Six
The Angel of Death
THE HEBREW BIBLE mentions “destroying angels” in Exodus (12:23), 2 Samuel (24:16), and Isaiah (37:36), a grim reaper in Jeremiah (9:20), and angry “messengers of death” in Proverbs (16:14), but none of these are personified as the angel of death.
The angel of death develops in the postbiblical literature of the Apocrypha. The Book of Tobit (3:8, 3:17), for example, names Asmodeus as the angel of death, while the Talmud sometimes uses an etymologically similar name, Ashmedai. Scholars believe that both names have a Zoroastrian influence. In the Avestan language of Zoroaster we find Daeva Aesma as the demon (daeva) of wrath (aesma).1
In addition to Ashmedai, the Talmud also uses the name Mal’akh haMavet (the messenger/angel of death) and identifies him with Satan and the Yetzer ha-Rah, the human inclination toward selfishness and evil (Bava Batra 16a). According to the Talmud, the only reason Israel accepted the Torah was to secure an antidote to the permanence of death (Avodah Zarah, 5a). Despite the linking of the angel of death with Satan in a single Talmudic passage, Mal’akh haMavet is, as his name implies, a messenger of God and not the enemy of God that Satan becomes in later Christian texts.
Samael is often seen as synonymous with the angel of death. Samael is mentioned in a number of places, though which of these was first is hard to say. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer links Samael to the sin of Adam, Exodus Rabbah 21:7 tells us that Samael argued against the redemption of the children of Israel from Egyptian slavery, and Deuteronomy Rabbah names Samael as the angel sent to take the soul of Moses.
Most of what we know about the angel of death in Judaism comes from the rabbis, especially those rabbis engaged in midrashic imagination.
One question that concerned both the midrashists and the much earlier writer of Genesis is how death came into the world. The Genesis writer tells us that it is a punishment from God for Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The midrashist has a different story:
Prior to their leaving Eden Eve encountered Samael (the angel of death) and his son who were also enjoying a walk in the Garden. The angel approached Eve and asked her to keep an eye on the boy while Samael ran an errand. Eve agreed, and as soon as Samael departed the boy began to howl and scream inconsolably.
Adam came upon Eve and the child, and demanded that the boy stop crying. The more Adam demanded silence the louder the boy’s cries became. Enraged Adam grabbed the boy and struck him dead. Yet even in death the boy kept screaming. Beside himself with anger, Adam then chopped the corpse into small pieces, but that too failed to silence the boy. Fearful of what may befall him for killing the boy, Adam cooked the remains and, in a horrible reversed foreshadowing of what was to happen at the Tree of Knowledge, ate of the remains and fed some to Eve. When they had finished eating, Samael returned and asked about the welfare of his son. Adam and Eve denied ever seeing the boy.
Suddenly the voice of the child spoke from within the hearts of both Adam and Eve saying, “There is nothing you can do here, Father. Go. Depart. I have penetrated into the heart of these humans and will inhabit them and the hearts of their children until the end of time.”2
It is not hard to see the link between the Genesis myth and this midrash. Indeed, the midrash is a fantastical riff on the earlier Genesis theme of eating. In the older story Adam and Eve ate a fruit, and the consequence of their doing so was death. In the midrash they eat death itself.
Evidently, death is brought into the world through misdirected human consumption. When we eat what we should not eat we die. Not right away, of course, but eventually. This speaks directly to the angst of the ego-centered mind. Living with a belief rooted in I-It consciousness that sees the world as something to be exploited for one’s own benefit, the “I” consumes the world around it—the “It.” We become like the giants who devour the earth in the midrash associated with the Genesis myth (Genesis 6:4) of the coupling of the angels with human females. That is to say, we take our angelic faculty, our potential to see the world in larger and more integrated ways, and use it not to embrace this larger world, but to devour it instead; use it not to realize our place in the larger life of I-Thou and I-I, but instead to seek to usurp that larger life, to swallow it up.
Elsewhere in rabbinic literature we learn that the angel of death was created by God on the first day of creation, making it clear that death is a part of life and not its enemy (Midrash Tanhuma on Genesis 39:1). And we are told that at the hour of our death the angel stands at our head with a raised sword to which clings a single poisonous drop. When we see the angel we are startled and our mouth opens, at which point the angel shakes the drop into our mouth causing us to turn yellow and die (Avodah Zarah, 20b).
It may be this teaching regarding the poisonous drop that gave rise to the following midrash of King David and the angel of death. Here, too, we encounter the image of death entering through the mouth, warning us about the dual nature of consumption—it can both support life and destroy it:
The King inquired of God as to the day of his death. God explained that such knowledge was not to be given to humans, even such a righteous one as David. David then asked God to tell him on which day of the week he was to die, and God revealed to David that he would die on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
From that day forth, David spent every Sabbath steeped in the study of Torah, hoping in this way to protect himself from the Angel of Death. When the Sabbath of his death arrived, the Angel of Death found the King poring over the Torah. So immersed was he in his studies that the Angel could find no way to take his soul. The Angel had to find a way to distract David.
