Chagigah No.1: Talmudically Accurate Angels

How did ancient Jews relate to angels? Are “Biblically accurate angels” really Biblically accurate?

Dr. Mika Ahuvia is an associate professor of Classical Judaism in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her book On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture investigates conceptions of angels in foundational Jewish texts and ritual sources. Mika also co-edited the volume Placing Ancient Texts: the Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space and has published book chapters and articles on ancient ritual-magic, gender and rabbinic literature, and late antique archeology.

Special thanks to our executive producer, Adina Karp

View a source sheet for this episode here.

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Music from https://filmmusic.io

"Midnight Tale" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Transcript

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:00:00] Welcome to Interleaved, where we take a deep dove into topics from the Daf Yomi with modern day sages of the Torah and the world. I'm Netanel Zellis-Paley. On today's episode, our better angels. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:00:12] Jews are imagining different angels around them and above them for a long time. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:00:20] They're invisible. They're invincible. Seventy seven percent of Americans believe they're real, and yet there are still a lot of Jews who don't realize how significant a role angels play in their tradition. Thankfully, there's a short passage in Tractate Chagigah that crams in more references to angels than in any other place in the Talmud. So we asked Dr. Mika Ahuvia, expert in Jewish angelology, to give us our wings as we explore the heavenly realms. Dr. Mika Ahuvia is an associate professor of Classical Judaism in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her book, On My Right, Michael on My Left Gabriel: Angels and Ancient Jewish Culture, investigates conceptions of angels in the foundational Jewish texts and ritual sources. Mika also co-edited the volume Placing Ancient Texts: The Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space, and published book chapters and articles on an ancient ritual, magic, gender and rabbinic literature, and late antique archeology. Mika, welcome to the podcast. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:01:23] Thank you so much. It's good to be here. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:01:26] I'm really excited for our conversation. So you literally wrote the definition for "angelology" for Routledge's 2016 Dictionary of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, which, I have to say, is so cool. How did that happen? Was your life kind of always building up to this moment? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:01:45] You know, there's so many ways you can tell the stories of our lives. But I, you know, my mom, like, reminded me that I used to decorate my room with an angel posters, but that's not at all what I had in mind, you know, 20 years later when I was studying at Princeton Religion Department and I was just coming across really interesting questions about the way people interacted with invisible beings. And I think I was reading Seth Schwartz book Imperialism in Jewish Society, and he has this like throwaway line about how the Jews lived in a world full of angels. But he didn't really explain what that was like, and I was like: Wait, I didn't really grow up with angels. Like, I just thought angels were like, this cute pop culture thing. Like: What does it mean that Jews, like that their lives were filled with angels? So that question was there, and then I just happened to be studying texts that gave me a way to get at the answers. So that's kind of where the book came from. And once I wrote my dissertation on angels, then that invitation came to write that entry. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:02:49] That's amazing. I love that.

