Mika Ahuvia, On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021.
The release of the most recent Pew survey of American Jews has once again resurfaced questions about the way Jewish Americans conceptualize Judaism as a religious, cultural, and ethnic category. As Rachel Gross points out, “the concept of religion, as most Americans use it today, is a modern, Protestant creation, and Jewish practices fit uncomfortably in the category.”
In the course of my research, I have been struck by how much American Jews’ response to the topic of angels in Jewish culture depends on their understanding of Judaism vis-à-vis modern Protestant Christian conceptualizations.
“Aren’t angels Christian?”
“Isn’t Judaism a religion of law?”
More generally, people are skeptical about how we modern citizens can make sense of ancient people’s preoccupation with the beings of the invisible realm, and what it means for US society that 77% surveyed Americans said they believe in angels, a number that likely includes some Jewish Americans as well.
It’s striking to me how much American Jews been shaped by Christian Protestant views of Judaism and reductive Jewish / Christian binaries that themselves can be traced back to antiquity and have a long and troubling history. Doing so not only diminishes Judaism; it obscures the very aspects of Judaism that made it so attractive to ancient people from the ports of the Mediterranean to the towns of the river valleys of Mesopotamia. It is precisely this discomfort with conceptualizations of angels that led me to write a book, published this month, titled On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture (University of California Press, 2021).
We need not look to “foreign influence” to make sense of Jewish belief in angels—there is plenty of biblical material on angels for Jews to draw on. That said, angels became very popular among the inhabitants of the Mediterranean in late antiquity, and Jewish thinkers had to find distinctively Jewish ways of conceptualizing them. My research shows that Jewish poets, practitioners, mystics, and rabbis rose to the challenge.
My book argues, firstly, that thanks to the heritage of the Hebrew Bible, angels figured centrally into Jewish thought and practice throughout late antiquity. We understand ancient Judaism more fully when we investigate the place of angels. Secondly, considering rabbinic and biblical sources alongside material evidence and seemingly less authoritative sources such as magical-ritual objects and synagogue poetry produces a more accurate picture of ancient Jewish thought about angels, in part by capturing the output of more than just a small group of elite men, as has often been the case in previous scholarship. Thirdly, I argue that placing these diverse sources in conversation with one another demonstrates that rabbinic ideas about angels developed over time and in dialogue between different sectors of Jewish society.
Angels fulfill key roles in the Hebrew Bible. No ancient Jew questioned their on-going presence in the world. The most significant biblical episodes include the angelic visitation to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, Jacob wrestling with an angel who names him Israel, the angel that leads the Israelites through the desert wilderness, and the seraphim that Isaiah sees praising God in the Temple. Another key story was Hagar’s encounter with the angels of God in the wilderness, which echoes other angelic annunciation stories and dramatizes divine attention to the lowliest persons, even those enslaved and marginal to Israelites’ story. Many other such narratives appear in biblical sources.
Ancient Israelites depicted cherubim in the Temple, and later Jews depicted angels in their synagogue architecture and sarcophagi. Late antique Jews, like other inhabitants of the Mediterranean, lived in a world full of angels: angels were God’s subordinate beings who fulfilled divine missions; nations had patron angels; celestial stars were imagined to be angels; Jews were accompanied by good angels and evil angels, guardian angels, and angels that monitored their transgressions for afterlife judgment. Jewish belief in angels was bound up with biblical stories, prophetic models, and practices of piety that they inherited from previous generations of Jews. Though non-Jewish inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world also believed in angels, this shared belief did not make angels any less Jewish to ancient Jews.
Drawing upon a wide range of evidence – incantation bowls and amulets, mystical literature, rabbinic texts, and synagogue liturgy – I reconstruct the lived practices and beliefs of late antique Jews. Such sources demonstrate how Jewish men and women related to the beings of the invisible realm. No ancient community could thrive without relationships: relationships among people, families, households, circles of disciples, practitioners and clients, experts and ordinary folks – and yes, also relationships with divine beings, including angels.
An important insight I gained over the course of my research was that believers were taught how to conceptualize relationships with the beings of the invisible realm. Biblical and rabbinic stories, liturgical prayers, mystical sources, and ritual practices and objects can be analyzed as evidence of how ancient Jews learned to engage with and imagine angels all around them. Jews invested in relating to God and God’s angels in diverse and regionally idiosyncratic ways.
