“Statements attributed to Rabbi Akiva and other rabbis after him encouraged Jews to focus on God directly and to focus on God’s loving relationship with Israel,” writes Ahuvia. It appears that early rabbis grappled with popular beliefs about angels - and made some concessions. She noted that the angel of evil is “not innately evil, just around to monitor events when they happen,” like a “police officer with a speeding ticket, not super-popular but maintaining order in the invisible realm… so they actually look out for justice.”Īhuvia writes, “Early rabbinic traditions do not provide more commentary on the idea of accompanying angels, whether good or evil… Only much later rabbinic traditions would elaborate on the idea of good and evil angels accompanying Jews.” A mind of their own? And if it is not, the evil angel says, ‘May it be like this on another Sabbath too,’ and the good angel answers ‘amen’ against his will.” And when he arrives at his house, if a lamp is lit and a table is prepared and his bed covered, the good angel says, ‘May it be like this on another Sabbath too,’ and the evil angel answers ‘amen’ against his will. The book cites the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 119b) as containing a tradition about angelic visitation attributed to Yose ben Judah that “two ministering angels accompany a man on the eve of the Sabbath from the synagogue to his home, one good ( tov) and one evil ( ra’). It was you and local authorities, local synagogues, rabbis, ritual practitioners, you and your guardian angels.”
It was not just you and God if you were Jewish. In the early centuries CE, Ahuvia said, “people lived in a world filled with all sorts of intermediaries. “They also worried about demons attacking them, attaching themselves to them.” “Things that kept them awake in the night,” Ahuvia sums up. I think where angels are useful is, you just pray to angels about events in your life that are beneath God’s worries.”įorty percent of the bowls Ahuvia examined contain pleas to the angels - either alongside or beneath requests to God - for help with diverse problems, from gossip to curses to physical illnesses to the health of a marriage. “Do you really want to pray to God about the issue of your in-laws? It seems a bit beneath God’s majesty. “The most popular formula we have found represented, that I see most often, has to be a prayer against the intrusion of in-laws,” Ahuvia said.
Through the bowls, Jews found a way to deal with numerous sources of tsuris (troubles) in the supernatural and natural worlds, from demons to in-laws. “I wanted to foreground that - the most vivid description of where angels were, what they were doing for people.”Īn Aramaic incantation bowl from Nippur, photo taken circa 1909, shown in ‘Studies in Assyriology and Archaeology’ dedicated to Hermann V. “I found the magical bowls to be the most exciting and fascinating - and the most neglected - in the story of religion and lived experience,” she said. About the size of a modern-day breakfast cereal bowl, they were used to seek divine assistance from a variety of sources. Other Jewish traditions related to angels have long since faded away, such as incantation bowls from Babylonia, which date from the Mesopotamian region of Mesene in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.
She noted that her book does not represent a comprehensive survey of angels among ancient Jewish sources, adding that this would have called for a multivolume effort.Īhuvia noted that key parts of Jewish liturgy today have centuries-old links to angels, from the Kedushah prayer to the practice of standing on Yom Kippur while dressed in white. To understand the Jewish view of angels millennia ago, Ahuvia said she plumbed “much of the available evidence,” spanning “magical-ritual, liturgical, early mystical, and from early to late rabbinic literature,” from the Hebrew Bible to the liturgical poetry of a Jew named Yannai in Byzantine Palestine.