Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Michael
The angel assigned to Israel, and the only figure the Bible calls an archangel.
Daniel 10:13,21, in every translation this tool compares.
Daniel has spirit figures standing over nations, a prince of Persia and a prince of Greece, and Michael is Israel's. He is also the only being in the Bible ever called an archangel. Most of what people picture at the name was filled in by later Jewish writing, which made far more of him than the handful of passages that actually name him.
Called one of the chief princes and "your prince," Israel's assigned sar, the counterpart to the princes of Persia and Greece. The geopolitics of Daniel 10 are cosmic before they are military. DDD's Mach warns that Michael grew so prominent in Second Temple Judaism that later writers pulled almost any unnamed biblical angel into his orbit, so traditions originally about Michael need separating from generic angel traditions attached to him afterward. His usual Second Temple title, archistrategos, "chief commander," most likely translates "commander of the LORD's army" from Joshua 5:14, though that verse never names him.
H4317 (מִיכָאֵל), G3413 (Μιχαήλ). Most occurrences of the Hebrew name are human namesakes; the five verses listed below are the being.
The oldest surviving list of archangels puts Michael first among four (1 Enoch 9-10, with Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel or Sariel), and the group grows to seven in 1 Enoch 20. In 3 Baruch 11-15 he is the sole mediator between God and the guardian angels of individual nations, receiving their prayers. Jude 9's dispute with the devil over Moses' body draws on the lost Assumption of Moses, and the Life of Adam and Eve (Vita 13-14) supplies the earliest surviving version of Michael as Satan's direct opponent, tied there to a refusal to worship Adam.
Jude 9 depends on a lost work, probably the Assumption of Moses, and some readers treat that as disqualifying.
The Jehovah's Witness identification of Michael with the pre-incarnate Christ rests on "the voice of the archangel" in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, which is a comparison and not an equation.
- Daniel 10:13,21
- Daniel 12:1
- Jude 9
- Revelation 12:7
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/divine-council-index\/daniel-10-13-20-21\/","n":"Daniel 10:13, 20-21","s":"A prince of Persia resists for twenty-one days, a prince of Greece is coming, and Michael fights for Israel.","r":"Daniel 10:13, 20-21"}
- M. Mach, DDD s.v. "Michael," 569-571
- Heiser, *Unseen Realm*, ch. 15
