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 appears not merely as a declarer of the conditions of the deliverance, but as a mediator of this deliverance itself. And if the ממתים, Job 33:22, are angels by whom the man is threatened with the execution of death, the מלאך who comes forward here for him who is upon the brink of the abyss cannot be a man. We must therefore understand מלאך not as in Job 1:14, but as in Job 4:18; and the more surely so, since we are within the extra-Israelitish circle of a patriarchal history. In the extra-Israelitish world a far more developed doctrine of angels and demons is everywhere found than in Israel, which is to be understood not only subjectively, but also objectively; and within the patriarchal history after Gen 16, that (אלהים) מלאך יהוה appears, who is instrumental in effecting the progress of the history of redemption, and has so much the appearance of the God of revelation, that He even calls himself God, and is called God. He it is whom Jacob means, when (Gen 48:15.), blessing Joseph, he distinguishes God the Invisible, God the Shepherd, i.e., Leader and Ruler, and “the Angel who delivered (הגּאל) me from all evil;” it is the Angel who, according to Psa 34:8, encampeth round about them that fear God, and delivereth them; ”the Angel of the presence” whom Isaiah in the Thephilla, ch. lxiii. 7ff., places beside Jehovah and His Holy Spirit as a third hypostasis. Taking up this perception, Elihu demands for the deliverance of man from the death which he has incurred by his sins, a superhuman angelic mediator. The “Angel of Jehovah” of primeval history is the oldest prefigurement in the history of redemption of the future incarnation, without which the Old Testament history would be a confused quodlibet of premises and radii, without a conclusion and a centre; and the angelic form is accordingly the oldest form which gives the hope of a deliverer, and to which it recurs, in conformity to the law of the circular connection between the beginning and end, in Mal 3:1.