Mika Ahuvia [00:02:50] With lots of, you know, other stops in between, you know, I was I was a classical studies major. I love, like Roman Archeology of Israel. Like, that was kind of my first love. And then I did a master's in Judaic Studies and just I love the arguments among Jews and like Second Temple Jewish sources, but then also in rabbinic sources. I just loved seeing our history like Jewish history in that way. And yeah, and angels were just another way to get at that topic. You know, during grad school, just challenging time. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:03:22] For sure. So I know this is kind of a big question, maybe a difficult question to answer. So no pressure, but what would you say is your kind of central thesis of your book, On My Right Michael on my Left, Gabriel? Or maybe there are multiple theses or conclusions you come to? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:03:40] Yeah. So mainly I wanted to show exactly how belief in angels was common among late antique Jews and by late antiquity. I mean, kind of Jews who were living after the after all the biblical texts were basically composed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, those Jews going through to that medieval period, like what was their relationship to angels like? So in part, it's a survey of angels and Jewish texts and lots of different Jewish texts, including Jewish texts that a lot of Jews don't know about. So not just the Talmud, but also ancient Jewish magical texts, ancient Jewish mystical texts and liturgical poetry in the 6th century. So really kind of obscure texts that actually tell us a lot about Jewish life. And one of the arguments of my book is that to understand the rabbis, we actually have to look at texts not written by the rabbis. We have to be able to understand the community that they were talking to and arguing with and trying to influence. And if we look at all of those texts, we can see how the rabbis developed ideas about angels over time and in dialog with different sectors of Jewish society, including mystics and poets and ritual practitioners. So that's the book's argument. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:04:58] Thanks so much for laying that out, that's really helpful and so fascinating. Yeah, I think I find that theme has kind of come up a lot in our podcast. What was the most surprising thing you learned in your research? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:05:14] I mean, there was, I guess, a lot that surprised me, I guess the-the thing that stays with me the most years later is that like seven years ago, a student asked me after a book talk if women could be angels in Judaism, or if angels could be feminine. And seven years ago, I was pretty sure that the evidence would said no, that it was pretty binary that OK, like demoness can be feminine and Jewish thought. But I hadn't seen evidence for feminine angels in Jewish texts. And as I revise my dissertation, I just realized that the evidence was like right there in front of me, and I had read it over and over again. But it was only like after kind of the student kind of challenged me that I saw it for the first time. And, you know, I ended up deciding to address this issue of gender and the angels in every chapter of my book. But thankfully, an editor who was reading the book said, You know, you should just write a separate article about gender and the angels, emphasizing that evidence for feminine conceptualization of angels and Jewish texts. And so that ended up becoming an article which should be published any day now in Jewish Studies Quarterly. So yeah, I think that was the most surprising, but I really thought that, you know, the rabbis also, like ancient Jewish thinkers in general, had this concept of like masculine good and divine and feminine demonic very much in conversation with ancient Greek norms. But that's actually not the case. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:06:43] That's so fascinating. I'm so excited to read that article. So I'd like to provide a little more context to our discussion before we dive in. Another kind of big question, but, how do angels figure into the Hebrew Bible and how did the rabbinic imagination, I guess the imagination of Jews in antiquity kind of build on or challenge the Torah's idea of angels? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:07:07] You know, it's so interesting when I tell people that I work on angels and classical Jewish text, there's two responses. One is like: What are you talking about? Jews don't believe in angels. And one is like: Oh yeah, because like, the angels, visit Abraham, you know? And I'm like: Oh yes, and what other stories can you think of? And they're like: Oh, the angels visit Abraham like the angels lead the Israelites in the wilderness. Right? There's the representative angels. There's the angel of death, you know, and the Exodus story. There's the Seraphim in the Temple like, you know. And you know, you might even know about the Seraphim from Isiah's vision because you've maybe been to a synagogue and heard people saying "Holy, holy, holy," or you've seen how Jews when they're praying, right, this to demonstrate legs kind of an imitation of Ezekiel's discussion of angels and his visions. So I mean, sometimes, you know, when I turn the question on people, they suddenly realize that their texts are filled with angels. But for some reason they've kind of like unlearned that or they've found a way of like reading around that. And I think that's mostly a product of maybe living of American Jews living in a Christian society and associating angels with Christian thought or with like pop spirituality and not recognizing that, you know, the reason Christians have angels is because they also consider the Hebrew Bible sacred. Now it's true that there are even more angelic depictions in the New Testament and in Christian writings, but that's matched by developments in Jewish texts that also get very excited about angels, in the Hellenistic period. So the rabbis inherit all of these sacred texts, some of them they