Von Angesicht zu Angesicht gesehn 3 Und meinen Engel.’
The same idea was extended to nations and armies (Dn 121, 2 Mac 11° 1578). Indeed we find in 2 Mac. almost a repetition of the old Roman legend of Castor and Pollux mounted on white steeds and appearing at the head of the Jewish armies (3”*). A somewhat similar tale is told in 10°, where five such ‘men’ appear, ‘two of them leading on the Jews.’ In 15” Judas Maccabeeus is represented as praying for ‘a good angel’ to terrify the enemy, and in v. the Jews are described as having been ‘made exceeding glad by the manifestation of God.’ This idea as applied to nations seems to underlie the Heb. text followed by the LXX trans- lator of Dt 328 ‘The Most High set the bounds of the people according to the number of the angels of God’ (5x33) instead of ‘sons of Israel’ (Sy. °33). Perhaps also Ben Sira may have had the angels in view when he wrote: ‘For every nation he appointed a ruler’ (Sir 17!”).
3. Conception of elemental angels in post-can- onical Jewish literature. — Allusion has already been made to the personification of the forces of nature in the OT. The same tendency showed itself later in the conception of the elemental angels. Sir 39° speaks of ‘fire and hail, and famine and death; teeth of wild beasts, and scorpions and adders’ as ‘spirits (mvevuara) that are created for vengeance.’ Although these are not angels, they are said to rejoice in executing God’s commandment, and the language used by the writer certainly prepared the way for the intro- duction into Palestine of the Gr. idea of attributing to every separate thing its daluwy or angel. In the Book of Enoch, the sea, the hoar frost, the snow, the mist, the dew, and the rain,—each has its special spirit (60":). This idea is still further developed in the Book of Jubilees (B.C. 135-105) ; the different elements are represented as each con- taining a spirit, and this again its angel, so that it becomes possible to speak of the angels of the fire -spirit, the wind- spirit, ete. The fullest de- velopment, however, of the tendency in question is found in the Targums. Thus in that of Jonathan the pestilence of Hab 3° becomes the angel of death. That even abstract conceptions had their angels bound up with them appears, ¢.g., from the state-
DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE 287
ment of the Testament of Benjanvin that the souls of the virtuous are led by the angel of peace (dyyedos Tis elpyvns).
To sum up. The Jewish people, under the in- fluence of what they saw in the religion of Zoro- aster, formulated their doctrine of angels with more precision than they had done previously. Especially was this the case with regard to these points: (1) the angels as a whole were conceived as forming a celestial hierarchy with seven princes; (2) those angels who acted as intermediaries be- tween heaven and earth were designated by proper names; (3) the Jews began to follow the custom (which, however, was no less Greek than Persian) of peopling the whole world with angels, and of giving to every man his own protecting spirit or Saluwv ; (4) they formed the conception of the elemental angels.
4. Doctrine of angels as held by the Essenes and by Philo.—That the Jewish angelology had not reached its full development even at the beginning of the Christian era is evident from the fact that a cardinal point in it, viz. the doctrine propounded in the Talmud and the Targums regarding the creation of angels on the second day of the creation of the world, is entirely absent from the NT as well as from the later pre-Christian Jewish writ- ings. The same conclusion is pointed to by the vagueness in several respects (¢.g. in the exact division of angelic tasks, and in the varying names given to the last three archangels) of the angel- ology of the two centuries before Christ, which seems to have been a product of popular imagina- tion rather than the deliberate teaching of the Rabbis. The Palestinian and Babylonian Jew was, however, quite satisfied with an angelology - which not only supplied some tangible link between him and the Deity, but also afforded the comfort- able assurance that in heaven his destinies were watched over by the accredited commissioners of J’. It was otherwise with the Jews of Alex-
-andria and the Essenes, who were concerned with
the speculative rather than the practical, and with whom the doctrine of angels took the form of a theory of cosmic powers. By the latter sect the popular belief in angels was spiritualized into an esoteric system, in which the angels were only metaphorically the servants and messengers of God; in reality they were descending grades of being, differing in purity and in power in propor- tion to their distance from the First Cause, of which they were all emanations. It was the privilege of the initiated to be informed as to the distinctive names of this graduated series of spirits, and of the relations in which they stood to the whole and to one another. Any one admitted to their sect had to take an oath that he would - ‘equally preserve’ their peculiar books and the names of the angels (Jos. BJ I. viii. 7). In all this we see the allegorizing and Gnostic tendency already at work.