On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture by Mika Ahuvia (review)
- On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture by Mika Ahuvia
Scholarship in recent decades has shown an increasing interest in transmundane beings in ancient Judaism. Mika Ahuvia's new monograph is an important contribution to this area of research; it is the only thematic study of the current century to focus specifically on angels in late antique Judaism. It is a particularly welcome addition to the literature for several reasons, not least the extent to which it recognizes that the study of angels in late antique Judaism is a multifaceted project that needs to consider a variety of sources. Across seven chapters, Ahuvia surveys the evidence not just from rabbinic sources but from magical, liturgical, and mystical texts. By putting these different sources into a wider conversation, Ahuvia's book works both to decenter the rabbinic sources (to a degree) and to better contextualize them, resulting in a richer and more nuanced picture of the world of late antique Judaism.
Ahuvia's study also emphasizes to great effect the complex social reality of late antiquity, where human beings were involved in a variety of interpersonal relations with different classes of transmundane beings. This is most apparent in the first two chapters, which focus on the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls from Mesopotamia and the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic amulets from the Levant, as well as the magical recipe book Sefer ha-Razim. Taken together, the bowls and the amulets afford us numerous examples of highly particular and personal engagements with angels. Ahuvia emphasizes the diverse ways in which these beings were imagined to actively participate in people's lives and in their homes: not just as protective figures, but as bearers of heavenly divorce writs designed to expel demons from people's homes, gatekeepers to blessings and success, bringers of favor, and appointees to different spheres of influence (including specific topographies and specific parts of the human body).
Angels plainly held great appeal as intermediary and intercessory powers—and as models for imitation—as Ahuvia further demonstrates in her discussion of angels in early rabbinic sources in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 deals with the (occasionally oblique) appearances of angels in the tannaitic sources. Without essentializing these sources or forcing them to speak in one voice, Ahuvia argues that the tendency in some of these sources to ignore, downplay, or discourage attention [End Page 410] to angels was in part a response to the popular appeal of angels as mediating agents elsewhere in Jewish society.
Chapter 4 continues Ahuvia's diachronic treatment of the rabbinic sources against the backdrop of broader Jewish preoccupations with angels, this time as evidenced by such Second Temple traditions as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400–407; 11Q17) and the Community Rule (1QSa II, 3–12). Angelic imitation and/or liturgical communion with the angels are preoccupations of these texts, and Ahuvia traces the further development of rabbinic traditions that were concerned to uphold modes of divine fellowship and imitation over traditions of angelic fellowship and imitation. Again, she does so without essentializing the sources, providing a rich picture of the variety of contemporaneous frameworks that existed for conceptualizing the relationships among humans, angels, and God.
Chapter 5 turns to the late antique synagogue liturgy of Byzantine Palestine. It uses some of the 160 surviving kedushta'ot of the poet Yannai to exemplify how the angelic realm was embraced as a central part of communal worship. In the piyyutim composed by Yannai, we see part of the process whereby the kedushah was transformed into a participatory event in the synagogue that drew Jews and angels into parity and synchronicity of worship while also reflecting broader ideas about angelic imitation and the human assumption of angelic status. While Ahuvia reads Yannai as cultivating new modes of Jewish self-conception, her analyses also account for the role that popular interest in angels may have played in shaping Jewish liturgy, as well as noting parallel conceptions of angels in Christian congregational settings in...
