Michael B. Hundley, “What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 1: The Divine Cast of Characters,” ANE Today 13.7 (July 2025).
Most assume that angels (literally messengers) are not gods, using the circular argument that they cannot be gods since there is only one god. However, monotheistic assumptions aside, there is no compelling reason to exclude angels from the god category and many reasons to include them. Divine messengers are consistently labeled gods in the surrounding cultures and may serve important advisory roles. In the Bible, they also serve more expansive functions, including destroying both God’s people (2 Sam 24:15-16) and their adversaries (2 Kgs 19:35). Angels even may be so closely associated with YHWH that they appear indistinguishable from him (e.g., Gen 16; 31:11-13; Exod 3). It is possible though not certain that the Bible calls angels gods (Gen 32:1-2; 35:7) and Daniel 3:25-29 equates an angel with a son of god. Rather than being nurturing winged women wearing white, angels have no wings in the text, are always either nongendered or male, and consistently inspire fear.
The Amateur Exegete 
Yes, the default monotheism, hierarchy, and terminology to which we’re accustomed are post-Tanakh (certainly post-Torah) developments. When we suspend the preconceptions we understandably carry from years of exposure to Dante, C.S. Lewis, Left Behind, Supernatural, etc., while reading the Hebrew Bible, the apparent taxonomy of the divine is quite different.
We understand elohim (אֱלֹהִים) (the grammatically plural form of eloah (אֱלוֹהַּ), related to el (אֵל) and its cognates) to be the God of Abraham when it’s paired with a singular verb. But elohim does appear on occasion with a plural verb, and several passages in the Hebrew Bible take for granted the existence of an extended family/court of multiple elohim. Two conspicuous examples (among many): Genesis 6 mentions the “sons of the god(s)” (בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים) hooking up with mortal women, and the likely earliest version of Deuteronomy 32 describes the allocation of human nations among the “sons of god(s)” (בְנֵי אֱלֹהִים)–so Yahweh gets Israel, Chemosh gets Moab, and so on. The Hebrew word often translated as angel, malach (מַלְאָךְ), just means messenger, envoy, ambassador, etc., and could be a fleshy human or a marvelous eloah, depending on the context.
Words such as “god” and “angel” have connotations in modern English that don’t precisely reflect the original terms for–and conception of–the divinities that populated the ancient Hebrew worldview.
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Where all my Heiser-ites at?
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