NOTES for Tob 5:4

⁴Therefore when he went to seek a man, he found Raphael that was an angel.

Angels are mentioned in the Bible fairly often, although there is no special, developed angelology in it. This is understandable: the Bible pays attention first of all to the human being, and to angels insofar as they touch people and their lives. But we will not find in the biblical books a definite definition of who angels are and what their nature is. They speak only of concrete episodes of angels appearing to people.

At the same time it is not always easy to understand whether a theophany is in question or the appearance of a special spiritual created being. A special kind of vision was called angels, during which prophets saw the image of a heavenly rider on a white horse proclaiming the will of Yahweh; the prophets usually perceived this rider not as a special created being separate from God, but as the manifestation of Yahweh Himself, addressing Him accordingly. But there was also another experience: angels sometimes appeared to people in human form, most often, like the heavenly riders, fulfilling the role of messengers who told those to whom they were sent the will of God.

The riders of apocalyptic visions, up to the well-known riders of the Apocalypse, go back to the image of the heavenly rider. Angels in human form are no less well known: such angels announced the Savior's resurrection to the women who came to the tomb at night. Real experience, as often happens, gave rise to a special literary genre in which angels, along with people, become characters in the narrative.

An example of this kind of literature is the Book of Tobit, where an angel accompanies the main hero of the story in his wanderings. Yet its real hero is still not the angel, but Tobit himself. And, of course, God, who accompanies Tobit and leads him after Himself.

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For Tob 5:4

⁴Therefore when he went to seek a man, he found Raphael that was an angel.

In the biblical books there are fairly frequent mentions of angels, messengers of God whom He sends to people with one or another assignment, most often in order to tell one of His servants something important. And often such messengers take on human appearance in our world. Not a winged person, as Christian artists and icon painters so love to portray angels, but a quite ordinary person, whom it is sometimes difficult, or even entirely impossible, to distinguish from the sons of men. How widespread is such experience? It is hard to answer this question unequivocally, because God is free to choose the circle of His communication Himself, and we have no grounds to think that He limited it to the boundaries of His people. Homer's poems, for example, speak a great deal about appearances of "gods" which, in their descriptions, remarkably resemble some biblical descriptions of appearances of angels. Of course, from these descriptions one should hardly conclude that angels outwardly resemble people. We will perhaps hardly ever know or understand how they see one another, and still less how God sees them, just as we do not know this exactly even when it concerns ourselves. But if they are indeed, as is commonly thought, purely spiritual though created beings, it is quite possible that it is not very difficult for them to assume any outward appearance, including a human one. Perhaps they appear before us in this way precisely in order to make our communication with them easier. It is not surprising that in such an appearance they are sometimes impossible to distinguish from a human being, which, by the way, makes them similar to the "gods" of Homer's poems, who also often appear to people in human form so that they are taken for people. But, as is clear, the main purpose of an angel, a messenger of God, is not that people see in him some higher being, but that he fulfill the mission entrusted to him by God. That is probably why these messengers often try to draw as little attention as possible to themselves in order to focus it on what they have been entrusted to convey.

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NOTES for Tob 5:4

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Readings for 18 November 2019

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