Angels in the Three Monotheisms

The belief in angels – divine messengers, personal guardians and celestial legions – is, according to various independent sociological polls, one of the most firmly grounded beliefs nowadays. The assumption of the existence of the winged benevolent spirits manifests itself in various forms, ranging from the pop-art trinkets till the angel-oriented therapeutic systems. This is the result of more than two thousand years of literary angelophanies. The records of their multidimensional semantic evolution can be traced in a variety of Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources. These shall be analyzed chronologically, starting with the dim ideas of a divine messenger present in Mesopotamian, Ugaritic and Persian religious literature and the gradual development of the angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, through the proliferation of angelic functions in apocrypha, pseudepigrapha and early Biblical commentaries, until we reach the medieval notion of systematized angelic hierarchies.

The basic purpose of the course is to acquaint its participants with the hermeneutical method of research applied within the framework of religious and comparative culture studies. These practical skills will be acquired through the scrupulous analysis of the selected source texts. The emphasis shall be put on the immediate intellectual context of the particular text, its linguistic and translational nuances as well as on the semantic potential of its key-terms.

SOURCE TEXTS

1. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Peshitta/New Testament, Qur’an, Zendavesta;

2. Ahadith – various collections;

3. Moshe ben Maimon, The Guide for the Perplexed, tr. M. Friedländer, London 1904;

4. Pritchard J.B. (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with Supplement, Princeton 1969;

5. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy in: Works, ed. J. Parker, London 1897;

6. Targum Pseudo-Yonathan, Targum Onqelos, tr. J. W. Etheridge, London 1862-1865;

7. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R.H. Charles, vol. I-II, Oxford 1913;

8. The Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. E. Tov, Leiden, New York, Cologne 1999 (CD-ROM);

9. The Soncino Midrash Rabbah, ed. D. Kantrowitz, New York 1983 (CD-ROM);

10. The Soncino Talmud, ed. D. Kantrowitz, New York 1990 (CD-ROM);

11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1947;

SUGGESTED READING

1. Orlov A., The Enoch-Metatron Tradition, Tuebingen 2005;

2. Reed, A.Y., Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity. The Reception of Enochic Literature, Cambridge 2005.

3. A.F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven. Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, Brill 2002;

4. Wood A., Of Wings and Wheel. A Synthetic Study of the Biblical Cherubim, Walter de Gruyter 2008.

Knowledge:

• Student has the knowledge of angels and their textual manifestations over various Jewish and Christian sources.

• Student knows and understands the basic methods of analysis and interpretation of the primary sources concerning angels.

Skills:

• Student can formulate research questions and search for the answers.

• Student can practically apply the hermeneutic methods learned during the classes.

• Student can present the result of the analyses in the form of a term paper.

Competences:

• Student is aware of the mutual influences of various religions and cultures on the example of angels.

• Student can independently develop and improve their academic knowledge and skills.

• Student can formulate the research problems stemming from their personal academic interests.

Student is graded on the basis of the term paper.