A Name That Changes Between Manuscripts of the Same Book

Jeremiel's clearest textual appearance is in Second Esdras, also called Fourth Ezra, where an archangel answers Ezra's questions about the fate and number of righteous souls awaiting the end of days. What makes this figure a genuinely interesting case for textual study is that the surviving manuscript tradition of that very passage does not agree on his name: different versions and translations of Second Esdras render the angel's name variously as Jeremiel, Ramiel, or in some manuscript traditions substitute Uriel entirely for the same role, a real and documented instance of scribal variation affecting even which named angel is credited with a given scriptural action.

Second Esdras itself occupies an unsettled position across Christian canons, treated as apocryphal by Catholic and most Protestant traditions, included in an appendix in some editions, and given a more elevated status in some Slavonic and Orthodox biblical traditions, which means Jeremiel's scriptural standing is doubly uncertain, first because the work naming him is not universally canonical, and second because even within that work his own name is not stable across the manuscripts that preserve it. Later tradition sometimes also associates him with a role in guiding departed souls, an extension built on his original appearance rather than stated within it directly.