Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He takes a pause to give his words time to sink in. Then he turns and points across the plain, where the flames of a few distant fires are burning small holes in the darkness.

“Look, that town there is close enough for me to flee to; it isn’t a large place. Please let me go there — it’s so small — so that I can save my life!”

The angels think for a bit. Then one of them says:

“Well, I’ll humor you in this as well; I won’t destroy the town you mention. Hurry up and go there! I can’t do anything until you’ve arrived.”

Lot and his family part from the angels there, and arrive at the small town just as the sun rises above the rim of the mountains and light floods across the landscape. At the same moment the destruction of Sodom commences. Fire and brimstone rain down from heaven; all the cities and the entire plain is destroyed, and all who live in the cities, and everything that grows in the fields. And Lot’s wife, who can’t stop herself looking back at it, is turned into a pillar of salt.

The next day Abraham stood looking out over the smoking plain. If Lot had happened to see him there, it’s not at all certain that gratitude would have been the emotion filling his breast. Hate would have been more likely. Lot lost everything: his wife, his house, his goods, and his livelihood. And there was Abraham, righteous, innocent, good-hearted, blameless in everything. What had he lost? Nothing. Abraham had everything. And what had his so-called help led to? One catastrophe after another. But what Lot might have found most irritating, if he’d chanced to see his uncle standing there, was that Abraham was completely ignorant of all of this. He really did believe he was good, he really did believe that everything he’d done had been in Lot’s best interests. But it wasn’t like that, as we know: all Lot had left after Abraham’s kindness had done its work were his two daughters.

Antinous Bellori recognized something of what he himself had seen in the way the angels behaved during those days. The presence of the angels in the river was clearly of a different type to the traditional revelations the Bible describes. There, all revelations have meaning because they are linked to people chosen by God, or who are close to them. The revelations almost always are part of a chain of events, either correcting what has happened or laying the foundations for what will happen, and in so doing making known the will of God. This will is the meaning of the revelation. The question Bellori asked is what significance does a revelation have if it occurs outside this framework? When someone who isn’t one of God’s chosen happens to see an angel that has nothing to do with the situation he finds himself in?

Lot’s revelation is on the margins. On the one hand the angels were there to carry out the will of God, on the other they were there long enough for something else to manifest itself in their presence, something that was to do with their own existence, and outside God’s remit. From this Bellori concludes that immutability and inapproachability are only one aspect of the angel’s nature. The constant distance maintained by angels toward human beings throughout the Bible is the result of their being described there only when engaged in actions ordained by the Lord. Each time the men respond to the divine, as Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel, and Gideon do, the angels withdraw, and the Lord steps forward. This must be intrinsic either to angels — in the shape of a limitation in their nature, in purely physical terms, or in terms of their interest — or to the relationship between the angels and the Lord. From the angels’ behavior with Lot, the first alternative is unlikely, and so we’re left with the second: the Lord had set limits on their area of responsibility.

Because the Bible describes only the side of their nature angels show when they’re doing God’s will, it’s impossible to document any such prohibition or limitation, but if we go outside scripture and look at the narratives that deal with angels there, the picture alters radically. We know from Jacob’s dream that there are portals that link this world with the next, through which angels come and go. Where were the angels Jacob saw going, and where had they been? The Bible says nothing about this, but the fact that they’d been seen there, at the celestial gateway, can only mean that they move around the earth more frequently than it tells us, and this bolsters the credibility of the myriad sightings of angels that have been made down through history. The sirens described in The Odyssey , for example, had wings, and if one adds to that their supernaturally beautiful and enticing singing, which was irresistible, it’s more than likely that what Odysseus really heard were angels, which he only just managed to resist by getting his crew to lash him to the mast. The harpies were winged, Hermes and Iris had wings, Nike from Samothrace likewise. The lamassu of the Assyrians had wings, the Egyptian god Horus had wings and the head of a hawk; their goddess Isis brought Osiris to life with the draft from her wing beats.

Presumably all these peoples had observed angels, but celebrated them in various, and for angels, alien, contexts, and these difficulties subsequently made it hard to see what kind of creatures were really being talked about, and permanently closed off the possibility of comprehending whatever intent they may have had.

Things are different with the writings about angels that built up in, or in close association with, the Judaic culture, principally in the Old Testament’s Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, collected around 500 BC and AD 200 respectively, but presumably of much older provenance. Some of these texts are so similar to the Bible, and complement it so well, that they might have been cut out of it. This is especially true of parts of the Book of Enoch. There is a passage in the Old Testament that is completely incomprehensible by itself, and that has meaning only if read in conjunction with the relevant passage in the Book of Enoch. As far as Bellori was concerned, this passage established a bridgehead between the Bible and the Apocryphal writings, and constitutes a supremely vital part of the basis for the main hypothesis of On the Nature of Angels . If there is a connection, he writes, it means that the Bible’s authority must also apply to the passage in the Book of Enoch. And if it does that, the picture of the nature of angels given in the Bible must be thoroughly reassessed.

Even though the Bible’s authority isn’t absolute, i.e., it comprises only a small piece of a larger picture, such a picture provides no guarantee that the narratives about angels in other sources are true or authentic. This is why Bellori emphasizes the Book of Enoch to such an extent. Parts of it are so similar to the Bible that one passage at least is unintelligible without it. This is Genesis 6:1–8:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.