Was the law given by God or through angels?

Hard question · The law of Moses · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate

The passages

The objection

Exodus says that “God spake all these words” at Sinai (Exodus 20:1), and that the Lord talked with Israel from heaven (20:22). But Paul says that the law “was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator” (Galatians 3:19), and Stephen says that Israel “received the law by the disposition of angels” (Acts 7:53). Did God give the law, or did angels?

The answer

Both, in different roles. God is the author and giver of the law; the angels were his attendants and servants in giving it. The Old Testament itself says that angels were present at Sinai. In Moses’ blessing, “The Lord came from Sinai” with “ten thousands of saints”, that is, holy ones, and the Greek Old Testament renders the end of the verse ‘on his right hand were his angels with him’ (Deuteronomy 33:2). A psalm speaks of the chariots of God, “even thousands of angels”, with the Lord among them “as in Sinai” (Psalm 68:17). Later Jewish writers, quoted by Gill, say the same, and Stephen could mention it in passing to the Sanhedrin as something his hearers already accepted.

The Greek words fit this. Paul’s diatageis di’ angelōn means ‘arranged’ or ‘put in order through angels’: the word dia, ‘through’, marks the means, not the source. Stephen’s ‘disposition of angels’ means the same. Neither says that the angels made the law. The law was God’s, given through angels and then through Moses, much as a royal decree carried by heralds is still the king’s. Paul’s point is a contrast: God gave the promise to Abraham directly, while the law came through go-betweens (Galatians 3:19–20). Hebrews calls the law “the word spoken by angels” (Hebrews 2:2) for the same reason, without denying that God spoke it.

The Angel of the Lord

In the same speech Stephen speaks of “the angel which spake to him in the mount Sina” (Acts 7:38). Many, Gill among them, take this to be the Angel of the Lord, whom the Old Testament often treats as the Lord himself, with a host of angels in attendance. On this view the voice from Sinai was God’s, spoken through the divine Angel.

Still open

Scripture does not say what the angels did at Sinai. Gill thought they might have formed the sounds, sounded the trumpet and fashioned the tablets, but that is a guess; the texts say only that the law came through them.

From the classic commentators

for though the tables are said to be the work of God, and the writing the writing of God, and to be written with the finger of God, and he is said to speak all the words of it, yet this hinders not, but that all this might be done by the means of angelsJohn Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Galatians 3:19 (1746–1763)