to which God is removed that causes Ezekiel to create these intermediaries." The necessity for them rather arises from the same natural feeling, which we have suggested as giving rise to the earliest conceptions of Angels: the unwillingness, namely, to engage the Person of God Himself in the subordinate task of explaining the details of the Temple. Note, too, how the Divine Voice, which speaks to Ezekiel out of the Temple, blends and becomes one with the Man standing at his side. Ezekiel's Angel-interpreter is simply one function of the Word of God. Many of the features of Ezekiel's Angels appear in those of Zechariah. The four smiths or smiters of the four horns recall the six executioners of the wicked in Jerusalem.1 Like Ezekiel's Interpreter, they are called Men, and like him one appears as Zechariah's instructor and guide: he who talked with me.3 But while Zechariah calls these beings Men, he also gives them the ancient name, which Ezekiel had not used, of Male'akim, messengers, angels. The Instructor is the Angel who talked with me. In the First Vision, the Man riding the brown horse, the Man that stood among the myrtles, is the Angel of Jehovah that stood among the myrtles. The Inter 4 preter is also called the Angel of Jehovah, and if our text of the First Vision be correct, the two of them are curiously mingled, as if both were functions of the same. Word of God, and in personality not to be distinguished from each other. The Reporting Angel among the myrtles takes up the duty of the Interpreting 1 Zech. i. 18 ft.; Ezek. ix. 1 ff. 2 Zech. i. 8: so even in the Book of Daniel we have the man Gabriel-ix. 21. 3 i. 9, 19; ii. 3; iv. 1, 4, 5; v. 5,10; vi. 4. But see above, pp. 261 f. 4 i. 8, 10, 11. Angel and explains the Vision to the prophet. In the Fourth Vision this dissolving view is carried further, and the Angel of Jehovah is interchangeable with Jehovah Himself;1 just as in the Vision of Ezekiel the Divine Voice from the Glory and the Man standing beside the prophet are curiously mingled. Again in the Fourth Vision we hear of those who stand in the presence of Jehovah, and in the Eighth of executant angels coming out from His presence with commissions upon the whole earth.3 In the Visions of Zechariah, then, as in the earlier books, we see the Lord of all the earth, surrounded by a court of angels, whom He sends forth in human form to interpret His Word and execute His will, and in their doing of this there is the same indistinctness of individuality, the same predominance of function over personality. As with Ezekiel, one stands out more clearly than the rest, to be the prophet's interpreter, whom, as in the earlier visions of angels, Zechariah calls my lord, but even he melts into the figures of the rest. These are the old and borrowed elements in Zechariah's doctrine of Angels. But he has added to them in several important particulars, which make his Visions an intermediate stage between the Book of Ezekiel and the very intricate angelology of later Judaism. In the first place, Zechariah is the earliest prophet who introduces orders and ranks among the angels. In his Fourth Vision the Angel of Jehovah is the Divine Judge before whom Joshua appears with the Adversary. iii. I compared with 2. 2 iii. 6, 7. s vi. 5. iii. I. Stand before is here used forensically: cf. the N.T. phrases to stand before God, Rev. xx. 12; before the judgment-seat of Christ, Rom. xiv. 10; and be acquitted, Luke xxi. 36. He also has others standing before him1 to execute his sentences. In the Third Vision, again, the Interpreting Angel does not communicate directly with Jehovah, but receives his words from another Angel who has come forth. All these are symptoms, that even with a prophet, who so keenly felt as Zechariah did the ethical directness of God's word and its pervasiveness through public life, there had yet begun to increase those feelings of God's sublimity and awfulness, which in the later thought of Israel lifted Him to so far a distance from men, and created so complex a host of intermediaries, human and superhuman, between the worshipping heart and the Throne of Grace. We can best estimate the difference in this respect between Zechariah and the earlier prophets whom we have studied by remarking that his characteristic phrase talked with me, literally spake in or by me, which he uses of the Interpreting Angel, is used by Habakkuk of God Himself. To the same awful impressions of the Godhead is perhaps due the first appearance of the Angel as intercessor. Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah themselves directly interceded with God for the people; but with Zechariah it is the Interpreting Angel who intercedes, and who in return receives the Divine comfort. In this angelic function, the first of its kind in Scripture, we see the small and explicable beginnings of a belief destined to assume enormous dimensions in the development of the Church's worship. The supplication of Angels, the faith in their intercession and in iii. 4. Here the phrase is used domestically of servants in the presence of their master. See above, p. 293, n. 2. 2 ii. 3, 4. 3 Hab. ii. 1: cf, also Num. xii, 6-9. 4 First Vision, i. 12. the prevailing prayers of the righteous dead, which has been so egregiously multiplied in certain sections of Christendom, may be traced to the same increasing sense of the distance and awfulness of God, but is to be corrected by the faith Christ has taught us of the nearness of our Father in Heaven, and of His immediate care of His every human child. The intercession of the Angel in the First Vision is also a step towards that identification of special Angels with different peoples which we find in the Book of Daniel. This tells us of heavenly princes not only for Israel-Michael, your prince, the great prince which standeth up for the children of thy people1-but for the heathen nations, a conception the first beginnings of which we see in a prophecy that was perhaps not far from being contemporaneous with Zechariah.2 Zechariah's Vision of a hierarchy among the angels was also destined to further development. The head of the patrol among the myrtles, and the Judge-Angel before whom Joshua appears, are the first Archangels. We know how these were further specialised, and had even personalities and names given them by both Jewish and Christian writers.3 Among the Angels described in the Old Testament, we have seen some charged with powers of hindrance and destruction-a troop of angels of evil. They too are the servants of God, who is the author of all evil as well as good," and the instruments of His wrath. 1 X. 21, xii. I. 2 Isa. xxiv. 21. 3 Book of Daniel x., xii.; Tobit xii. 15; Book of Enoch passim ; Jude 9; Rev. viii. 2, etc. • Psalm 1xxviii. 49. See above, p. 312, n. 2. Amos iii, 6. But the temptation of men is also part of His Providence. Where wilful souls have to be misled, the spirit who does so, as in Ahab's case, comes from Jehovah's presence.1 All these spirits are just as devoid of character and personality as the rest of the angelic host. They work evil as mere instruments : neither malice nor falseness is attributed to themselves. They are not rebel nor fallen angels, but obedient to Jehovah. Nay, like Ezekiel's and Zechariah's Angels of the Word, the Angel who tempts David to number the people is interchangeable with God Himself." Kindred to the duty of tempting men is that of discipline, in its forms both of restraining or accusing the guilty, and of vexing the righteous in order to test them. For both of these the same verb is used, "to satan," in the general sense of withstanding, or antagonising. The Angel of Jehovah stood in Balaam's way to satan him. The noun, the Satan, is used repeatedly of a human foe.5 But in two passages, of which Zechariah's Fourth Vision is one, and the other the Prologue to Job," the name is given to an Angel, one of the sons of Elohim, or Divine powers who receive their commission from Jehovah. The noun is not yet, what it afterwards became,' a proper name; but has the definite article, the Adversary or Accuser-that is, the Angel to whom that function 3 1 I Kings xxii. 20 ff. 2 2 Sam. xxiv. 1; 1 Chron. xxi. 1. between the two documents may have There are two forms of the verb, latter apparently the older. 4 Num. xxii. 22, 32. Though here difference of age caused the difference of view. V, satan, and DDV, satam, the 5 1 Sam. xxix. 4; 2 Sam. xix. 23 Heb., 22 Eng.; 1 Kings v. 18, xi. 14, etc. Zech. iii. I ff.; Job i. 6 ff. 1 Chron. xxi. 1. |