reject, right? The myth of the fallen angels, by the way, is originally a Jewish myth. So it's one that's rejected by the rabbis, but everybody in the ancient world knew it. And so the rabbis have to like, navigate what to do with this preoccupation with angels. And what I discuss in my book is that at the earliest strata of rabbinic literature, right so like in the Mishnah and Tosefta, and in the early midrashim, in the early interpretive texts, I see two tendencies. One is to like, try to get Jews to ignore the angels. There really is a tendency there to get Jews to like just focus on God. Or I just don't. Don't get too preoccupied with the angels, which is pretty unique in ancient religions. Only the rabbis seem to be a little bit nervous about this situation. But even in those early texts in the Tosefta we already find the tradition that you know, when a pious person goes on a journey angels of peace accompany him. Or when a wicked person goes on a journey of angels of destruction, you know, acompany. And so it's obvious that the rabbis had ideas about the invisible realm that he took for granted. But when they were in teaching mode and prescribing mode and legalistic mode, they preferred to tell Jews to focus on God instead. That tendency kind of changes over the course of rabbinic literature. So by the time the Babylonian Talmud is kind of being put together, the rabbis are like: Oh, come on, all the Jews believe in angels, let's just, you know, I just told you how to pay attention to angels properly, you know, so they really kind of shifted in their strategies of angels in a later period. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:10:24] That's so interesting. Yeah, it was interesting to kind of see parallel to that we did an episode on demons with Dr. Sara Ronis, and just to see like how demons figured so prominently and like Halacha and Jewish law, I'm excited to hear more about how the rabbis really brought the angels back into their world. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:10:47] So I guess this is a good opportunity to say that because of Dan Brown, often when I say I work on angels, people are like: Oh, you work on angels and demons, they're like. No, actually, I just I work on angels. Because even though that category, like angels and demons like it seems really natural to us, as far as like my research shows like the rabbis and other Jews talked about angels plenty without demons. So demons are certainly significant in Jewish thought as well. But it wasn't like everywhere you see and you see discussion of angels. You also find demons like they don't necessarily go together. They fulfill kind of many roles for for Jews apart from the demonic realm. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:11:25] Thank you for pointing that out and that that kind of aligns well with, you know, what we learned in that episode that demons were seen to be part of like the natural world and not necessarily the supernatural world. All right, so let's dove into the daf. Our first encounter with angels in this track day comes on 4b where the Talmud relates that that the Amoraic Sage Bavi bar Abaye was visited by the Angel of Death. The Angel of Death is unlike most other angels and that it spends much of its time on Earth. It's also, I believe, I may be incorrect, the most frequently mentioned angel in the Talmud. What do we know about the angel of death from elsewhere in the Talmud and other Second Temple rabbinic sources? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:12:08] Yes, the Angel of Death is really fascinating, never named but consistently referred to in every single strata of the Talmud. What's interesting to me about the angel of death, he's ranked fourth most powerful angel in the rabbinic hierarchy, so it goes like Michael, Gabriel, Elijah, and the Angel of Death. I mean, there's so many wonderful stories about the Angel of Death and the rabbis interacting with him. And so I do summarize like some of them in my book. The main takeaway I have for him is the rabbis never indicate that the angel of death is a scary figure. And one of the things I book discusses is that it seems that the rabbis took for granted that there are of these angels of peace and angels of destruction. And I talk about angels of destruction, sometimes they're called Angel sof Satan, as like the police force of the angelic realm like they— they're annoying. People don't like them. People want to avoid them, but they actually are, they seem to be doing something like some enforcement in the invisible realm. And the angel of death, no one really likes them, but they're not scared of him. Because if you're a rabbi right, you have the power of Torah to protect you. And you can bargain with death and you can talk to death. And so it's never a scary figure, which I really appreciate, and I wish we had more stories, you know? People often think that angels in the context of death, like bands of angels and encounter a human soul and into parts of the body, right, like we do find that in rabbinic literature. I think we also find like this depiction of the angelsof death as having a sword, which kind of sounds like a grim reaper like description. But it's also very clear that the rabbis had these superstitions about how to repel the angel of death. So like, famously like this verse from Zachariah, chapter three, verse two for some reason became very considered to be very potent against the Angel of Death or the demonic. So Zachariah three two is: the Lord said to Satan, I  rebuke you  Satan, the Lord has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you for this is a brand plucked from the fire. So the rabbis believe that this verse would award away the angel of death. And we find this not just in rabbinic literature, but also in Jewish incantation goals from from Babylonia. So it's like an interesting parallel. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:14:34] Yeah. I just wanted to add that also, a lot of people have the custom to say that verse every night as part of the kriyat shema al hamita, like the kritay shema before bedtime,

