That is a sad thought! Well, thank you for answering me, Iver. I learn from the instruction “with all patience” that you give.

Those who are familiar with Relevance Theory will know about “contextual assumptions”. I don’t personally like this term, and would rather call it extra-textual assumptions or pre-textual assumptions. In any case, it includes the encyclopedic information that a reader or hearer brings to a given text in order to understand the intended meaning.
Once we use the term “angel” in English, a number of ideas come to mind. My Collins dictionary list the following under “angel”:
1. A spiritual being believed to be an attendant or messenger of God.
2. A conventinal representation of an angel as a human being with wings.
3. A person who is kind, pure or beuatiful.
4. An investor in a theatrical production.
(I thought an obedient child is also called an angel, but that must come under 3.)
If a Greek person reads the word AGGELOS, he will have some very different ideas in mind. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 are completely irrelevant to AGGELOS. (Many are surpised that angels do not have wings.) Even number 1 does not properly cover the basic concept of AGGELOS, which happens to be “messenger”, whether human or not.
The Greek term will evoke the sense of “messenger”.
If I use “messenger” in English, a different set of ideas come to mind. My Collins only lists one sense:
1. A person who takes messages from one person or group to another.
This does not completely overlap with AGGELOS, but the overlap is greater than with “angel”, because the core meaning of AGGELOS is “messenger”. As soon as I say messenger, you are less apt to think of an awesome being, but more likelty to think of a person in a position of a rather low status, much lower than the “boss”.
All of this to say that when you think of AGGELOS in terms of “messenger” and Jesus (and God) in terms of “boss”, you are closer to the intended meaning of the text, IMO. In most contexts, it is not crucial to know that the word for “angel” means messenger, but in this particular text it is important.

Permanancy is only one aspect and not the main one. It is possible that the angels will be out of work in the new world, and maybe cease to exist, but I don’t know.
The thematic contrast between angels and Jesus is that of superior position, introduced in v. 4 and referred to repeatedly. Jesus is the Son of God, angels are not. Jesus is to be worshiped, angels are not. Jesus has a throne, angels do not. Jesus rules, angels are only messengers and servants. This is what I consider the context of the whole passage, and that is why winds and lightning function as messengers and servants of God and therefore Psalm 104 fits with the theme of this section: God uses his creation, including angels, to fulfill his purposes, but these created beings and things have a position and function far below that of Jesus.

Yet the following verses in Hebrews do speak of permanency and, at least in the NIV’s wording, this is contrasted to verse 7.

Sorry if I come out too strongly. I did not intend to say that you follow tradition, simply because it is tradition. I only said that your starting point was the English rendering, presumably in NIV, because you said: “When I looked up my annotated translation, I found I’d followed the “traditional” rendering and simply added a paraphrase (“He makes the angels who serve him as powerful as the wind and fire”).”
Nor did I say that you “blindly” follow tradition. You are reacting to things I never said. However, tradition is still a strong force for all os us, whether we think about it or not.
Nor am I denying the reality of metaphors, but I am saying that there is no need to interpret Heb 1:7 as metaphorical. One cannot prove anything by examples, only illustrate what has otherwise been proven.

This idea fits the NIV rendering for Hebrews 1:7, and actually connects to the immediate context. This does not fit the context of Psalm 104, but immediate context is more important.

Thank you for your comments.

You said: “this verse must be about angels in the proper sense, as in the introductory line, and cannot be about an additional class of pseudo-angels or messengers consisting of winds and flames.” I entirely agree with you. It seems clear to me that the writer is talking about what we in English call “angels” throughout this section.

When you suggested the rendering:

“He makes his angels out of winds, his servants out of flames of fire.”

I would in essence be happy with that, except that I would then interpret that metaphorically (which I guess neither you nor Iver are happy with) rather than introducing the idea of wind and fire being “two of the four elements in ancient philosophy”.

I’d respond in a similar way about your later suggestion.
_____

Iver

You asked: “Does that make sense to you?” Yes it does, but it’s just that I’m far from convinced that it’s what the passage is saying.

I must also object when you say:

“Your starting point was and is the traditional English renderings of this verse, and therefore your context is what these translations can possibly mean in English. My starting point is the original texts …”

I thought I had spelled out in my previous comment that acceptance of the traditional rendering was definitely NOT my starting point. On the contrary, as I said, I initially favoured your version, but of course I wanted to check its validity against the data I found in the context and my (admittedly partial) understanding of the underlying Greek. I’m unsure why you seem convinced that everyone who disagrees with you is blindly following the “traditional understanding” of the passage.

You also suggest that when someone attempts to understand a text metaphorically they are “twisting” it. I had hoped that my everyday examples would show that, on the contrary, people in general are happy to understand obviously non-literal statements as imagery. Just because people who do this here cannot tie down the image precisely doesn’t mean that the method is flawed.

Anyway, thank you for the discussion. To be honest, I had hoped that someone with a better grasp of the text might have weighed in “on my side”, but perhaps from your point of view there is no one with a better understanding of the “traditional” viewpoint, as it is only followed by those who fail to understand the text properly! So perhaps all the others are just blindly following the “traditional” rendering.

