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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 33:23 - 33:23
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
23 If there is an angel as mediator for him,
One of a thousand,
To declare to man what is for his profit:
24 He is gracious to him, and saith:
Deliver him, that he go not down to the pit -
I have found a ransom.
The former case, Job 33:15, was the easier; there a strengthening of the testimony of man's conscience by a divine warning, given under remarkable circumstances, suffices. This second case, which the lxx correctly distinguishes from the former (it translates Job 33:19, πάλιν δὲ ἤλεγξεν αὐτὸν ἐν μαλακίᾳ ἐπὶ κοίτης), is the more difficult: it treats not merely of a warning against sin and its wages of death, but of a deliverance from the death itself, to which the man is almost abandoned in consequence of sin. This deliverance, as Elihu says, requires a mediator. This course of thought does not admit of our understanding the מַלְאָךְ of a human messenger of God, such as Job has before him in Elihu (Schult., Schnurr., Boullier, Eichh., Rosenm., Welte), an “interpreter of the divine will, such as one finds one man among a thousand to be, a God-commissioned speaker, in one word: a prophet” (von Hofmann in Schriftbew. i. 335f.). The מלך appears not merely as a declarer of the conditions of the deliverance, but as a mediator of this deliverance itself. And if the מְמִתִים, Job 33:22, are angels by whom the man is threatened with the execution of death, the מלאךְ 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 (הַגֹּאֵל) 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.
The strophe begins without any indication of connection with the preceding: one would expect וְאִם or אָז אִם, as we felt the absence of אַךְ fo e in Job 33:14, and לָכֵן in Job 32:17. We might take מַלְאָך מֵלִיץ together as substantive and epitheton; the accentuation, however, which marks both מלאך and מליץ with Rebia magnum (in which case, according to Bär's Psalterium, p. xiv., the second distinctive has somewhat less value than the first), takes מלאךְ as subj., and מליץ as predicate: If there is then for him (עליו, pro eo, Ew. §217, 9) an angel as מליץ, i.e., mediator; for מליץ signifies elsewhere an interpreter, Gen 42:23; a negotiator, 2Ch 32:31; a God-commissioned speaker, i.e., prophet, Isa 43:27; - everywhere (if it is not used as in Job 16:20, in malam parte) the shades of the notion of this word are summarized under the general notion of internuncius, and therefore of mediator (as the Jewish name of the mediating angel מטטרון, probably equivalent to mediator, not μετάθρονος, which is no usable Greek word). The Targ. translates by פרקליטא, παράκλητος (opp. קטיגור, κατήγορος, κατήγωρ). Therefore: if an angel undertakes the mediatorial office for the man, and indeed one of a thousand, i.e., not any one whatever of the thousands of the angels (Deu 33:2; Psa 68:18; Dan 7:10, comp. Tobit 12:15, εἶς ἐκ τῶν ἑπτὰ), but one who soars above the thousands, and has not his equal among them (as Ecc 7:28). Hirz. and Hahn altogether falsely combine: one of the thousands, whose business it is to announce ... . The accentuation is correct, and that forced mode of connection is without reason or occasion. It is the function of the מלאך itself as מליץ, which the clause which expresses the purpose affirms: if an angel appears for the good of the man as a mediator, to declare to him יָשִׁרֹו, his uprightness, i.e., the right, straight way (comp. Pro 14:2), in one word: the way of salvation, which he has to take to get free of sin and death, viz., the way of repentance and of faith (trust in God): God takes pity on the man ... . Here the conclusion begins; Rosenm. and others erroneously continue the antecedent here, so that what follows is the intercession of the angel; the angel, however, is just as a mediator who brings about the favour of God, and therefore not the חֹנֵן himself. He renders pardon possible, and brings the man into the state for receiving it.
Therefore: then God pardons, and says to His angel: Deliver him from the descent to the pit, I have found a ransom. Instead of פְּדָעֵהוּ, it would be admissible to read פְּרָעֵהוּ, let him free (from פרע, Arab. frg), if the angel to whom the command is given were the angel of death. פָּדַע is a cognate form, perhaps dialectic, with hdfp@f, root פד (as יפע, יפה, Arab. wf‛, wfy, from the common root יף, וף).
(Note: Wetzstein is inclined to regard פדע as a metathesis of דפע, Arab. df‛: thrust (tear, hold) him back from the gave. A proper name, fed‛ân, which often occurs among the Beduins, is of uncertain signification; perhaps it would serve as an explanation of פדעהו.)
The verb מָצָא (מְטָא) signifies to come at, Job 11:7, to attain something, and has its first signification here, starting from which it signifies the finding on the part of the seeker, and then when weakened finding without seeking. One is here reminded of Heb 9:12, αἰωνίαν λύτρωσιν εὑράμενος. כֹּפֶר (on this word, vid., Hebräerbrief, S. 385, 740), according to its primary notion, is not a covering = making good, more readily a covering = cancelling (from כָּפַר, Talmud. to wipe out, away), but, as the usual combination with עַל shows, a covering of sin and guilt before wrath, punishment, or execution on account of guilt, and in this sense λύτρον, a means of getting free, ransom-money. The connection is satisfied if the repentance of the chastened one (thus e.g., also von Hofm.) is understood by this ransom, or better, his affliction, inasmuch as it has brought him to repentance. But wherefore should the mediatorship of the angel be excluded from the notion of the כֹּפֶר. Just this mediatorship is meant, inasmuch as it puts to right him who by his sins had worked death, i.e., places him in a condition in which no further hindrance stands in the way of the divine pardon. If we connect the mediating angel, like the angel of Jehovah of the primeval history, with God Himself, as then the logos of this mediating angel to man can be God's own logos communicated by him, and he therefore as מליץ, God's speaker (if we consider Elihu's disclosure in the light of the New Testament), can be the divine Logos himself, we shall here readily recognise a presage of the mystery which is unveiled in the New Testament: “God was in Christ, and reconciled the world unto Himself.” A presage of this mystery, flashing through the darkness, we have already read in Job 17:3 (comp. Job 16:21; and, on the other hand, in order to see how this anticipation is kindled by the thought of the opposite, Job 9:33). The presage which meets us here is like another in Ps 107 - a psalm which has many points of coincidence with the book of Job - where in Job 33:20 we find, “He sent His word, and healed them.”
(Note: In his introduction, p. 76, Schlottmann says: “The conceptions of Wisdom and of the Revealing Angel were already united in that of the Eternal Word in the ante-Christian, Jewish theology. Therein the fact of the divine revelation in Christ found the forms in which it could accommodate itself to the understanding, and stimulate succeeding ages to further thought and penetration.” Thus it is: between the Chokma of the canonical books and the post-biblical development of the philosophy of religion (dogmatism) which culminates in Philo, there is an historical connection, and, indeed, one that has to do with the development of redemption. Vid., Luth. Zeitschrift, 1863, S. 219ff.)
At any rate, Elihu expresses it as a postulate, that the deliverance of man can only be effected by a superhuman being, as it is in reality accomplished by the man who is at the same time God, and from all eternity the Lord of the angels of light.
The following strophe (Job 33:25) now describes the results of the favour wrought out for man by the מלאך מליץ.