So I continued looking in the vision of the night on my bed and, lo, a holy eir descended from heaven (
v. 13). By
eir he refers to the watcher, the meaning in Greek. By watcher he means an angel,
110 thus bringing out its bodiless form: what is clad in a body is subject to sleeping, whereas what is rid of a body is superior to the need for sleeping. So he means, I saw an angel, bodiless in nature, who descended from heaven.
Footnote 110: It is not that Theodoret goes behind his text to cite the Hebrew form ir: he finds it thus in Theodotion. This is the only use of the word in the Old Testament in reference to an angel, though it is (according to Alexander Di Lella, “Daniel,” NJBC, 413) frequently so used in Jewish apocryphal works and at Qumran.