Mika Ahuvia [00:14:44] Which is where the title of my book comes from. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:14:46] Oh, really? Oh yeah. Yeah, right, right. Of course. To you does like the rabbinic depiction of the Angel of Death tell us anything about the rabbinic idea of death, or is it more like about their own death? Like, are they not,Do they relate to the angel of death I guess with less fear because like they know the power of Torah will protect them? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:15:08] Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that their sense is that they have all these role models who have interacted with the angel of death and prevailed, and they know that they can keep the keep away death by studying Torah. So I mean, obviously if they're talking about the angel of death, they're scared. But at the same time, they seem to have developed these imaginative strategies that also made them feel like there is order, right? There is order in the invisible realm. There's order in their lives. They're not powerless. They have tools and knowledge to protect them. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:15:43] Mm-Hmm. How common is it in Jewish sources for, I guess, to have encounters with angels? Or like for humans to see angels or otherwise interact with them? How common is that, like in like, maybe like when's the latest we see that? Do We see that like in medieval sources or...? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:16:03] So in liturgical poetry of Yannai he he emphasizes that people are in synchronicity with the angels. They pray, but it doesn't necessarily emphasize that they're in the same room. In the ritual magical texts, you find these descriptions of people surrounding angels or to the invocation of angels on all sides right the, on my right, Michael, on my left, Gabriel, which is part of the nighttime shema, we find that right in in the liturgy as early as the 11th century, which is one of our earliest liturgical prayer books, it is maybe the ninth or tenth, it's it's not that early, but we find variations on that prayer already in Aramaic incantation bowls. Jews are imagining different angels around them and the schinah above them for a long time. And I think for most, Jews like that continued to be the norm that they were aware that angels were in their life. So, you know, in my book launch at UW that you can find online. I talk about Marc Chegall, who wrote an autobiography, and he describes how once when he was asleep, an angel came to his room and he like there was like a really bright light. And he like hears this like commotion of wings, and he paints this encounter. He paints this encounter of the angelic visitation. And he just like writes about it, like, it's a normal thing, like it doesn't occur to him to, like, have to like, explain this angelic visitation. And it's really only after the Holocaust that you see Jewish thinkers kind of questioning the presence of angels in their lives. Now, of course, at the same time, you have scholarly Jewish movements who are like trying to make Jews more like their conception of like modern Protestant citizens who don't believe in intermediary beings. But it seems to me, like most ordinary traditional Jews, continue to believe that angels are a part of their life and that if they had a traditional upbringing, they have all of these stories and models and ways of believing that angels are present in their life. I think that just being in an American society that has an impact on the way we conceptualize the world, and so it's just become less common to believe that we are surrounded by divine presences, at least like in many Jewish communities I've encountered know if you go to like Catholic, you know, communities, they are also taught to believe in like real presence of the divine evangelical Christian communities, you see the same thing. They're really taught how to interact with the divine. But from what I've seen in most Jewish circles, like Jews just aren't taught or they're not read the sources in the same way to continue to have those kinds of encounters. Yeah. So my survey of the sources at least and gives you a sense of how people were trained that you have to be trained to imagine these things in your life, to believe that they're there. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:19:11] So there's also another angel mentioned in this story Duma, who oversee the souls of the dead after the angel of death discharges them, so to speak, from this earth. Who is Duma? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:19:24] People always want biographies of angels, right? They want angels to be like, really stable and for me to have stories about them. But the most angelic names, like appear once and you just don't see them again. But there's a lot of these like Sandaphone, Akatron, like, I think we're going to see some of them like a little bit later in Chagigah. Yeah. They don't have a biography. The only one that does is Metatron. And that's like, you know, everybody has different stories about him. And slowly you start collecting these stories and, you know, developing that into legends. But you have asides from like Michael, Gabriel, Rafael, Metatron, maybe Uriel, like those like five I see pretty regularly. Ananel, actually sometimes depicted as a feminine angel like that one ap— like appears pretty regularly the sources. You know, you can buy dictionaries of angelic names, but very few appear, more than one or two times. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:20:21] Oh wow, that's so fascinating. So the next reference to angels comes on 12b, where each Reish Lakish lists the seven levels of heaven and what goes on in each of them. According to Reish Lakish, the fourth level, known as Zevul is where the angel Mikhail or Michael offer sacrifices on a supern altar in a heavenly temple that is a mirror image of the temple on Earth and in the seventh level, Aravot, the holiest kinds of angels ministering angels— Seraphim, Chayot, and Ophanim dwell underneath God's throne. Listeners may recognize some of these from Jewish liturgy. We mentioned Malachi Ashereit, the ministering angels in the Shalom Aleichem prayer on Friday nights and Seraphim, Chayot, and Ophanim in the blessings before the morning shma. What do we know about the differences between these kinds of angels, if anything? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:21:14] So I should say that you know what you find in Chagigah here is right this depiction of a seven layered heavens, there's different Jewish conceptions of these heavens. So it's very, first of all, interesting that Chagigah even has this discussion because most of the Babylonian Talmud does not dwell on angels as intensely as this particular section of the Talmud. This is, I would say, one of the sections that's like most dense with references to angels. So, you know, if you compare this account here with some liturgical poetry that's contemporary, you see a different order for the seven heavens and probably different imagining about what's going on in this one. I mean it is a beautiful image, right? You can see the rabbis really kind of playing with speculating about what's going on and the heavenly realms. This idea that there's like, you know, there used to be a temple up in Jerusalem, but that's gone now. But in the heavens, like the kind of archetype for that image remains. And if Michael is the one that's offering sacrifices, you know, that says something about the priests, you know, and the temple in the days of old, right, that the priests and angels are somehow analogous. And I think that probably was a very comforting image to ancient Jews who identified as priests. So I feel like I can talk less about the angels that they speculate about and more about, like, what did this do for the humans who told these stories? Right? It's it's interesting how much how interested Jews were in imagining themselves imitating the angels. That's kind of a theme that I saw in late antiquity among Jews that Jews are really preoccupied with being angelic, not just praying through angels to the heavens, but really imitating them in behavior. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:23:05] Yeah, that was great because I was going to ask you the follow up question like: What, what do you see as a function of this passage? And I think that there really answers the question, well. It is interesting see, like parallels. You know, the rabbis kind of construct parallels between human beings and angels. And the other hand, sometimes we see them contrast humans and angels. I remember like a passage in Brachot saying: "Lo nitnah hatorah l'malachei h'sharet", like the Torah, was not given to angels but is given to humans because angels are perfect and humans are not. And also, like other examples of, you know, the differences. And also, I think there's another passage that says, you know, humans are better than angels because angels stay in one spot and humans can walk or they can move around, they can, I guess, progress in spiritual growth. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:23:56] Yeah, these were really, these were really hot topics in the ancient world among Jews and Christians and others. So you know how one could relate to angels, right? You know, there were some Christians that asserted that people who chose celibacy were basically angels in human form. And I think that might have been like a real— I don;t want to say a threat that sounds too powerful. But like, I think that was a really appealing idea to some people. And Jews were like, we need to find ways to also feel powerful in the way we relate and talk about angels. So in like Jewish liturgical poetry of that era, Yannai who is this poet, insists that when Jews obey the Torah, when they pray that they are angels, right, they are just like the angels and when they reproduce and circumcise their children they are like the angels. Like that these things, the rituals that Jews do, don't make them less angelic in the way that some Christians might claim. Right so to say, you know, the Torah wasn't given to angels, you know, in a sense to acknowledge human shortcomings and to say that that's OK. It wasn't intended for perfect things like perfect beings don't need the Torah. Humans need the Torah, so, you know, making space for humanity.

