Isaiah 24:21

the host of the high ones that are on high Lit. the host of the height in the height. The "host of the height" is equivalent to the "host of heaven" (Jeremiah 33:22; 1 Kings 22:19; Nehemiah 9:6); but (as these passages shew) the expression may be used either of the stars or of the angels. It is impossible to say which sense is intended here, or whether both are combined. That celestial beings of some kind are meant appears clearly from the emphatic contrast with the "kings of the earth" in the second half of the verse. The heavenly bodies, conceived by the ancients as animated, and as influencing the destinies of men, were objects of false worship, and so might be represented as part of the evil system of things which has to be overthrown. On the other hand the idea of patron angels of the various nationalities appears in the later literature (Daniel 10:13; Daniel 10:20-21; Daniel 12:1; Sir 17:17) and these, as mysteriously related to the earthly sovereignties, might also be thought of. (On a similar conception in Psalms 58, 82, see Cheyne's Bampton Lectures, pp. 120, 337.)