Who Is Archangel Jeremiel, and Where Is He Named in Religious Texts?

What does 2 Esdras 4:36 actually say about Jeremiel?

The verse sits inside a long argument between Ezra and the angel Uriel about why God's promises are slow to arrive. In 4:33 Ezra asks how long he must wait, and Uriel replies by recalling that the souls of the righteous once asked the same thing from their chambers.

And the archangel Jeremiel answered and said, "When the number of those like yourselves is completed, for he has weighed the age in the balance."

2 Esdras 4:36, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

Verse 37 finishes the thought: God "will not move or arouse them until that measure is fulfilled."

The souls are not asking about their past lives. They want to know when the resurrection will come, and Jeremiel answers with a count and a pair of scales.

Three details in verse 36 shape everything later written about him. He is called an archangel, he speaks to the dead and not to the living, and his answer concerns a timetable that God has already measured.

The weighing image is the likely reason Orthodox icons put scales in Jeremiel's hand. It also explains why some writers make him an angel of judgment, although the verse only has him announce when the waiting ends.

Jeremiel does not speak again in 2 Esdras. Uriel carries the rest of the dialogue and remains the book's interpreting angel, so a reader who meets Jeremiel meets him for exactly one reply.

Are Jeremiel and Remiel the same archangel?

They are probably related, but no ancient text says they are one angel. The Greek text of 1 Enoch 20, preserved in the sixth-century Codex Panopolitanus, closes its list of holy angels with "Remiel, one of the holy angels, whom God set over those who rise."

The Ethiopic version, the only complete text of 1 Enoch, lists six angels in that chapter and has no Remiel. The seventh name, and his charge over the risen dead, therefore rests on the Greek witness alone.

Two more texts widen the family. In 2 Baruch 55:3, "the angel Ramiel who presides over true visions" is sent to interpret Baruch's vision of a cloud raining dark and bright waters.

Book 2 of the Sibylline Oracles names Ramiel with Arakiel, Uriel, Samiel, and Azael as angels "that know how many evils" each person did, and who lead souls to judgment.

Those two passages are the closest ancient parallels to the modern roles. Baruch's Ramiel owns visions, and the Sibyl's angels hold a record of past deeds.

A fourth form, Eremiel, appears in the Apocalypse of Zephaniah as the angel over the abyss and Hades. That text is one reason some writers file all four names under one angel of the dead.

What does the name Jeremiel mean: mercy or exaltation?

Two meanings circulate because two Hebrew roots can sit behind the name. Read as Yerahme'el, from the root for compassion, it means "God has mercy" or "may God have compassion."

That Hebrew name belongs to a man in 1 Chronicles 2:9, a descendant of Judah, long before it belongs to an angel.

The Orthodox Church in America glosses Jeremiel as "the raising up to God," a sense that fits a Hebrew root meaning to be high or lifted up. English lists that translate the name as "exaltation of God" follow this second reading, and it suits an angel placed over those who rise.

Both readings end in El, the Hebrew word for God, a theophoric ending that Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael share.

Latin and Greek spellings cannot tell us which root a scribe heard. The mercy reading is safest for the Hebrew name, and the exaltation reading is how the Orthodox calendar explains the angel's role.

Where did Jeremiel's life-review and visions roles come from?

No ancient text gives Jeremiel a life review. The role came together in stages, and each stage has a date.

Butler's term and Moody's interviews made the life review a familiar idea decades before anyone attached an angel to it. Virtue's 2003 encyclopedia supplied the patron and her 2004 deck put him on a card, and Jeremiel's old connection with souls awaiting resurrection probably made him the natural choice.

The visions role has a firmer ancient anchor, although it belongs to a differently spelled name. Writers who treat Ramiel, Remiel, and Jeremiel as one angel carry the office of 2 Baruch's Ramiel, who "presides over true visions," across to Jeremiel.

Virtue was baptized in 2017 and has since rejected her earlier New Age angel teaching in public, so the best-known modern source for the Jeremiel life review comes from an author who no longer holds it.

What are Jeremiel's color and symbols?

The only attribute with a traditional source is the pair of scales. The Orthodox account of the Synaxis gives Jeremiel balance-scales, which matches the line about God weighing the age in the balance.

• Scales. Orthodox iconography, drawn from 2 Esdras 4:36, and the oldest symbol attached to him.
• Dark purple or indigo. Angel-card and archangel books from the 2000s; no ancient text gives Jeremiel a color.
• Amethyst. Modern crystal lists that follow the purple color; no Jewish or Christian source about him mentions a stone.
• Hope, emotions, and forgiveness. Recent devotional websites that repeat themes from Virtue's books.

The purple may borrow from older Christian color symbolism, where purple marks the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent. That association is a modern writer's choice, and nothing written about Jeremiel before the twentieth century supports it.