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:25:19] For sure, I found that really beautiful. On 13b the Talmud attempts to resolve a contradiction between two verses about angels, one in the Book of Daniel and one in the Book of Job. The verse in Daniel says that a thousand angels serve God and another hundred million stand before God, while the verse in Job appeared to imply that the number of angels in heaven is infinite. The Talmud resolves this apparent contradiction by answering that the number of angels has diminished since the destruction of the Temple. So I think you sort of addressed this already, but if you have anything else to add— what is this passage tell us about how the rabbis understood the relationship of angels to the temple and perhaps the ancient Jewish past in general? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:26:04] So I thought you were actually going to ask about another comparison that's made in one of these pages here, which is about what does it say in Isiah that the angels have six wings while Ezekiel that they only have four wings? Right. So this is like this discussion of like, wh ydoes it say this here and this here, like the rabbis are, of course, believe that the Torah is a harmonious book so yhere has to be an explanation, and they conclude that, you know, things have become progressively worse or that the destruction of the First Temple, but also is correlated with the loss of two wings. And that's why angels went from six to, four to two. So I love that the rabbi are speculating about this and also acknowledging that there a change in the way that people conceptualize angels. This is true that in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, right there were beings with four or six wings. But in the Hellenistic period, the more kind of bird like to wing and figure becomes really more dominant in the visual art. And that impacts the way Jews to imagine the invisible realm. So they kind of come to see and imagine angels in the same way that the ancient Greeks and Romans and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean world did. So we can see some connections in these discussions here.  

