How do we understand that the law was given by angels
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There are many encounters that believers have had with God in the Old Testament, the explanations of which (how men could meet with God and live) was a problem for Jewish scholars, who, instead, attributed these incidents to men meeting with God's Wisdom/Logos/Word personified. Of course they could not explain further, at the risk of contradicting monotheism, preferring, instead, to remain silent.
Jesus, God's Wisdom, and the Trinity
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This conception of Wisdom parallels a less significant, general Jewish explanation of how a transcendent God could participate in a temporal creation. The Aramaic Targums resolved this problem by equating God with His Word; thus, in the Targums, Exodus 19:17, rather than saying the people went out to meet God, it says that the people went out to meet the word of God, or Memra.
This term became a periphrasis for God; whether it could have been reckoned as a separate person, as in Christian Trinitarianism, is a matter of debate. The risk involved with making Wisdom/Word an independent deity was too great for the rabbis to speculate further, but Christians found in the Wisdom tradition an ideal categorical conception within which to place the person of Jesus.
One more verse about angels mediating the Law:
Galatians 3:19Why the Law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made.
Upvote:1
Exodus seems to be silent about the angel. It's a later Jewish tradition, which believes that the angel of presence was God's intermediary to dictate the law to Moses. Please note: that even in the tradition, the law was transmitted, not given, by the angel.
See the non-canonical pseudepigrapha work Book of Jubilees 1:27-29 and 2:1 :
27And He said to the angel of the presence: Write for Moses from 28 the beginning of creation till My sanctuary has been built among them for all eternity. And the Lord will appear to the eyes of all, and all shall know that I am the God of Israel and the Father of all the children of Jacob, and King on Mount Zion for all eternity. And Zion and Jerusalem shall 29 be holy.' And the angel of the presence who went before the camp of Israel took the tables of the divisions of the years -from the time of the creation- of the law and of the testimony of the weeks of the jubilees, according to the individual years, according to all the number of the jubilees [according, to the individual years], from the day of the [new] creation when the heavens and the earth shall be renewed and all their creation according to the powers of the heaven, and according to all the creation of the earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord shall be made in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, and all the luminaries be renewed for healing and for peace and for blessing for all the elect of Israel, and that thus it may be from that day and unto all the days of the earth.
1 And the angel of the presence spake to Moses according to the word of the Lord, saying: Write the complete history of the creation, how in six days the Lord God finished all His works and all that He created, and kept Sabbath on the seventh day and hallowed it for all ages and ...
More on this can be learned from a journal article Angels at Sinai: Exegesis, Theology and Interpretive Authority by Hindy Najman, 2000.
Example Christian assessment of the use of the Book of Jubilees can be read from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the book.
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