Who is the Angel of the Lord?
This blog entry will deal with the identity of an enigmatic figure known in the Old Testament (“OT”) as the “Angel of the Lord” or “Angel of Yahweh”. Although it’s certainly not unanimous amongst scholars, many take the view that this character is actually Jesus himself, who in these instances in the OT appears on earth in what is known by them as a “pre-incarnate appearance“. To make it clear up front, when we say Jesus is the Angel of the Lord, we do not thereby contradict Hebrews 1 which takes great pains to points out that Jesus is not an angel in the same way that, for example, Michael and Gabriel are. We have to merely keep in mind that the word “angel” (“Malak” in Hebrew) means “messenger” and is therefore a word that can be used of humans delivering a message or even God himself doing so without imply either are angels in the normal sense of the word. Now there are a number of places where Scripture makes it clear that this character known as the Angel of the Lord is God himself (specifically, God the Son):
In Joshua 5:13-15, Joshua encounters a “man” with his sword drawn. As Michael Heiser notes, “An important clue in identifying this “man” as the angel of Yahweh is the drawn sword in his hand. The Hebrew phrase here occurs only two other times: Numbers 22:23 and 1 Chronicles 21:16. Both explicitly name the Angel of Yahweh as the one with “drawn sword in hand”. Upon seeing the “man” Joshua immediately bows down to him and then he is told “take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy”. This wording reminds us of the Burning Bush incident in Exodus 3:1-6 where Moses is told by God not to come near and to take off his sandals since he is on holy ground. Joshua’s reaction to the Angel is the same as Moses’s reaction to seeing God; that is, he reacts as if he had seen God even though he is said to have seen the Angel of the Lord.
In Genesis 32 Jacob famously has a wrestling match with a “man”. Hosea 12:4 later informs us that this man was an angel. Further on in Genesis 32 Jacob asks this being to bless him (v. 26). In response to the blessing Jacob renamed the place Peniel and says “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (v. 30). Jacob therefore understand this man/angel he wrestled with was God himself. We know previously from Exodus 33:20 and Deuteronomy 5:24 that no man can see God and live.
Another example of this reaction to seeing the Angel of the Lord is Judges 13:21-22 where the angel appears to Manoah and the reaction of Manoah to seeing this angel is to say “We shall surely die, for we have seen God”.
A final example of this same reaction is found Judges 6:11-24. In verse 11 the Angel of the Lord sits down under an oak tree in order to talk to Gideon. Gideon, not realising who he’s speaking to, asks the Angel why Yahweh has forsaken the nation. Then in verse 14 the narrator says “Then Yahweh turned to him (Gideon) and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand” (v. 14). So what the narrator has done here is have Gideon conversing with an angel in verses 11-13 but then in verse 14 he switches and refers to this same character by the name Yahweh, thereby equating them. In verse 16 Yahweh promises that he will help Gideon defeat his enemy which in turn causes Gideon to prepare a food offering for Yahweh as a thanks. In verse 21 the Angel of the Lord burns up the food and disappears. Verses 22-23 then read:
“When Gideon realised it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed ‘Alas, sovereign Lord. I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face’. But the Lord said to him “Peace!. Do not be afraid. You are not going to die.”
Once again we have a person who, upon seeing the Angel of the Lord, responds by fearing for their life because they know they’ve seen God himself.
In Genesis 31:11-13 an incident of the the Angel of the Lord appearing to Jacob is recounted:
“The angel of the Lord said to me in the dream, ‘Jacob’. I answered ‘Here I am’. And he said, ‘Look up and see that all the male goats mating with the flock are streaked, speckled or spotted, for I have seen all that Laban has been doing to you. I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made a vow to me”.
The Angel of the Lord here in verse 13 identifies himself as the God of Bethel. This recounts the incident of Jacob’s ladder some three chapters earlier where Jacob, after seeing in a dream numerous angels and God himself, renamed the city “Bethel” and anointed a pillar and made a vow to God (Genesis 28:18-20). The clear teaching here is that the Angel of the Lord is the God of Bethel and the same God that Jacob made a vow to.
In Genesis 16 the Angel of the Lord appears to Hagar in the desert (v. 7). Th angel promises Hagar that she will have numerous descendants and that she will have a son and name him Ishmael (verses 10-11). Verse 13 then reads, “She (Hagar) gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me”, for she said, “I have now seen the one who sees me.” The angel of the Lord that Hagar had been speaking with suddenly now in verse 13 becomes God himself and Hagar notes this by saying “I have now seen the one who sees me”.
Sometimes the deeds of Yahweh are attributed instead to the Angel of the Lord, which give us another clue that this angel is a very special kind of angel. An example of this is in Judges 2:1-2, where we read: “The angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bokim and said “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land I swore to give to your ancestors.” The angel says he was the one responsible for the Exodus. Yet we know that it was God who delivered Israel from Egypt. A New Testament passage also makes a similar claim:
“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” (Jude 5).
So here Jesus is said to have saved Israel out of Egypt (some translations have the word Lord instead of Jesus but the earliest and best manuscripts read “Jesus” instead of “Lord”), which is strikingly similar to these OT passages that have the angel of the Lord doing deeds attributed to God elsewhere. There are numerous other places in the NT of course where things are attributed to Jesus (e.g., the creation of the universe in John 1) that are elsewhere attributed to God alone.
In conclusion, it seems clear that when we examine all the evidence, prior to his incarnation in Bethlehem just over 2000 years ago, the second person of the Trinity made a number of pre-incarnate appearances in the OT as the Angel of the Lord.
