Raguel

The Book of Enoch was written in stages between roughly the third century BC and the first century AD. It was known to early Christian writers, and a phrase from it is quoted in the Epistle of St. Jude, but the Church did not receive it among the Scriptures. Only the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which is not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church, includes it in its canon.

Raguel belongs to a stratum of the book much occupied with naming and ordering the angelic world. The chapter that lists him gives six names in the Ethiopic and seven in the Greek — an interest in enumeration that Scripture itself does not share, since the canonical books name only Michael, Gabriel, and (in Tobit) Raphael.

The Orthodox Church venerates eight archangels by name — Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Selaphiel, Jegudiel, Barachiel, and Jeremiel. Raguel is not among them, and the Church has never received him for veneration.

There is a long and deliberate caution behind this. The Church has generally held that angels are to be invoked by the names God has revealed, and not by names drawn from speculative literature: a Roman synod of 745, under Pope St. Zachary, acted against the invocation of angels under unrevealed names, and the same instinct runs through the Christian East, which simply did not take these names up.

The right way to read Raguel, then, is as a witness to Second Temple angelology rather than as a member of the heavenly hierarchy the Church confesses. Nothing here is a basis for prayer.

Scripture names very few angels: Michael and Gabriel in the received canon, and Raphael in the Book of Tobit, which Orthodoxy reads as Scripture. Everything beyond that comes from tradition or from literature outside the canon.

The Orthodox eight are received because the Church's own liturgical tradition received them, not because a book supplied a longer list. That is the distinction this page keeps, and it is why Raguel appears here as a subject of study and not as a name to pray with.

• 1 Enoch 20:4 (extra-biblical) — Named among the holy angels who watch.
• 1 Enoch 23:4 (extra-biblical) — Identifies the fire in the west as the fire of all the luminaries of heaven — the only words the book gives him.
• Jude 1:14–15 — The one place a phrase from the Book of Enoch is quoted in Scripture. It does not make the book canonical, and it does not concern Raguel.

Orthodox teaching is not one undifferentiated body of claims. What Scripture states, what the Church prays, what the Fathers taught, and what later writers explain are distinct registers — this page keeps them apart so you can see what each statement rests on.