Rabbi Nico here.
I was reading Proverbs 17 today and came across this:
“An evil man seeks only rebellion; therefore a cruel messenger will be sent against him.”
That’s verse 11.
Looking at it in the interlinear, we can find that the word translated to “messenger” here is “malakh,” a word also translated to “angel” in Scripture. In fact, it’s translated to “angel” more often than it’s translated to merely “messenger.”
The word for “evil” is “ra,” which also translates to “strife,” “harm,” and “bad.” And what’s interesting is that the word for “man” isn’t in there. It’s implied in the syntax that the “evil” that it’s talking about is the evil of a man.
The word for “seeks” is “baqash,” which also translates to “requires” or “attempts.”
And where one might more literally read this passage to say, “Evil attempts rebellion, therefore a cruel angel will be sent against him.”
There are a lot of strange concepts to unpack here. First of all, the idea of a cruel angel may seem a bit odd. One might wonder, “Does it really say ‘cruel’?” Yes, the Hebrew word is akzari, which translates to cruel, and does not appear to have an alternative translation.
So, how can one of G’d’s angels be cruel? Well, in 1 Samuel 16:14, we read, “But the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the Lord troubled him.”
This may fly in the face of some of our conceptual understandings of G’d and His goodness, but sometimes it seems that He sends spirits or angels that cause distress and suffering. Often, when we talk about these ideas, the focus is on justifying why G’d would send distress or trouble, and that can be an interesting conversation to have from an intellectual standpoint.
However, it’s far more useful for the way we live our lives if we instead look at what causes G’d to send distress or trouble. Because whether we understand G’d’s justification or not, that is irrelevant. He knows what is best far better than any of us ever could, and therefore He will act according to what is best.
In this case, we see that those who align with evil attempt rebellion. They seek after rebellion.
In our American society, we kind of see rebellion as a good thing. After all, our country was founded on an act of rebellion against a tyrannical power. I won’t get into a history lesson about the American Revolution. What’s important is that we understand that the kind of rebellion this passage seems to be talking about is different from that.
Tyrants who abuse their power and torment their people are in rebellion against G’d. Therefore, when the people successfully rise up against tyrants, it is to put a stop to those tyrants’ rebellions against G’d’s Law, which is above the laws of man.
What this is talking about is rebellion against righteous authority, both G’d’s and the authority of those G’d has put in charge over us. Rebellion against His Torah and against those He has anointed is the kind of rebellion that brings a cruel angel.
Therefore, let us all be careful where we tread. Let us be hesitant to rebel against stability and rules. Let us be slow to assume that we know better than the authority figures that G’d has placed over us. Let us be sure that when we need to be disobedient to an authority figure that we do so in order to be loyal to G’d most of all, and not merely because, “We don’t want to.”
I don’t know for sure what the cruel angel does to the evil one who seeks after rebellion, but I don’t want to discover it from first-hand experience.