If “spirits” or “winds” are not the material out of which angels are made, as I suggested before (and I accept that the Greek text we have would not be the most natural way of saying that – but then it is over-literal translation Greek), then perhaps they are the category of being into which angels fall. Thus perhaps something like “he makes his angels as spirits/spiritual creatures (rather than divine beings), his servants as flaming fiery beings”. This preserves the topic of the verse as being the angels (so not using equivocation about the various senses of aggelos) but also avoids the unlikely suggestion that angels are transformed into something else.

Since you have responded in some detail, I’ll make an effort to do the same. These exchanges are naturally rather brief, so what we are doing is to employ iterative approximation in order to come step by step closer to understanding where both of us are coming from. If we had time and opportunity to sit and talk for an hour or two, we would arrive at a better understanding, maybe even agreement.
Your starting point was and is the traditional English renderings of this verse, and therefore your context is what these translations can possibly mean in English. My starting point is the original texts, and by that I mean not only the Greek text of Heb 1:7, but the Greek text of the LXX of Psalm 103:4 which corresponds to the Hebrew of Psalm 104:4 within its own context.

Let me use the same numbers:
(1) Since the Greek text in v. 4 uses a word that means “messenger”, the Greek reader would have this concept in mind. The English reader misses that. I agree that while the meaning of AGGELOS in v. 4 is “messengers” the reference is to “angels”. The same applies to v. 5 and 6, but not 7a. There is an important semantic disctinction between sense and reference. In v. 7 the reference is changed to messengers who are not angels, but the basic sense of the word does not change. How to get that across in translation, I shall discuss later. The theme of comparison between Jesus and angels is introduced here, and the point is that Jesus is so much higher than the angels. Why? Because Jesus is co-ruler with God, while angels are mere messengers who must do God’s bidding without questioning. Jesus willingly obeyed his Father. Angels do not have a choice, because they are only messengers.

(2) Notice that I said that the reference changed in v. 7, so this verse is about messengers in general. It does have relevance to angels, because angels are one specific type of God’s messengers. The text is not talking about angels contra winds, but angels as being within the overall concept of messengers.

(3) It is not an either-or situation. God needs his angels as his messengers, partly because they can talk, but he can also use wind and lightning to do his bidding. This is amply demonstrated in the OT. I agree that the comparison between angels and Jesus is found in Hebrews 1, not in the Psalm. One can hardly expect the Psalm to talk about Jesus. The context of the Psalm is God’s control over his created world. He is using the wind and other natural phenomena like clouds, winds, lightning, fire to fulfill his purposes.

(4) It is crucial to look at the Greek text, but this particular text is translation Greek in the form of a literal translation of a Hebrew text. The Greek keeps the Hebrew participles for “making” and “flaming2 plus the exact Hebrew word order. Only the KJV keeps the same order in English (Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire). The KJV is nonsense in English, because of its utter literalness, so GNB has given the meaning in better English: “You use the winds as your messengers
and flashes of lightning as your servants.” Both Greek and Hebrew has the general principle that the more prominent element comes first. Psalm 104:3 already introduced the winds, so that is not new information in v. 4, but the fact that he uses winds as his messengers is new information. That is why “his messengers” occur before “winds” in both the Hebrew text and the LXX. To try to analyse the Greek text of Heb 1:7 without reference to the LXX text it quotes and the Hebrew text that the LXX translates is a serious exegetical mistake. (That the mistake is commonly made, does not make it right.)

(5) You are doing what every reader would try to do. We assume that a text is to make sense, and when it does not, we try to bring some sense into it. You then take the wind and fire as metaphors that indicate the power of angels. Others have suggested that the angels are as fast as the wind and lightning. Such attempts are understandable, but they build on sand, because the English translation they try to make sense out of is flawed.
When you have to “twist” a translated text to make sense of it, it is likely that there is something wrong with the translation as is surely the case here.
Recognizing that the Hebrew word and Greek word for “make” can refer to “appointing” or “using x as y”, that both Hebrew and Greek use the word “messenger” to occasionally refer to what we call angels, that the meaning of the text of Psalm 104:4 as given in
GNB is not “twisting” the Greek and makes perfect sense BOTH in the Psalm AND in Heb 1:7, then that meaning is most likely what the writer of Hebrews had in mind. Of course, he would be very familiar with the text and context of Psalm 104.

Now, how might this be translated into better English? Let me give a suggestion for a dynamic translation of verses 4-8, but remember that I am not an native speaker of English:

4. God’s own Son is far above God’s messengers, the angels, and he is talked about in a superior way to them.
5. Did God ever say to one of his messengers: ‘You are my Son, today I have become your Father’ or ‘I will be his Father and he shall be my Son’?
6. And when God sent his one and only Son into the world, he said, “All God’s messengers shall worship him.”
7. While (on one hand) Scripture talks in the following way about God’s use of messengers: ‘He who uses even winds as his messengers and makes lightning to be his servants’
8. (on the other hand) it talks about the Son like this: ‘Your kingdom, God, will stand forever, you rule in righteousness…’

Does that make sense to you?