The Angels

Hebrew mal'akh and Greek angelos both mean simply messenger, and both are used of ordinary human messengers as often as of heavenly ones. Nothing in either word implies wings, or immortality, or a particular kind of body. It is a job description.

Which is why context, not vocabulary, decides who is being talked about: the same Hebrew word covers the men Jacob sends ahead to Esau and the figures on the ladder at Bethel. The Bible is also remarkably uninterested in describing them. There is no passage that sets out what angels are, how many there are, or how they are organised. The detailed hierarchies most people have absorbed, nine ranks in three choirs, come from a sixth-century Christian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, not from Scripture. Wings belong to cherubim and seraphim specifically; the messengers who visit Abraham and Lot are taken for men.

A figure who appears from Genesis to Judges and does something no other messenger does: he speaks as God, in the first person, and those who meet him say they have seen God and expect to die for it. Hagar names him. Moses meets him in the bush. Gideon and Manoah both react as though the encounter should have killed them.

The oddity is that the text will, in the same breath, distinguish him from God and identify him with God. Three readings have long histories. The first is that he is simply a messenger speaking in the sender's voice, as an ambassador does, which is ordinary ancient practice. The second is that he is a temporary visible appearance of God himself, a theophany, which is how much Jewish tradition took it. The third, common in Christian tradition since the early centuries, is that he is the pre-incarnate Son. The passages do not settle it, and it is worth noticing that after the incarnation the figure stops appearing in this way.

The word appears exactly twice in the Bible, both in the New Testament, and only one figure is ever called one: Michael. Daniel calls him one of the chief princes and the prince who stands guard over Israel.

Gabriel is not called an archangel anywhere in Scripture; he is described as a messenger, and a remarkably conversational one. The familiar set of seven archangels with names, Raphael, Uriel, and the rest, appears in Tobit and in 1 Enoch. That material is old, and it is part of what the New Testament's first readers had in their heads.

Composite guardian creatures, and nothing whatever like the plump infants of Renaissance painting. They are set to guard the way to the tree of life with a flaming sword; they are hammered in gold on either end of the ark's lid; and God is repeatedly described as enthroned upon them.

Ezekiel gives the fullest description and it is unsettling rather than sweet: four faces, four wings, calves' feet, wheels full of eyes. Assyria and Babylon set very similar creatures at the doors of palaces and temples, winged bulls or lions with human faces, precisely as guardians, and the Akkadian word karibu is likely related. The point of the ark's cherubim is the empty space between them: the throne of a God who is not carved, with the guardians visible and the seat unoccupied.

They appear once, in Isaiah's vision of the throne: six wings each, two covering the face, two the feet, two for flying, calling holy, holy, holy to one another. One of them takes a coal from the altar and touches Isaiah's mouth with it.

The name means burning ones, from the verb to burn. Here is the connection most readers never make: the same Hebrew word, saraph, is what Numbers calls the fiery serpents in the wilderness, and the bronze one Moses is told to make and lift on a pole. Egyptian royal imagery of the period is full of winged, upright cobras guarding the throne. Whether Isaiah's seraphim are serpentine is debated, but the word is the same word, and it is the only place in Scripture these creatures are described at all.

Four figures around the throne in Revelation, each with a different face, lion, ox, man, eagle, and each covered with eyes. They are the same four faces Ezekiel sees, redistributed: Ezekiel gives all four faces to each creature, John gives one face to each.

Very early Christian writers matched the four to the four Gospels, and the pairing stuck hard enough that Matthew's man, Mark's lion, Luke's ox and John's eagle turn up carved on cathedrals across Europe. It is an interpretation, not something either text says, and the assignments differ between early writers.

A group who present themselves before God in Job, who shout for joy at creation, and who go in to the daughters of men in Genesis 6. Psalm 82 shows God standing in the divine assembly and passing judgment among them.

Genesis 6 is read three ways, all of them ancient: as angelic beings, which is how 1 Enoch and probably Jude and 2 Peter take it; as the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the line of Cain; or as ruling dynasts taking harems. The passage gives too little to settle it. Deuteronomy 32:8 is the sharper case. The traditional Hebrew text says God set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the sons of Israel, but the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Greek both read sons of God, which pictures the nations apportioned among heavenly beings while the LORD keeps Israel as his own. Most modern translations now follow the older reading, and it changes how a great deal of the Old Testament sounds.

