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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Raphael
An angel who works as a physician and demon-binder in Tobit, a book outside the Protestant Bible.
A traveling companion who turns out to be an angel, cures blindness with fish gall, and ties up a demon. He is in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and not in the Protestant one, because the book he appears in sits on the far side of that line.
Named as one of the seven who stand before the glory of the Lord. He is in the Catholic and Orthodox canons through Tobit and in 1 Enoch, and absent from the Protestant Old Testament. DDD's Mach derives the name from the root RP', "to heal" (rapha, "physician"), so that Raphael reads "God healed," and leaves one question open: whether the name has anything to do with the Rephaim, which DDD says has not yet been studied. In Tobit he works as a physician and demon-binder more than a messenger. He prescribes the fish-gall remedy for Tobit's blindness, uses the fish's other parts to drive off and bind the demon Asmodaeus (Tobit 6:1-9; 8:3), and says outright that he never ate or drank with Tobias's family, since the shared meal was only an appearance (Tobit 12:19).
1 Enoch 9-10 and 20; also 40:9 ("set over all disease and every wound of the children of the people") and 54:6, where his task is healing the earth of the Watchers' damage, including the binding of Azazel.
- Tobit 3:16-17
- Tobit 6:1-9
- Tobit 8:3
- Tobit 12:11-15,19
- M. Mach, DDD s.v. "Raphael," 688
