Side by side, from the sources
Angels vs The Sons of God
These two are identified with one another in the record, which is not the same as being the same figure. The commonest later reading, and the one that turns a council of divine beings into a heavenly civil service. Recorded because the tradition makes it, not because the Hebrew text requires it.
Angelic · Third Sphere · c. 500 CE
Angels
also called Malakim, Angeloi, Ishim
The ninth and closest of the angelic choirs: the ordinary messengers who deal with individual people, and the only rank most human accounts ever describe meeting.
- Alignment
- Celestial
- Rank
- Ninth Choir
- First attested
- De Coelesti Hierarchia (The Celestial Hierarchy) · c. 500 CE
- Named there as
- Angels
- Texts naming it
- 5
- Powers attributed
- 2
Angelic · The Divine Council · c. 900 BCE
The Sons of God
also called Bene ha-Elohim, Bene Elim, Bene Elyon, The Divine Council, The Host of Heaven
The plural divine beings who make up God's council in the Hebrew Bible — present at creation, attending audiences, allotted the nations, and in one psalm sentenced to death for judging unjustly.
- Alignment
- Disputed
- Rank
- The Assembly
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- The sons of God
- Texts naming it
- 2
- Powers attributed
- 0
Where do they actually overlap?
Texts naming both
None. The two never appear in the same text in this corpus, which is worth knowing before accepting any confident claim that they are one figure.
Powers credited to both
No shared office is recorded. Where two figures are said to be the same and share no job description at all, the identification is usually doing polemical work rather than descriptive work.