In Hosea 12:3-5, "The Angel who redeemed" Jacob is expressly called God: "He (Jacob) had power with God: yea, he had power over the Angel, and prevailed; he wept and made supplication unto him: he found him in Bethel, and there he spake with us; even the Lord God of Hosts; The Lord is his memorial."
When we look at the symbols in the triune figure of Layard, already referred to, and minutely examine them, they are very instructive. Layard regards the circle in that figure as signifying "Time without bounds." But the hieroglyphic meaning of the circle is evidently different. A circle in Chaldea was zero; * and zero also signified "the seed."
* In our own language we have evidence that Zero had signified a circle among the Chaldeans; for what is Zero, the name of the cypher, but just a circle? And whence can we have derived this term but from the Arabians, as they, without doubt, had themselves derived it from the Chaldees, the grand original cultivators at once of arithmetic, geometry, and idolatry? Zero, in this sense, had evidently come from the Chaldee, zer, "to encompass," from which, also, no doubt, was derived the Babylonian name for a great cycle of time, called a "saros." (BUNSEN) As he, who by the Chaldeans was regarded as the great "Seed," was looked upon as the sun incarnate, and as the emblem of the sun was a circle (BUNSEN), the hieroglyphical relation between zero, "the circle," and zero, "the seed," was easily established. Therefore, according to the genius of the mystic system of Chaldea, which was to a large extent founded on double meanings, that which, to the eyes of men in general, was only zero, "a circle," was understood by the initiated to signify zero, "the seed." Now, viewed in this light, the triune emblem of the supreme Assyrian divinity shows clearly what had been the original patriarchal faith. First, there is the head of the old man; next, there is the zero, or circle, for "the seed"; and lastly, the wings and tail of the bird or dove; * showing, though blasphemously, the unity of Father, Seed, or Son, and Holy Ghost. * From the statement in Genesis 1:2, that "the Spirit of God fluttered on the face of the deep" (for that is the expression in the original), it is evident that the dove had very early been a Divine emblem for the Holy Spirit. While this had been the original way in which Pagan idolatry had represented the Triune God, and though this kind of representation had survived to Sennacherib's time, yet there is evidence that, at a very early period, an important change had taken place in the Babylonian notions in regard to the divinity; and that the three persons had come to be, the Eternal Father, the Spirit of God incarnate in a human mother, and a Divine Son, the fruit of that incarnation.