Judg. ii. 1 — 5. Ayid an Angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to BocJihn, and said, I made you to go np out of Egypt, and have brought you unto the land xvhich I sware unto your fathers ; aiid I said, I will never break my covenant with you. And ye shall make no league icith the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw doimi their altars : but ye have not obeyed my voice : why have ye done this ? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive then out from before you ; but they
shall he as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall he a snare unto you. And it came to pass, ivhen the Angel of the Lord spake these words unto all the children of Israel, that the people lifted up their voice, and wept. And they called the name of that place Bochim : and they sacrificed there unto the Lord.
WE admire the condescension of Jehovah towards his chosen people, in that he raised up prophets to instruct them, and not unfrequently sent angels also to minister unto them. But the person who is here called " an Angel of the Lord," seems to have been no other than " the Angel of the Covenant," the Lord himself. It is certain that Jehovah did some- times assume the appearance of an angel ; as when he visited Abraham, and informed him of the judg- ments that were about to be inflicted on Sodom and Gomorrha. And it is clear that the person spoken of in our text was no created angel ; for if he had, how could he with any propriety use such language ? It was not a creature that brought the Israelites out of Egypt ; but Jehovah. It was not a creature that made a covenant with them ; but Jehovah. It was not a creature to whom they were accountable for their disobedience, or whose threatened dereliction they had such reason to deplore, but Jehovah : and the circumstance of his being said to come up from Gilgal, which is supposed to militate against this interpretation, rather confirms it : for it was in Gilgal, near to Jericho, that this same divine person had appeared to Joshua, as an armed warrior. That he was Jehovah, cannot be doubted ; because he suf- fered Joshua to worship him ; and even commanded him to put off his shoe from his foot, because the very ground whereon he stood was, by reason of Im presence, rendered holy. In his conversation witli Joshua he had called himself " the Captain of the Lord's host ;" and therefore there was a particular propriety in his appearing now to the people, to inquire, " Why they had not carried his orders into effect ? and to threaten that he would fight for them no longer. Besides, at Gilgal the people had revived