“Mediator” (mēlȋṣ)
In Job 33, Elihu, one of Job’s “miserable comforters” rebukes him as follows:
Man is also rebuked with pain on his bed
and with continual strife in his bones,
so that his life loaths bread,
and his appetite the choicest food.
His flesh is so wasted away that it cannot be seen,
and his bones that were not seen stick out.
His soul draws near the pit,
and his life to those who bring death.
If there be for him an angel,
a mediator, one of the thousand,
to declare to man what is right for him,
and he is merciful to him, and says,
“Deliver him from going down into the pit;
I have found a ransom . . .” (Job 33:19-24)
and with continual strife in his bones,
so that his life loaths bread,
and his appetite the choicest food.
His flesh is so wasted away that it cannot be seen,
and his bones that were not seen stick out.
His soul draws near the pit,
and his life to those who bring death.
If there be for him an angel,
a mediator, one of the thousand,
to declare to man what is right for him,
and he is merciful to him, and says,
“Deliver him from going down into the pit;
I have found a ransom . . .” (Job 33:19-24)
The verse of interest for our study is Job 33:23: “If there be for [a man] an angel, a mediator.” The Hebrew term translated as mediator is mēlȋṣ. It occurs in the phrase mal’āk mēlȋṣ, a grammatical construction that is not a construct phrase that would require a translation like “a messenger/angel of a mediator.” Rather, as Meier notes, “they are either in apposition, function as poetic parallels, or the first noun is modified by the second adjectival participle” (A.S. Meier, “Mediator,” DDD, 554). The result is that Job 33:23 puts forth the concept of angelic mediation for human beings. (Michael S. Heiser, Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host [Bellingham, Wash.: Lexham Press, 2018], 24)
