What’s Your Death Toll?

How many people have you killed?

Disclaimer: the following is the middlebrow blog version of a ghost story.  Not intended for brooding purposes.

At Christmas, we sometimes properly speculate that we may have been among the angels who sang at His birth.

There are two kinds of beings in heaven who are called angels: those who are spirits and those who have bodies of flesh and bone. Angels who are spirits have not yet obtained a body of flesh and bone, or they are spirits who have once had a mortal body and are awaiting resurrection.

-Angels, Guide to the Scriptures

And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

-thus 2 Kings 19.

There are other examples at the Passover, in 2 Samuel 24:15-16, and elsewhere.

Was it just one angel?  Scholars say the term translated as destroying angel also has plural forms.  I don’t enough myself to say if these are divine plurals or actual plurals.

For example, Job 33:22.