Acts 7:53

Acts 7:53. Who have received the law by the disposition of angels. That is to say, ‘the Divine law of Moses was announced to Israel, in the first place, by the holy angels acting as the ministers of the Eternal King of heaven; and this glorious law, written by Jehovah and specially communicated to the chosen people by beings not belonging to this earth, you know, neither you nor your fathers have kept!' But an important question underlies the statement contained in this verse. Were angels, then, employed in the giving of the law in the desert of Sinai? Now, on reading the simple text in the Hebrew or the English translation, the first impression is, that no such angelic intervention was employed. Jehovah the great Covenant Angel gives, and Moses the judge of Israel receives, the law in its varied and comprehensive details. On the other hand, it is an undoubted fact that all Jewish tradition ascribes to angels an important place as assistants in the giving of the law. So in Josephus, Ant. xv. 5. 3; Herod says: ‘We have learned what is most beautiful and what is most holy in our doctrines and laws from God through the medium of angels.' See also the book of Jubilees, written in the first century of our era. There is, however, one striking passage in the dying blessing of Moses, Deuteronomy 33:2, which the great Jewish expositors and doctors, as the LXX., Onkelos, the writers of the Palestine Targum, etc., interpret as directly teaching the interposition of angels in the giving of the law. The accurate rendering of the passage in Deuteronomy 33:2 is: ‘He came from amidst myriads of holiness,' that is, from amidst countless angels who attend Him. The LXX. translation alters the sense of the whole passage. They assume the fact that in the giving of the law, angels were in attendance on the Eternal. Onkelos in his Targum (written first century of our era) thus paraphrases the words in Deuteronomy 33: ‘With Him were ten thousand saints.' The Palestine Targum in its present form, dating from the seventh century, but based on older materials, reads in the same place in Deuteronomy: ‘With Him ten thousand times ten thousand holy angels. ' The well-known statement of Psalms 68:17: ‘The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, are thousands upon thousands: the Lord among them hath come from Sinai, into His sanctuary; and possibly Numbers 10:36: ‘Return, O Jehovah, with the myriads of the thousands of Israel' (Perowne's translation), teach the same truth that angels, as ministers of the Eternal, assisted in the first solemn giving of the law in the desert wanderings; while St. Paul in his Epistle to the Galatian church (Acts 3:19), and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Acts 2:2), tell us that this Jewish belief which Stephen quotes here, passed without question into the teaching of followers of Jesus.