In late antique Babylonia, Jews created incantation bowls that listed their sources of anxiety and, at times, invoked angels to remedy them. My first chapter centers on these bowls and the diverse conceptualization of relationships that they revealed. Some Jews found it sufficient to pray to God alone for assistance, but most Jews drew upon God, the angels, their ancestors, and folk heroes, depending on the context. My second chapter focuses on shorter amulets and amuletic texts from the Levant that reveal a similar range of divine beings in the Jewish imagination. These ritual sources show Jewish interest in angelic protection, affection, and imitation.
Dramatic sacred song became very popular in the worship spaces of late antiquity, and angels figured largely in this new genre. In Byzantine Palestine Yannai is credited with popularizing the Qedushta, a genre of liturgical poetry where the recitation of the third benediction of the Amidah liturgy, the Qedushah (the “Holy, Holy, Holy” of Isaiah 6:3) is the culmination and climax of prayer. To this day, this is the most participatory moment in the daily Jewish liturgy. In chapter 5, I analyze the corpus of the paytan Yannai, showing the distinctively Jewish ways he imagined the angelic realm, and how he used angelic ideals to encourage Jews to pray and uphold Jewish practices like kashrut and circumcision.
Since I seek to convey an inclusive picture of ancient Jewish communities, I include the beliefs of what I would term radical esoteric Jewish circles as well. Some Jewish mystics, the subject of chapter 7, “Jewish Mystics and the Angelic Realms,” were more preoccupied with exerting power over angels, commanding them, and even joining the heavenly host. Extremists have the ability to expand the Overton window, and I see the Jews who upheld this “way not taken” in Jewish mysticism as influential, even as they were peripheral to Jewish practice. In the medieval period Jewish ritual-magical evidence increasingly expresses dominance over the angels, but that is not yet the case in late antiquity.
Though early rabbinic sources betray some discomfort with attention to angels, the rabbis themselves never questioned their existence. And as I argue in chapters 3, 4 and 6, Babylonian rabbis came to harness Jewish preoccupation with angels to uphold proper Jewish practices. It is also in rabbinic texts that we find descriptions of angels weeping for the suffering of the Jews, hardly the depersonalized abstractions Maimonides later made them out to be.
The conclusion of my book situates angels in the religions of late antiquity more broadly, surveying angels in Greco-Roman, late antique Christian, Mandaic, Manichean, Zoroastrian, and Islamic practices. In every religious movement that arose in late antiquity, the role and function of mediating figures was negotiated and developed gradually over time even as different groups consolidated their authority, foundational texts were codified, and new ritual practices were established. Each of the above-mentioned religious communities had mediating divine beings in keeping with their respective cosmologies and adapted to the needs of religious authorities as well as ordinary worshippers.
I close the book by suggesting how angels came to be rationalized and demoted in the modern Jewish imagination as scholars sought to show that Judaism was a religion that fit the nation-state, one that could be understood and respected by Christians as well. Centering Maimonidean-philosophical tendencies at the expense of the preponderance of midrash enabled some Jewish scholars to avoid engaging with the presence of angels and other mediating figures in ancient sources, even though they mattered to Jews, ancient, medieval, and modern. In doing so, they ignored much rich evidence for the religious imagination of ancient Jews
Judaism cannot be reduced to “a religion of law”[1] or the legal dialectics of the Babylonian rabbinic study house. My survey of the evidence demonstrates that being Jewish was always also about relationships, primarily with God, but concomitantly with God’s host as well.[2] If that idea seems uncomfortable today, we ought to wonder how much ground has been conceded to Christian theology, anti-Jewish polemics, and early modern apologetics.
My book contributes to a more recent trend that foregrounds the diversity of ancient Jewish sources, discovers central aspects of ancient Judaism that have been minimized, and reintegrates them into the way in which we imagine Jewish history, culture, and people. When Jews sing “Shalom Aleichem” on Friday evenings, recite “Holy, Holy, Holy” in synagogues while adopting angelic postures, invoke the angels Michael and Gabriel in the nighttime Shema, or call on angels in prayers for healing, they are continuing a long tradition of Jewish practice that stretches back to antiquity. Returning angels to the history of Jewish religion offers both a more accurate view of the past and important insights into Jewish beliefs and practices today.
[1] For where this notion originated in modern discourse, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: an Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011), especially chapter 1.
[2] My approach was in part inspired by Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Harvard University Press, 2016), especially the theory that religion is fruitfully studied as a “network of relationships.” Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Random House, 2012) was also helpful in elucidating how people are taught to imagine personal relationships with divine beings.