verse seven, this person is referred to as “the word of Yahweh.” In verse nine it’s referred to as an angel. In ten it’s referred to as a man. And in verse 11, this same figure is referred to as “the Angel of Yahweh, the Angel of the Lord.” And that’s setting up our next few episodes.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, indeed. Wow. We’re going to do an episode that might just be a hair over two hours. Can you believe it?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I’m going to ramble. Don’t worry.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s good! Great. We can make up for the time, yeah. [Laughter] Right, so okay, to try to wrap this up, again, this is a series, so we’re not going to try to draw all possible conclusions, but one of the things that I wanted to especially focus on: if you look at the Angel of the Lord as depicted in Scripture, he’s often shown as being the one who is leading the armies of God and is protecting the people of Israel, sometimes punishing the people of Israel, defeating God’s enemies, which is really good especially when Israel is on board with him and is obeying him. You see the Angel of the Lord, as we just heard about from the Assyrian siege, being the one that’s described as responsible for killing a lot of people: doing battle. This is the Angel of the Lord; this is the Son of God with a drawn sword. That’s not the only thing, as we’ve heard, that the Angel of the Lord is associated with, but it’s a major, major element of the way he’s shown in Scripture.

I think a lot of times when people see this and we say, “Okay, this is Jesus”—you hear there from Jude when he said, “Jesus saved the people of Israel from Egypt as they were about to cross the Red Sea,” and if you read in Exodus 15, that’s described as God defeating those enemies, that God has done this—not to allude too much to your book, Father, God is a Man of War, but that’s exactly where that phrase comes from, and that describes, in many ways, the Angel of the Lord—not the only way, again, not the only way. But when people see this, if they’re not used to looking at the whole of Scripture and understanding that that’s who this is, and then they’re told, “Okay, this is Jesus,” that can seem like a contradiction, because at what point in the gospels does Jesus ever pick up a sword? Like: “Well, no, Jesus is non-violent,” this sort of thing. And it can seem like this can’t possibly be the same figure.

But one of the things that I think is really important to focus on is that, for these many centuries that precede the gospels, the Angel of the Lord is shown to be not a violent figure in the sense of being aggressive and wanting just to be the destroyer or whatever, but the one who’s bringing God’s justice, the one who’s making things right. And so, if we understand that that’s who he is, and then he comes and he comes humbly, very humbly—he does not come as the son of a king, some earthly ruler; he does not come with a whole bunch of, with an army behind him—he comes humbly and offers himself, that’s actually not a contradiction. Instead, what you’re getting is something much more powerful. You’re seeing that the one who, as he says, he could command legions of angels… He says, “Don’t you know I could do this?” He’s making a reference to himself as the commander of the hosts of the Lord, when he’s being betrayed and arrested and so forth. It says, “Don’t you know I could call down legions of angels”—because that’s who he is.

That that one, who can call down legions of angels and has done that kind of thing before—they know it—that’s the one who offers himself. That’s the one who enters into a kind of special ops mission, so to speak, where you get what’s called the messianic secret, that it’s tricking the devil and the dark powers into not realizing what his mission is, and utterly destroying and defeating them, as St. John Chrysostom says in his Great Homily, “Hell took a body and met God.” It was, like I said, special ops, or however you want to think of it, but the point is it’s kept secret from the dark powers. They don’t understand what’s going on, and that’s because he came in humility. He defeats his enemies ultimately that way.

Continuing on, then, the Christ who’s preached by the apostles and the Christ whom we see especially in the Apocalypse is again the Christ on his throne, the Christ who is the commander of the Lord’s armies, the Christ who is establishing justice. If we understand that this is that Christ, all the way through, then that makes the Jesus whom we see in the gospels—it’s much clearer then what his suffering is about and what his sacrifice of himself is about. It’s not a contradiction. These aren’t two different figures; this is the same one figure. And so he offers himself; God in the flesh offers himself as a ransom to death, as a sacrifice, as purification for the whole world, and only the one who is the Angel of the Lord can do that. Only the one who is able to establish justice in the way that he does can do that.

So to me, looking at this is not dismaying at all. It makes what we see in the gospels just so rich with meaning, when you understand that this is that Jesus. And we’re going to see more about it; we’re going to see more of this over the next few episodes, but when you understand what St. John says in the first chapter of his gospel when he identifies this figure whom they’ve always known and says, “This is Jesus,” that’s big. That’s really big, and that’s what’s going on in the gospels. That’s one of the things going on in the gospels, and so this is just very, very powerful material for me, and I hope it has been for everyone listening tonight as well. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, as you mentioned, this is the beginning of a series, and I think we’ve already seen, even in this beginning, that when it comes the Old Testament, it’s not just angels on the sidelines, puzzled and confused, but that Christ himself is actively involved, and we’re going to see him… A lot of times when people talk about Christ in the Old Testament, they think what you’re going to do is, every time there’s a stick: “Oh, see, that represents the cross!” and every time somebody is raised from the dead, “Oh, that’s the resurrection of Christ!”—but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about Christ himself, active in the Old Testament.