A phrase that carries two meanings at once, and Scripture uses both. It is the stars, which Israel is warned not to worship. And it is the heavenly army, standing around God's throne, which is what the title LORD of hosts refers to.

The double sense is not a confusion; the ancient world did not separate the two the way we do. That is what makes Deuteronomy's warning pointed: the stars were allotted to all the nations, and Israel is told to look up and not bow. It also loads the announcement to the shepherds, where a multitude of the heavenly host appears in the sky at night, praising rather than being praised.

A term for heavenly beings that appears in the Bible only in Daniel, where a watcher, a holy one, comes down from heaven and announces the decree against Nebuchadnezzar. The Aramaic word means one who is awake or watchful.

Outside the canon the term does a great deal more work. In 1 Enoch the Watchers are the beings who descend, take wives, and teach forbidden knowledge, and that book shapes how a lot of Second Temple Judaism read Genesis 6. Jude quotes Enoch directly, so it is demonstrably part of the world the New Testament writers were working in. It is also outside the canon for almost everyone reading this, and the Bible's own use of the word is three verses in Daniel and nothing else.

Genesis introduces him as the most crafty of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He is not called Satan, or a demon, or a fallen angel, anywhere in Genesis. He is called a beast of the field, and he is cursed to go on his belly and eat dust.

The identification with Satan is old and very widespread. Genesis itself does not make it; the earliest explicit statements of it are later, in the Wisdom of Solomon, and Revelation calls the dragon that old serpent, the devil and Satan. Readers who take the identification still have to reckon with Genesis calling him an animal God made, and readers who do not still have to reckon with a talking animal who knows what God said. In the surrounding cultures the serpent was a symbol of wisdom, of fertility, and of chaos all at once, and it guarded sacred trees; Genesis puts it in the garden and has it dispute the terms.

The wider serpent thread is worth following. Moses' staff becomes one before Pharaoh, whose own crown carried one. The bronze serpent that heals is later smashed as an idol. And Jesus takes that bronze serpent as the image of his own lifting up.

In Isaiah 14 it is a taunt sung over the king of Babylon. The chapter says so in its own opening line: take up this taunt against the king of Babylon. The Hebrew is helel ben shachar, shining one, son of the dawn, and Lucifer is simply what the Latin translation put there, light-bearer, which English inherited as a proper name.

The tradition of reading the passage as the fall of Satan runs deep and is very old, and the same is done with Ezekiel's lament over the king of Tyre. Set against that: Isaiah 14:4 names the king of Babylon as the subject, Ezekiel 28:12 names the king of Tyre, and both are cast as taunts over a ruler whose pride has outrun him. Readers have weighed those two things differently for a very long time.

The reversal worth knowing is that the title itself is not a negative one. Peter uses the morning star for what rises in the heart of a believer. And in the last chapter of the Bible, Jesus says plainly: I am the bright morning star. Whatever Isaiah 14 is doing, the phrase ends up belonging to Christ.

In the Old Testament, Abaddon is a place, not a person: a Hebrew word meaning destruction, paired with Sheol and the grave in the poetry of Job and Proverbs. Revelation turns it into a name, the angel of the abyss, and gives its Greek equivalent, Apollyon, the destroyer.

A separate figure is simply called the destroyer, the one who passes through Egypt at Passover, and the Bible does not identify the two. Nor does it say whether the angel of the abyss serves God or opposes him, which has not stopped anyone from deciding.

Paul's vocabulary for structures of authority that are more than human: rulers, authorities, powers, thrones, dominions. He says they were created in Christ, that they were disarmed at the cross, and that the church's struggle is against them rather than against flesh and blood.

What exactly he means has been read two ways, and the readings are not exclusive. One takes them as personal spiritual beings, in line with Daniel's princes of Persia and Greece. The other takes them as the powers embodied in human institutions, empire, law, and custom, which take on a life beyond the people who staff them. Paul's own usage moves between the two without apology, and Colossians manages to say in one breath that they were created good and that they needed disarming.