Il prolungarsi del divino nella figura del mal'ak

The aim of this paper is to investigate the figure of the Angel of the Lord as a mediator between human and divine world: it focuses especially on the ambiguous relationship between God and the mal’ak YHWH/mal’ak Elohim in some texts of the Old Testament and of Greek-Jewish authors like Philo and Flavius Josephus. If it is true that the human messenger often speaks, acts and is addressed in the Old Testament as his sender himself, it is always unequivocal from the context who is speaking and who is the one who sent him. In the case of the Angel of the Lord, there is sometimes (especially in Genesis, Exodus and Judges) some confusion and his identity tends to blend, to merge and finally to identify with God himself, as a “visible or audible phenomenon”. Obviously this identity raises on a theological level problematic issues such as anthropomorphism. Modern scholarship has proposed a number of different theories, that endeavor to figure out this special relationship, but the issue is still open and debated. Thus the “messenger theory”, asserts that the best conceptual background is the idea of the union between the human sender and the messenger in the Near East: starting from it, we could propose to reverse the point of view, not taking the human world as a model to be transferred into the divine, but the divine world of the early stages into the human: this divine world had the features of a hierarchical pantheon, in which, perhaps, a divinity of the group (to which belongs YHWH himself) had a mediator function and undertook particular theophanic tasks. This angel, indistinguishable from God, tends later to disappear in the OT and the development towards an individual angel can be found in the exilic and post-exilic periods. If we take into account later authors like Philo and Josephus, we notice that this process is over and in their “rewritten” Bible the pericopes that presents ambiguity between the Lord and the angel have been modified: Philo wants to deliberately avoid any confusion and interference and usually identifies the Angel with the immanent powers called “logoi”; similarly Josephus, in his rationalizing attitude, tries to avoid any theological problem for his Gentile audience, simply eliminating one of the two actors (God-angel) acting in the scene.