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Angel (Hebrew, malakh), the word derives from angiras (Sanskrit), a divine spirit; from the Persian angaros, a courier; from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger. In Arabic the word is malak (a Jewish loan word).
In popular usage an angel denotes, generally, a supernatural being intermediate between God and man (the Greek "daimon" being a closer approximation to our notion of an angel than angelos). In early Christian and pre-Christian days, the term angel and daimon (or demon) were interchangeable, as in the writings of Paul and John.
The Hebrews drew their idea of angels from the Persians and from the Babylonians during captivity. The two named angels in the Old Testament, Michael and Gabriel, were in fact lifted from Babylonian mythology. The third named angel, Raphael, appears in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. "This whole doctrine concerning angels" (says Sales in his edition of "The Koran, Preliminary Discourse," page 51) "Mohammed and his disciples borrowed from the Jews, who borrowed the names and offices of these beings from the Persians."
While Enoch, in his writings dating back to earliest Christian times and even before, names many angels (and demons), these were ignored in New Testament gospels, although they began to appear in contemporaneous extracanonical works. They had a vogue in Jewish gnostic, mystic, and cabalistic tracts.
Angelology came into full flower in the 11th-13th centuries when the names of literally thousands upon thousands of angels appeared, many of them created through the juggling of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, or by the simple device of adding the suffix "el" to any word which lent itself to such manipulation.
An angel, though immaterial, that is, bodiless, is usually depicted as having a body or inhabiting a body, pro tem, and as winged and clothed. If an angel is in the service of the devil, he is a fallen angel or demon.
To Philo, in his "On Dreams," angels were incorporeal intelligences. He held that the rabbis, on the contrary, thought of angels as material beings.
In Roman Catholic theology, angels were created in the earliest days of creation, or even before creation, tota simul, that is, at one and the same time.
In Jewish tradition, angels are "new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23) and continue to be formed with every breath God takes (Hagiga 14a).
In the pseudo-Dionysian scheme with its 9 heavenly choirs, angels as an order rank lowest in the scale of hierarchy, the seraphim ranking highest. The archangels show up 8th in the sequence, despite the fact that the greatest angels are often referred to as archangels.
Strictly speaking, when one refers to the named angels in the bible, it is correct to say there are only 2 or 3. But the following may be considered: Abaddon/Apollyon, mentioned in Revelation as the "angel of the bottomless pit." Wormwood, referred to as a star (Revelation 8:11), but to be understood as an angel. And there is Satan, who in the Old Testament is a great angel, one of the most glorious, certainly not evil and with no hint of his having fallen. He goes by his title of adversary (ha satan). It is only in Christian and post-Biblical Jewish writings that ha-satan of the Old Testament is turned into an evil spirit.
A case for including Rahab among the named angels of the Bible might also be made: Talmud refers to Rahab as "the angel of the sea."
This article has been excerpted from the book:
A Dictionary of Angels, by Gustav Davidson,
Copyright 1967 Gustav Davidson.
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