Consider the years of ages past;
Ask your parent, who will inform you,
Your elders, who will tell you:
(8) When the Most High gave nations their homes
And set the divisions of humanity,
[God] fixed the boundaries of peoples
In relation to Israel’s numbers.
(9) For יהוה’s portion is this people;
Jacob, God’s own allotment.
(ג) למספר בני ישראל. בִּשְׁבִיל מִסְפַּר בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל שֶׁעֲתִידִין לָצֵאת מִבְּנֵי שֵׁם, וּלְמִסְפַּר שִׁבְעִים נֶפֶשׁ שֶׁל בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל שֶׁיָּרְדוּ לְמִצְרַיִם הִצִּיב גבלת עמים — שִׁבְעִים לָשׁוֹן:
(3) למספר בני ישראל ACCORDING TO THE NUMBER OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL — i.e. because of the number of the children of Israel that were in future to descend from Shem’s sons, and in accordance with the number of seventy souls of the children of Israel who went down to Egypt God firmly established גבלת עמים THE NATIONS ACCORDING TO THEIR BOUNDARIES — i.e. seventy separate nations (cf. Sifrei Devarim 311:5).
(1) בהנחל עליון גוים, when God assigned to them ancestral lands (2) בהפרידו בני אדם, after the death of Noach and the time of Avraham about which the Torah wrote (Genesis 10,5) “from this point on they separated, branched out by their respective lands, each with its language, etc.” יצב גבולות עמים, twelve descendants of Canaan (Genesis 10,6) mentioned in that context in that chapter of Genesis, corresponding to the eventual 12 tribes of Israel. Canaan and his 11 sons amounted to twelve. (Genesis 10,15-18) The Torah describes the boundaries of the Canaanites as extending from Tzidon in the north to Gerar, near Gaza in the south, and Sodom in the east. This entire region became the land of Israel during the conquest commencing in the days of Joshua, except for the coastal plains inhabited by the Philistines which was conquered many hundreds of years later, and Jerusalem which was captured by David. The Torah does not give details of the boundaries of the territories of any of the other sons of Noach. למספר בני ישראל, matching the number of the Children of Israel.
(3) ACCORDING TO THE NUMBER OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. The rabbis, of blessed memory, say that the image of our father Jacob is engraved on the throne of glory and this is a great secret. For the portion of the Lord is His people is proof of this. This is a very great status. God did not do this for any nation. Scripture therefore states, Do ye thus requite the Eternal, O foolish people and unwise? (v. 6), that is, a people who have fallen from their status in their foolishness. Now, this God is your parent, for God created you for Divine glory, and as Scripture goes on to explain, God taught you as a parent teaches their child.
בְּהַנְחֵ֤ל עֶלְיֹון֙ גֹּויִ֔ם,
בְּהַפְרִידֹ֖ו בְּנֵ֣י אָדָ֑ם
יַצֵּב֙ גְּבֻלֹ֣ת עַמִּ֔ים,
לְמִסְפַּ֖ר בְּנֵ֥י אלהים
כִּ֛י חֵ֥לֶק יְ־הֹוָ֖ה עַמֹּ֑ו,
יַעֲקֹ֖ב חֶ֥בֶל נַחֲלָתֹֽו
Deut 32:8-9 in DSS and Septuagint
When Elyon assigned inheritance to the nations,
When he separated mankind,
He established the territories of nations,
According to the number of minor gods.
YHWH’s share is His nation,
Jacob is his allotted inheritance.
Are There Gods, Angels, and Demons in Deuteronomy? by Prof. Jonathan Ben-Dov
The verse describes the division of humanity into nations, and the assignment of territory to each nation “according to the number of minor gods.” Each god thus receives a nation and territory, and YHWH receives (or takes) Israel as His share (v. 9).
According to a reasonable (if radical) understanding of the original verse 8, when all gods in the world received their inheritance from a senior god appropriately named Elyon ([most] high), YHWH was a merely a minor deity. YHWH subsequently raised Israel, making Himself a reputation as a senior and successful god among other nations and their gods. At the end of the poem (verse 43), whose original version is preserved in the scroll 4QDeutq and (in slightly different form which cannot be elaborated here) the Septuagint, all those gods are summoned to praise YHWH, the God of Israel, and acknowledge His greatness, similarly to the summons of Psalm 29:1-2.
Angels and Angelology, Jewish Virtual Library
The masoretic reading בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל "the children of Israel" for the reading of the Qumran fragment and the Septuagint cited above is a conflation of the latter and of a variant שָׂרֵי אֵל, "the ministers of God." This variant is not attested directly, but its existence may be deduced from the fact that it would account both for the masoretic reading in Deuteronomy 32:8 and for the use of שַׂר, "minister" in Daniel 10:20 twice, 21; 12:1. For these passages are obviously nothing but a bold development of Deuteronomy 32:8–9. Their doctrine is that the fates of nations are determined by combats among the celestial "ministers" to whom they have been assigned and that (despite Deut. 32:9) Israel also has a "minister," Michael, who is assisted by another angel, Gabriel.
Raphael and the Virgin Bride by the Rev. Wil Gafney
Stories about angels are, if not as old as time, then as old as humanity. They are certainly older than the scriptures. They are older than the people called Israel who collected, codified and, collated our scriptures. In the ancient Afro-Asiatic world divinity was understood to be complex, too complex for one being no matter how great, how wise or, how powerful. There were the old gods of Canaan and all the gods of all the peoples before them, the gods of Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Phoenicia and Philistia and those of every place in which humanity eked out a living below a sky filled with mystery.
There were by necessity, systematic theologies accounting for all of these beings. And then as monotheism gained a toehold, the Israelite systematics of the day collapsed categories and blended cultures and re-articulated the gods as the host of heaven, as divine beings something like the one God, but not quite. These expressions of lesser divinity bridge the dimensions and worlds between the heavens and the earth in a way their Creator could not have been easily imagined to do. There were the six-winged seraphim made of fire, the two-winged cherubim who range from the simple sword-wielding model of Gan Eden to the fantastic composite of wings, wheels, eyes and human hands in Ezekiel’s vision. There were garden variety divine messengers and, divine beings sufficiently male to impregnate human women and girls...
From 'On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism' by Gershom Scholem
The history of Judaism, perhaps to a greater degree than of any other religion, is the history of the tension between these two factors—purity and living reality—a tension which has necessarily been heightened by the special character of Jewish mono¬ theism. For in Judaism everything depended on preserving and expounding the pure unity of this God, on safeguarding the idea of God against all admixture with elements of pluralism. But to preserve God’s living reality at the same time—that called for a state of perfect balance between the two factors, and this balance has always been precarious. The more the philosophers and theologians strove to formulate a unity which negates and eliminates all symbols, the greater became the danger of a counterattack in favor of the living God, who, like all living forces, speaks in symbols. Inevitably, men of intense religious feeling were drawn to the full, rich life of the Creator, as opposed to the emptiness, however sublime, of a pure and logically flawless theological formula. And it is this counterattack, this ‘reaction,’ which has given so much dramatic tension to the history of Judaism in the last 2,000 years. For not only the popular religion responding to the simple Jew’s undiminished need of expression, but also the great impulses of Jewish mysticism are to be understood in this light. And this brings us to the special problem of the Kabbalah.