Who Is the Angel of the Lord, and Is He Jesus?

What does "angel of the LORD" mean in Hebrew?

Mal'akh means someone sent, and YHWH is the divine name that most English Bibles print as "the LORD" in small capitals, so the title first describes a job: the one YHWH sends.

The same word covers human envoys, as when "Jacob sent messengers before him to his brother Esau" in Genesis 32:3, which is why the messenger sense of mal'akh never drops out of the debate.

Hebrew has no word for "a" or "an."

A noun bound to a proper name, as mal'akh is bound to YHWH, normally reads as definite, so most English versions print "the angel of the LORD" throughout the Old Testament.

Some grammarians allow "an angel of the LORD" as a fair rendering, and that small point comes back when the same phrase reaches the New Testament.

Two details set this figure apart from the named angels of later books. He never gives a name, and when Manoah asks for one the angel replies that his name "is too wonderful" (Judges 13:18, NRSVUE).

He appears mostly in the narrative books from Genesis through 2 Kings, with later appearances in Psalm 34:7, 1 Chronicles 21, and Zechariah's night visions. In the Hebrew Bible only the Book of Daniel gives angels personal names, and there the angels named are Gabriel and Michael, never the angel of the LORD.

Where does the Bible keep the angel and the LORD apart?

Other verses treat the angel as someone God sends, commands, or addresses. Both sides of the debate use them, so a reader weighing the identity question needs them in view alongside the scenes above.

• Exodus 23:20-21: God says he will send an angel ahead of Israel and warns them to obey him, "for my name is in him."
• 2 Samuel 24:16: during the plague, the LORD tells the destroying angel, "It is enough; now stay your hand," and the angel of the LORD stops at the threshing floor of Araunah.
• 2 Kings 19:34-35: God promises Hezekiah, "I will defend this city to save it," and that night "the angel of the LORD set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians"; Isaiah 37:36 tells the same story.
• Zechariah 1:12: the angel of the LORD prays, "O LORD of hosts, how long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem?"
• Genesis 48:15-16: Jacob's blessing puts "the God before whom my ancestors Abraham and Isaac walked" and "the angel who has redeemed me from all harm" in parallel lines.

These texts cut both ways. Readers who see a representative take them as proof that the angel is a servant who can be sent and told to stop.

Readers who see the Son answer that a figure who is distinct from YHWH and still speaks as YHWH is exactly what their reading expects, and they often cite Jacob's blessing, which sets the angel beside God as the one who blesses.

Why do many Christians say the angel of the Lord is Jesus?

The Christophany view, common among evangelical Protestants today and one of the oldest Christian readings of these passages, holds that the angel of the LORD was the Son of God appearing before the incarnation.

Justin Martyr set it out in the mid-second century in his Dialogue with Trypho, a debate with a Jewish teacher. In chapter 56 he starts from the three visitors at Mamre and argues for "another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things."

In chapter 60 he turns to the burning bush. Trypho proposes that an angel appeared in the flame while God spoke, "two persons in company with each other"; Justin grants the point for argument's sake and replies that even then "it will not be the Creator of all things that is the God that said to Moses" that he was the God of Abraham.

Chapter 61 gives the titles Justin assigns to this figure, who is called "now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos."

At the Reformation John Calvin kept the reading, writing in the Institutes (1.13.10) that "the Word of God was the supreme angel, who then began, as it were by anticipation, to perform the office of Mediator."

Present-day evangelical teaching usually adds three arguments, and the first is that the angel speaks as God and is also sent by God, which its holders take as an early sign of more than one person in God.

His name in Judges 13:18 is "wonderful," from the same Hebrew root as the "Wonderful Counselor" of Isaiah 9:6, a verse Christians read as messianic. And popular sources such as GotQuestions.org state that the appearances "cease after the incarnation of Christ."

BibleProject presents a softer version. It argues that the Old Testament writers present the angel as both Yahweh and distinct from Yahweh, and treats that as a first hint that Yahweh is complex, without labelling every scene a Christophany.

