How to Find an Angel

We read in the 37th chapter of Genesis:

When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, "What are you looking for?" He replied, "I'm looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?" "They have moved on from here," the man answered. "I heard them say, 'Let's go to Dothan'."

Who was the man that found Joseph in the field? Was he a man or was he an angel? The answer is simple. He was a man and … he was an angel. OK, maybe the answer is not that simple.

All the Abrahamic faiths believe in angels (the Qur'an was, by Muslim belief, dictated to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel). We first meet angels in Gen. 3:24, when one of them is stationed outside the Garden of Eden with a fiery sword preventing Adam and Eve from sneaking back in. Angels appear to Hagar in the desert, tell Abraham about the birth of Isaac, stop Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, appear to Jacob in a dream ascending and descending a ladder to Heaven, tell Jacob to return to Canaan, wrestle with Jacob when he tries to return, point Joseph in the right direction to find his brothers, speak to Moses out of the burning bush, lead the people out of Egypt—and all this angelology is just from the first two books of the Bible.

In most all of these biblical angel stories, the angels are people (except for the fiery-sword angel and the burning-bush angel and the pillar-of-fire angel). So apparently unless their mission is too hot for people to handle, God uses people to deliver messages to us. It was later Christian angelology that dressed up the angels in their Hallmark card costumes and made them cute cherubic figures with rosy cheeks. I think Jewish angels mostly look like Borat.

The important part of an angel is the message, not the costume. In fact, the Hebrew word for angel is malach, which just means messenger. It does not mean winged messenger or harp-playing messenger. And that messenger can be, and usually is, an ordinary person who has no clue that he or she is on a mission from God. And, like the people, the messages God sends to us through people/angels are often quite ordinary, like the message to Joseph that changed his life: "Your brothers went that-a-way."