Not far from where David was studying, the King had built a beautiful garden. The Angel of Death entered the garden and began to shake the trees violently. David heard the noise and went out into the garden to see who was in the trees. Yet even as he grabbed a ladder and began to climb a tree to investigate he continued to ponder the words of Torah and the Angel of Death could not touch him.
As he reached a high rung, the Angel caused the next rung to break beneath David’s weight and the King fell hard to the ground. Stunned by the fall, David ceased to recite the words of Torah, and his mouth fell open. It was then that the Angel of Death took David’s soul to Paradise.3
King David is not the first leader of Israel whose soul could not be taken easily by Samael, the angel of death. Samael struggled greatly with Moses, too, according to the midrash.
After Moses led his people Israel for forty years, his life was at an end and the time of his death had drawn near. God called to the angel Gabriel ordering him to fetch Moses’s soul and bring it to God. But Gabriel refused saying, “I would not presume to take the soul of such a spiritual man as Moses.” God then demanded that Michael fetch Moses’s soul, but he too refused arguing as did Gabriel that Moses was too holy for even an angel to take his soul.
God then turned to the angel Zagzagel who had been Moses’s teacher, but he too refused saying it was not fitting that the teacher take the life of the student.
No one would take the soul of Moses and it looked like Moses would not die after all. Then Samael came before the Throne of God and said, “Is this one, Moses, greater than the first one, Adam? Is he different from Abraham or Jacob or the fathers of the twelve tribes? I took the souls of each of these, so permit me to do the same for Moses.”
God said to Samael, “Moses is greater than all of these. How would you approach him? If you sought to take his soul through his face, you would fail for you cannot look upon his face anymore than you can look upon My Face. If you would take it from his hands, you would fail, for those hands held the Torah. If you would take it from his feet, you would fail, for his feet have walked the paths of Heaven. How will you take it from him?”
Samael said, “I do not know, but I will find a way.” And God gave him His consent.
Samael found Moses engaged in writing the Name of God. Samael drew his sword and summoned all the anger that was in him hoping in this way to frighten Moses and find a way to his soul through his fear. Moses saw the angel flying toward him and looked him in the eye, whereupon Samael went blind and doubled over in pain.
Moses said to him, “Leave me or I will cut off your head!”
“Be not angry with me, Moses,” Samael replied still blind and suffering, “God has placed your soul in my hands.”
Moses said, “I will not give you my soul,” and Samuel fled back to God in terror.
God was furious with Samael: “Bring me the soul of Moses!”
“I cannot! His power is greater than I can breach!”
“You were so eager to kill Moses and now you stand before Me humiliated. Is this what we shall remember of Samael?”
Samael drew upon his shame and humiliation and mustered a fury unlike even he had known before. Drawing his sword he flew enraged at Moses, but the prophet drew his staff engraved with the Name of God and did battle with Samael, forcing the angel to flee in defeat. Moses raced after him and tripped him with his staff and blinded him with the light of his face. Moses was about to kill the Angel of Death when God called to him from Heaven, “Moses, spare him for the world still has need of his services.”
Then God said to Moses, “Why do you struggle on? Your death is at hand.”
“Lord,” Moses said, “You have honored me with so much, please do not now give my soul over to the defeated Samael.”
“This I grant you, Moses,” God said. “I Myself will come for you.”
God descended to earth accompanied by three angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Zagzagel. Gabriel arranged a bed on which Moses could rest. Michael spread over him a purple blanket, and Zagzagel placed a woolen pillow beneath Moses’s head. Michael then stood by Moses’s right side, while Gabriel stood by his left and Zagzagel by his feet. God then said to Moses, “Cross your feet,” and he did so. “Lay your arms across your chest,” and he did so. “Close your eyes,” and he did so.
God then spoke directly to Moses’s soul saying, “My daughter, the one hundred and twenty years allotted to this body are up and you must relinquish it.” Moses’s soul replied, “I have grown to love this man, Lord, for his righteousness is only surpassed by his humility. Please do not suffer me to leave him.”
And God said, “You shall dwell under the Throne of Glory.”
But Moses’s soul continued to entreat God saying, “Remember how you suspended the angels Azza and Azazel between heaven and earth for their love of the daughters of men? Allow me to remain suspended as well for my love of this son of a woman.”
When Moses realized his soul would not leave him he said to her, “My soul, is my death a victory for Samael?”
“No,” she said, “I will go into God’s hands not Samael’s.”
“Will you cry over my death as will the Israelites?”
“No,” she said, “I am beyond tears.”
“Will you suffer the fires of Hell when I die?”
