Jewish Scripture contains many incidents involving the figure known only as the Angel of the Lord or the Angle of YHWH. Unlike any angelic messenger elsewhere in the Old Testament or in other ancient religious writings of the Middle East, this angel is often depicted as equivalent to God. In the following intriguing biblical events, the Angel of the Lord speaks with God’s absolute authority and is recognised as the presence of God Himself.
Making a Profound Promise
The Angel promised Abraham’s slave woman Hagar that he would personally ensure that she gave rise to a great tribe. He proclaimed with direct authority, “I will multiply your descendants exceedingly” (Gen 16:10), which is the same assurance made by God (Gen 21:13). Hagar believed that in her interaction with the Angel, she had spoken directly to God:
“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me’” (Gen 16:13).
Preventing the Sacrifice of Isaac
When God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, the Angel of the Lord prevented this by calling out to him from heaven. It is significant that the Angel said:
“Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Gen 22:12).
This would seem to imply that Abraham owed obedience directly to the Angel.
Speaking from the Burning Bush
When a voice spoke to Moses out of a bush that burned without being consumed, this was an encounter with both God and the Angel:
“There the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush . . . God called to him from within the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’ . . . Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exod 3:2–5).
Identifying himself as God
The patriarch Jacob dreamed about a divine ladder that connected heaven and earth:
“And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: ‘I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac’” (Gen 28:13).
The next morning, Jacob set up a stone pillar, called the place Bethel (House/Place of God), and made a commitment to God. Later in the narrative, the Angel of the Lord appeared to Jacob in another dream and identified himself as this same God: “I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed the pillar and where you made a vow to me” (Gen 31:13).
Wrestling with Jacob
A mysterious man wrestled with Jacob one night until the sun rose. In the same way that God gave new names to Abram and Sarai (Gen 17:5), this unnamed figure renamed Jacob as Israel—“strives with God” (Gen 32:28). Jacob was convinced that he had struggled with God:
“So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel [Face of God]: ‘For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved’” (Gen 32:30).
At the end of his life, Jacob associated God directly with an angelic figure (Gen 48:15–16), and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus identified his unnamed wrestler as the Angel of God.[1]
Promising the birth of Samson
The Angel of the Lord appeared as a stranger to promise Manoah and his barren wife that they would have a son (Samson). When this mysterious visitor ascended in the flames of the sacrifice, the couple were shocked to realize that they must have encountered the Angel of the Lord. But even more significant is that Manoah said to his wife:
“We shall surely die, because we have seen Elohim [a divine being/God]!” (Judg 13:22).
It seemed that the couple was afraid they had encountered a form of God Himself. Gideon expressed a similar dread when he encountered the Angel of the Lord (Judg 6:12–23), but nowhere in Scripture did people express a fear of dying after they saw a mere angelic messenger.
Rebuking the nation of Israel
God instructed his people to drive out the inhabitants of the Promised Land. When they failed to do this, the Angel rebuked them and spoke with absolute authority about his covenant with them and his commands that they had not fulfilled:
“Then the Angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said: ‘I led you up from Egypt and brought you to the land of which I swore to your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you. And you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall tear down their altars. But you have not obeyed my voice. Why have you done this?’” (Judg 2:1–2).
No other figure in the Old Testament or any other Jewish text spoke in such fashion without prefacing his message with the words, “Thus says the Lord.”
Inhabiting divine clouds
The Angel of the Lord was directly associated with the divine clouds that represented God’s presence:
“By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud” (Exod 13:21).
“And the Angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud went from before them and stood behind them” (Exod 14:19)
Biblical narratives such as these link the Angel of the Lord to highly significant events and locations in biblical history. This figure, which is never provided with a personal name, has the appearance of a man, but he speaks with personal divine authority, identifies himself as God and is recognized as such. Before we consider the Christian response to this human-divine figure, the next article will explore Jewish interpretations of the unique angelic presence.
[1]. Josephus, Antiquities 1.20.2. https://sacred-texts.com/jud/josephus/ant-1.htm