I think the place where what we talked about tonight really rubs against where we are and how we think as modern people has to do with the very fact that this is Christ in the Old Testament; this is Christ active “before”—before the Incarnation entered into our human experience—because it shows us that there is a reality that is far beyond the day-to-day life that we experience. And individualism, modern individualism, is very attractive to our ego; it’s very attractive to our pride, because what it does is it says: Whatever I’m dealing with today—whatever struggle I’m going through, whatever pain I’m going through, whatever victory I’m experiencing, whatever success I have—that is the most important thing in the universe; this is what is really happening and this is what’s really important. So approaching things from that direction of individualism can be very attractive.

And it’s not just our individual self and our sort of pure selfishness, but we’ve even, in our modern world, whittled down families from the huge extended families and households that existed for most of human history to little nuclear families, if that, and even that now is starting to break apart into collections of individuals. We see societies, communities, as collections of individuals, even church parishes. Individuals come, they experience the services, and then they leave as individuals, and go home, having received, they hope, what they were looking for when they came.

But if we look at it from the other perspective, from the perspective that’s required by what we’ve been talking about tonight, that there is an eternal reality that is being worked out, that we’re beginning to experience now, that’s beginning to enter into our experience now, but that is the most real, then that takes all of these things we experience on a day-to-day basis, both good and bad, and relativizes them. That takes a hit to our ego. My anxiety is not the most important thing in the universe; my success at something is not the most important thing in the universe. Christ is the center of what’s going on in the universe at all times.

But what this means positively, beyond just “Hey, don’t worry; be happy,” is that, for example, when we think about St. Gregory the Theologian… If you read a lot of St. Gregory the Theologian, you’ll find that he spends a lot of time talking about his irritable bowel syndrome—at least that’s what we call it today. That may shock some people, but it’s absolutely true; read his letters. He wrote prayers to God that he said when he was experiencing this pain and distress and suffering; it’s very human. That’s not usually how we think about St. Gregory the Theologian. The hymnography, as far as I know—someone can correct me, but I’m pretty sure the hymnography of his feast and the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs does not mention his health problems at all. The St. Gregory who appears to us in the services, whom we come to know in the services and by reading his writings preserved in the Church, is sort of a different St. Gregory than that. And it’s not that that’s not the real St. Gregory. We’ve been taught by our 19th-century German friends to think: Well, the person who, if I got in a Tardis and went back to the fourth century and met Gregory, if I met that person, that person with the suffering and the bathroom problems and all that stuff, that’s the “real” Gregory, and the other thing is this artifice of the Church, this “invented” thing, this legendary thing that doesn’t have reality to it. And that’s getting it exactly backwards.

The real St. Gregory is the St. Gregory in the Church. The real St. Gregory is that St. Gregory whom we come to know, because that’s who St. Gregory is in eternity. That’s who St. Gregory is at the end of his journey. That’s who St. Gregory became, the holy one who he became. And the same is true, at least in potency, for each of us. The experiences we have, the struggles we go through, the victories, the failures—everything we go through in this life is the reality of who we are in Christ entering into our experience, gradually, because we’re human and we’re finite and we’re flawed, and that’s how we have to process it, a second and a bit and a piece at a time, to try to grow and change into the likeness of Christ.

And so that means that who I am in Christ is the ultimate reality of myself, not how messed up I may feel about myself, not how horrible I may feel about myself, not whatever the little voice in the back of my head is telling me is true about myself—because that little voice isn’t me, as we talked about in a previous episode—none of that is who I am. Who I am in Christ is something that stands out before me and that I am working toward and coming to experience, bit by bit and piece by piece, and hoping to eventually become fully in the age to come.

And I think if we approach not just our own lives that way, but when we approach others in our community, in our family, in our parishes, not as who they may be right now when I encounter them with all their flaws and all their difficulties and all their good qualities, but as the person who they are in Christ, the person who they’re coming to be, and understand that we can have the joy of experiencing that with them, then that will transform everything—for us, for our communities, for the life of those communities—because it’s not just us: it’s our families who could become what our family was created to be. It’s our parishes who could become what our parishes were created to be in Christ. Our communities—all the way up, to the whole inhabited world, could become in Christ what they were created to be. And I think to do that we have to keep our eyes not on the day-to-day struggle, the moment-to-moment plusses and minuses, rejoicing in the momentary victories and mourning the momentary failures, but keeping our eyes focused on eternity and on Christ who dwells there.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. That’s a good word. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save some of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much, good night, and God bless you all.