The Manlike Ones

Ishim is formed from ish, the Hebrew word for a man, and the rank is usually rendered as the men or the manlike ones. It is the last of the ten and the only one whose name is taken from human beings rather than from a divine name, a natural phenomenon or a scene in a vision.

The Hebrew Bible offers no passage describing a class of angels called ishim, so the rank does not rest on a scriptural image the way the ophanim or the seraphim do. What it rests on is a position. Being lowest is the substance of the rank rather than an accident of where it landed in the list: the order closest to humanity is the one through which anything from the higher orders is understood to reach a person at all, and several later commentators read it in exactly that way.

The name also picks up a recurring biblical pattern in which a messenger is met as a man and only afterwards understood otherwise. Abraham's three visitors, the figure who wrestles at the ford, the stranger who tells Manoah's wife of a coming birth: in each of these the narrative first describes a man and then quietly withdraws the description. A rank of angels named the men sits comfortably against those passages without depending on any of them, and the ranked lists themselves do not cite them.