Mining Angels in Jewish and Coptic Magic Texts

In the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and the Apocrypha the term “angel” appears numerous times, referring to a divine messenger or being. Nonetheless, these corpora only name four such entities: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. From Late Antiquity onwards, however, a massive increment in angelic nomenclature appears in both Judaism and Christianity, primarily in magical and mystical texts. The use, popularity and connections between these angel names remain to be studied in depth. This paper is part of a larger research project that employs digital methods to analyze angelic nomenclature in Jewish magic and the magic of related cultures.