“No,” she said, “I will dwell in the highest Heaven.”
“Then let us be done with it,” Moses said, and asked his soul to go to God.
And God bent down and kissed Moses on the mouth and inhaled the breath of life from Moses as He had once exhaled it into Adam. God then buried Moses in a grave whose whereabouts is still unknown. All that is known is this: A tunnel connects the grave of Moses with those of the Patriarchs, and the body of Moses is as fresh today as the day God laid it to rest.4
We can see both a parallel and a difference between death entering through the mouth in the midrashim of Adam and Eve, and King David, and the Kiss of God here that is also the Kiss of Death for Moses. All three myths link death to the mouth, but in the case of Moses God takes out life rather than puts in death. God takes back from Moses the ruach, the breath that he breathed into Adam in Genesis.
God as we understand God in this book is the I-I, the Source and Substance of all reality. In Genesis God pours his breath into Adam the way we might say the ocean pours itself into a wave. The breath of God is the I-I taking up residence in the human as the I-Thou and the I-It. As we reverse the process, and move from ego-centered mind to world-centered soul, and finally into God-centered spirit we are, in a sense, returning the ruach to God, and returning ourselves to our source.
While King David eventually succumbs to death in the rabbinic midrash, his descendant Jesus defeats death in the New Testament. In the book of Acts, for example, we learn that death could not hold Jesus: “But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24).
In Paul’s letter to the Romans we learn that “death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses” (Romans 5:14), but that Jesus and those who believe in him as Christ are free from the eternality of death (Romans 6:3–11). The second letter to Timothy says that Jesus “abolished death” (2 Timothy 1:10), and in the first letter to the Corinthians Paul writes that though “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26), the final end of death will indeed come.
None of these examples in the New Testament, however, speaks of an angel of death. For this we need to turn once more to the book of Revelation: “I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him; they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth” (Revelation 6:8).
It is clear that Death in Revelation is a servant of God, for his authority to slaughter one quarter of the earth was “given” to him by God. Death is clearly not Satan who, in Revelation, is the cosmic and independent enemy of God. When the task of Death and Hades is done, and the final Day of Judgment arrives, death itself dies: “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:13–14).
Death as something to be defeated is alien to Islam, which looks upon death more positively as liberation from the suffering of life, and a transition to eternal life with Allah. The Qur’an tells us: “Say: ‘The angel of death appointed over you will take away your soul, then you will be sent back to your Lord’ ” (Qur’an 32:11).5 The angel is unnamed but thought to be ‘Izra’il. Overall not much is known of the angel of death from either the Qur’an or the Hadith, and little distinguishes him from the other angels of Islam.
Perhaps in Hinduism a comparable figure to the angel of death in the West is Yama or Yamaraj, the Lord of Death. Yamaraj is often depicted riding a black buffalo and carrying a rope lasso that he uses to bring the souls of the dead to his realm called Yamalok. In Yamalok, Yamaraj consults the records kept on each being’s life and decides that being’s fate in the next incarnation.
One of the most interesting myths regarding Yama is found in the Legend of Gokarnatirtha:6
In Mathura, a holy city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, there lived two men, one young and the other old, both of whom were named Gokarna. It was time for the older Gokarna to die and Yama send his agents to bring the old man to him. By mistake they took the younger Gokarna to Yama instead. Realizing the error, Yama ordered the young man back to life, but he refused.
Yama then sought to bribe the man. In exchange for Yama granting the wrongly deceased Gokarna a single request, the young man would allow himself to be returned to life on earth. The younger Gokarna agreed and asked Yama to explain to him the nature of hell, and how one can avoid going there. Yama told him in detail the twenty-one hells and the unrepented evil deeds that cause one to be reborn in one of them.
Meanwhile the agents of Yama had returned to earth and taken the soul of the older Gokarna to Yama, but seeing as how the younger Gokarna was still with Yama, the older man was allowed to live and return to earth. By the time Yama had finished speaking with the younger Gokarna and returning him to earth, both Gorkanas were alive and well.
It so happened that the two Gokarnas met, and the younger explained what had happened to the older. Both men then became devote, did penance for all their misdeeds, and when Yama sent for them again both were reborn in heaven.
The angel of death symbolizes the capacity for human transformation, moving from ego-centered mind toward God-centered spirit. This feels like death to the former, though it proves to be just the opposite once the transformation is complete. In this sense, of course, the death we are talking about is not so much physical as psycho-spiritual. The ego-centered mind must, as the Sufis say, “die before you die.” That is, the I-It must die to its illusion of exclusivity and reawaken to the reality of the all-embracing I-I nonduality.
This notion of “dying before you die” is powerfully symbolized by the ascension of humans to heaven. We can find two types of ascension myths. In the first, the ascending human remains in heaven; in the second, he or she returns to earth to be of further service to humanity.