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:27:25] Yeah. Another resolution offered to this contradiction is just that, in fact, the number of angels is infinite and 100 million is the number of angels that attend to the riverDinur literally river of fire, which is said to flow from the sweat of the angels to upon the heads of the wicked and hell— perhaps a Jewish answer to the River Styx. What else do we know about this strange river? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:27:50] That's an obscure question. I don't, what I can say about that tradition is that in every kind of Jewish texts that I've studied, angels are always associated with fire. That's one of the few things that all ancient Jews agreed on. There's something about angels that makes them fiery. And yeah, so I think so. When the rabbis encounter a river of fire, I think they automatically go to: Oh, well, angels are created there or they die there or are there like you suggest like their tears, you know, are part of this river. Yeah. So that that's the only kind of thing I can add to the source that angels are fiery and changeable. They're not quite corporeal, right, because fire, you can see it. It produces heat, but you can't really capture it, right? 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:28:44] So those of us who have been in certain niches of Twitter in the past few years may be aware of an increased interest in, quote unquote biblically accurate angels. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:28:56] I love this meme, 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:28:57] Which usually just means things with a lot of eyes on them, especially cats. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:29:01] Yeah. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:29:02] So two very important questions I'll I'll close with. So is this a thing— are these angels actually biblically accurate?

Mika Ahuvia [00:29:11] Yes! I mean, I mean, if you read Ezekiel chapter one and chapter 10, he has some really crazy, I mean, really nonfigural, they're not crazy. They're nonphysical conceptualization of angels like a wheel of eyes, like a wheel of eye? This is inHebrew, Ophan. Or, you know, they are- they're really weird and fantastical and pretty unique physical. But nonetheless, like, it's there. So I love it when people do crafty art and try to, like, actually bring out what Ezekiel was imagining. I've been to some interesting Christian churches in like Greece that also like depicts Ezekiel's visions. And yeah, it's like it's a bizarre, fantastical looking. So that's important. I do want to quote Annette Reed, professor of Classical Judaism and Christianity at NYU, but I think we're going to Harvard, she pointed out that what she likes about the biblically accurate angel meme is that it sort of dissenters the imagining of like the white angel, the white guy angel, right, or like the like, you know, the Victorian angel, like the feminine pop art angel. So like it kind of defamiliarizes  things that makes them like foreign and fantastical. And in a way that's important because that that is also part of the story of angels. They're not just they're not cherubim right? Or they're not  the cute cherubim, and when I say cherubim, you know, you're probably thinking of the cute renaissance thing, right? But cherubim in the Hebrew Bible are like terrifying sword polymorphic creatures right. So it's more that. So I think it is important to bring back into our imagination that, there was a time when angels were these beings that really terrified people. You don't necessarily want an out of this world encounter, and it's only kind of over the course of the Hellenistic period, but especially late antiquity that you think you people start imagining angels as benevolent presences in lives that they're not afraid of, but in fact can all come into their house, right? And welcome in on Sabbath evening, right? Like, if you sing Shalom Aleichem right, what are you doing? You're literally welcoming angelic creatures into your house. Like it takes time to to get there. But yeah, biblically accurate angel meme— another part of our tradition, you know, it's important. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:31:50] Just a follow up to that question. So do you believe like the keruvim in the mishkan and the First Temple where like, actually, you know, made to represent those angels are no? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:32:03] So in, you know, in the Book of Kings, its First Kings, we have a description of Solomon's Temple, there's a pretty clear description of what's on the walls, right? The Cardinal, and it includes depictionsI think it's like a lion with wings on a human face. I think that's what cherubim was in that context. And we do find, you know, royal art from ancient Mesopotamia that's just like that, right? So the cherub is very much in interaction with Mesopotamian ideas about divine guardian figures. And the first appearance of the cherubim in the Torah is at the end of the story of Adam and Eve, I think it's Chapter three, the end of of Chapter three, there's a chair that was stationed at the entrance, the Garden of Eden, and he has an ever-turning flaming sword. And so I actually go back to the first question you asked me about what surprised me the most. I said it was like the feminine angels. So in rabbinic traditions and poetic interpretation, this idea of ever turning revolving flaming sword inspires the idea that God can make the angels into anything, including masculine and feminine beings or even demons. So that particular image of the cherub and the flaming sword at the beginning of Genesis. It turns out to have a very long afterlife. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:33:37] As a concluding question like, you know, to follow up with that. What do you think the renewed interest in angels and esoteric theology in general— what do you think it says about our culture perhaps if anything? 

