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.[903] Like Ezekiel’s Interpreter, they are called _Men_,[904] and like him one appears as Zechariah’s instructor and guide: _he who talked with me_.[905] 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_.[906] The Interpreter 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 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;[907] 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_,[908] and in the Eighth of executant angels coming out from His presence with commissions upon the whole earth.[909]
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_,[910] 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_[911] Joshua appears with the Adversary. He also has others standing _before him_[912] 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.[913] 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.[914] 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.[915] 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 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.