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.Before they go out to pasture they all appear contemporaneously before the Lord, 89:59, and how could that suit successive rulers? Schürer ironically asks if these rulers were to be regarded as pre-existing? 3.In the last judgment they are associated with the fallen angels, 90:20 sqq.4.The angel who keeps the record of the deeds of the shepherds is simply called another, 89:61, thus signifying their oneness of being with him.5.The shepherds are appointed, according to 89:75, to protect the sheep from the wild animals, i.e.from the heathen nations, Interpreting the shepherds as heathen rulers would give the senseless sentence that the heathen rulers were to protect the Israelites from themselves, i.e.from these rulers! The author’s idea is simple and plain.During the time that Israel, by the will of God, was to be oppressed and overcome by the nations around her, he had placed them in the hands of seventy shepherds, as guardians, who should watch that Israel should not suffer and endure more than was God’s will.This the shepherds neglect to do, and deliver to the wild beasts and birds of prey more than they should have done; hence these shepherds shall be punished, and be cast with the fallen angels, who had also proved faithless, into the fiery abyss.The idea that Israel suffered more than her sins deserved is not strange or unexpected.It is the author’s exegesis of passages like Isa.xl.2b (according to thetrue interpretation of the Targumim, Luther, Authorized Version, Delitzsch, and others), Isa.lxi.7 and Jer.xvi.18, where it is stated that Israel has received double for all her sins.The choice of the mystical and sacred number seventy can be no surprise to the student of the Old Testament.Although all these shepherds appear contemporaneously before the Lord when they receive the commission, they shall not pasture together, but one after the other.That God speaks here directly to the shepherds, and not through the medium of angels, as we should expect from the analogy of the rest of the book and from the example of the Old Testament if they were men, and especially heathen rulers, shows conclusively that the shepherds were beings enjoying intimate communication with God, in other words, were angels.An author who but once (14:24 permits even the sacred person of Enoch to go into the presence of God, could under no circumstances have imagined heathen rulers, the oppressors of God’s children, as standing before him, and receiving their orders from his own mouth.—60.According to number, i.e.a certain number.These shepherds were not to act independently, but, like the angels in the Old Testament and in Enoch, were simply executors of God’s will and command.These are functions that a Jew, writing not in the time of the return from the Exile when the heathen Cyrus had appeared as the instrument in God’s hand for the benefit of his people, but in a time when experience had exhibited the surrounding heathen nations as the most bitter haters and revilers of Israel’s God and persecutors and tormentors of the people, in the time when the cruel scenes inaugurated by Antiochus Epiphanes were still vivid before the author—these are functions, we say, that a Jew at that time could never have ascribed to Gentile rulers.—61.God calls another shepherd, i.e.angel, to keep record of the deeds of these seventy shepherds.The “other one” is clearly and evidently an angel, as is seen from 90:22 and 14, probably the archangel Michael, the patron angel of Israel; cf.Dan.x.4 sqq.—62.Superabundance, GTR, Uebermass, the number slain above those intended by God.These shall be written down that the shepherds may be judged accordingly.—63.Give them over, i.e.to punishment.—64.These shepherds knowing God’s will that only a certain number should be destroyed are not to be disturbed or advised in their labor.But how could we suppose that, e.g.Antiochus Epiphanes should have a knowledge of the fact that he was to be an instrument to punish Israel, and should also be able to determine how far the divine will would allow him to go? For this knowledge, presupposed here as the basis of the just judgment of God over the shepherds for the transgression of God’s law, is clearly in possession of these shepherds, according to vs.59 and 60.—65.Shows that the killing of the sheep consisted in giving them over into the hands of the wild beasts, as also that the shepherds were beings entirely different from the lions [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]