All of these are Christian theological readings. They interpret the Hebrew Bible through the New Testament and the later doctrine of the Trinity, which their holders regard as the right key and which Jewish readers do not accept.

How do Jewish interpreters read the angel of the Lord?

Rabbinic interpretation takes mal'akh in its plain sense, a messenger, and asks how many angels came, which angel it was, and how a human being perceived him.

Genesis Rabbah 45:7 counts the angels who spoke to Hagar. Rabbi Yosei bar Hanina says five, one for each time the text says "said," while the Rabbis say four, one for each time it says "angel."

Rabbi Hiyya then sets Hagar beside Manoah, who feared death after seeing one angel: "But Hagar, Sarai's maidservant, saw five angels one after the other and did not fear them."

Rashi (1040-1105) carried the midrash into the commentary most Jewish readers still use. On Genesis 16:9 he writes that for each statement "a different angel was sent to her," which leaves no single figure to speak as God.

At the burning bush the midrash names the angel: in Exodus Rabbah 2:5, Rabbi Yohanan says it was Michael and Rabbi Hanina says it was Gabriel. Either way the angel is the one seen in the flame, and God is the one who speaks.

Exodus 23:21 gets a fuller treatment. Rashi explains "my name is in him" as meaning that whatever the angel does, he does in God's name, and that as a messenger he cannot pardon sin, since pardon belongs to God.

He adds the rabbis' identification of this angel as Metatron, whose name, Rashi notes, has the same numerical value as the divine name Shaddai.

The Talmud passage behind that identification, Sanhedrin 38b, shows the rabbis meeting the claim of a second divine figure head on. A heretic asks Rav Idit why Exodus 24:1 says "Come up to the Lord" rather than "Come up to Me," and Rav Idit answers that "the Lord" there is Metatron, "whose name is like the name of his Master," citing Exodus 23:21.

When the heretic concludes that this angel should be worshipped, Rav Idit reads "do not defy him" as "do not replace Me with him." The angel may carry God's name, and on that reading he still receives none of God's worship.

Maimonides (1138-1204) moved the question from identity to perception. In the Guide for the Perplexed (2.42) he writes that "the appearance or speech of an angel mentioned in Scripture took place in a vision or dream."

Two of this page's scenes get special handling. "Hagar, the Egyptian woman, was not a prophetess; also Manoah and his wife were no prophets," he writes, so what they heard was "like the bat-kol," the heavenly voice the rabbis describe, which people not prepared for prophecy can still hear.

Is the angel God himself or God's representative?

Modern biblical scholarship usually sorts the explanations into identity, representation, and interpolation. Each accounts for the shift from angel to God in Genesis 16 and Exodus 3, and each leaves some verse harder to explain.

The identity view says the angel is God made visible. Stephen White, in Tyndale Bulletin 50.2 (1999), argues that "angel of the LORD" works as a euphemism for God himself, a way to build tension in the story and to stress that YHWH stays transcendent even when he is present.

The representation view says the angel is a real messenger whose first-person speech belongs to his sender, and the Mishnah states the legal principle behind it: "a person's agent has legal status equivalent to his own" (Berakhot 5:5). On that principle, words an angel speaks as God carry God's authority without making the angel God.

The interpolation view is about the text's history. Daniel McClellan, writing for TheTorah.com, argues that later scribes added the word mal'akh to stories in which YHWH once appeared directly, because a visible God had become theologically awkward.

He points to Exodus 4:24, where the Hebrew says the LORD met Moses and tried to kill him and the Greek Septuagint reads "an angel of the Lord."

Exodus 3:2-6 shows where each reading has to work hardest. The theophany reading takes "I am the God of your father" at face value and has to explain why verse 2 calls the figure an angel, while the representation reading starts from verse 2 and has to explain why Moses was "afraid to look at God."

McClellan treats the angel of verse 2 as the later layer, since verses 4-6 speak only of the LORD and God. Justin's Christophany keeps both words by making the one who appears and the one who speaks the same Son.