Archangels

The word "archangel" appears only twice in the entire New Testament: once unnamed, in Paul's description of the Lord's return "with the voice of an archangel" (1 Thessalonians 4:16), and once naming Michael directly, in Jude's account of a dispute over the body of Moses (Jude 1:9). No archangel is named in the canonical Hebrew Bible at all; the earliest references to a distinct class of "chief" angels appear in intertestamental Jewish literature of the last centuries BCE. The archangel Gabriel is named separately in the New Testament — announcing the births of John the Baptist and Jesus (Luke 1:11–38) — but is never explicitly called an "archangel" in the biblical text itself; that title is applied to him only by later tradition. Raphael is named in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, where he heals Tobit's blindness, protects his son Tobias, and identifies himself as "one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord" (Tobit 12:15) — a detail that became the scriptural seed for the widespread tradition of seven archangels.

That tradition of seven takes different shapes across traditions that all trace back to the same handful of core names. The Book of Enoch, an intertestamental Jewish text quoted directly in the New Testament (Jude 1:14–15) though excluded from most biblical canons, lists seven holy angels including Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, with the remaining three names varying by manuscript. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, writing in the 5th–6th century CE (Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite — New Advent), formally placed the Archangels eighth in his ninefold hierarchy (De Coelesti Hierarchia — CCEL), second only to the lowest choir of Angels — but named individually gave them a level of prominence in devotion and iconography that most other choirs never received. The Roman Catholic Church names only three archangels in its scriptural canon (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael), while the Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox traditions venerate a full company of seven or eight, with names such as Uriel, Selaphiel, Jegudiel, Barachiel, and Jerahmeel appearing depending on the specific liturgical tradition. Islam preserves a close but independent parallel: the archangels Jibril (Gabriel), Mika'il (Michael), Israfil, and Azrael carry out comparable functions — revelation, sustenance, the trumpet of resurrection, and the taking of souls — within a hierarchy that developed separately from the Christian one but clearly draws on shared Abrahamic roots.