Mika Ahuvia [00:33:51] I think millennials and Generation Z don't trust institutions. I think Pew surveys show that. That young people don't trust institutional religion and angels have always been inspirational because they're not institutional, right? They transcend boundaries. So I'm not surprised that people are interested in reading and understanding  them more. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:34:19] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, for sure. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:34:22] I have had one scholar ask me, like: Well doesn't that worry you? That so many Americans believe in angels? Because, like survey, 77 percent of Americans believe in angels, guardian angels. And I mean, look, everybody needs therapy. Especially during the pandemic We all have voices in our heads. So like, we should all go and make sure that we can distinguish the real voices, you know, from the inspirational voices, the critical voices. So that's like my disclaimer, first of all. When I used to give public talks and people used to come and approach me afterwards, and they would often tell me about how guardian angels had intervened in their lives. I don't know. It sounded pretty positive and harmless, and like, who am I to question their experiences? I don't take a stand as an academic. I don't take a stand about whether angels are real or not. But I can't say that for thousands of years, people have believed that they are real and lived their lives in that way. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:35:28] And you said it still till today, believing in angelsclearly it has value to people. Dr Mika Ahuvia, thank you so much. 

Mika Ahuvia [00:35:37] Thank you. 

Netanel Zellis-Paley [00:35:39] Between episodes, you can keep up with Interleaved on Facebook and Twitter. If you like what you heard follow us, leave us a review and Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share this with your friends. Special thanks to our executive producer Adina Karp. Come back next time for another deep dive.