Jeremiel

Jeremiel is named in the apocryphal apocalypse 2 Esdras (also called 4 Ezra), where he is the archangel who answers the souls of the righteous when they ask, from their chambers of rest, how long they must wait for the reward promised them; his reply concerns the fullness of the appointed number of the just. Tradition often identifies him with Remiel of the Book of Enoch, one of the holy watchers, described as the angel "whom God set over those who rise," a guardian of souls and a guide of the resurrected.

On the strength of these roles he is counted among the archangels in the Eastern Christian tradition, sometimes as the eighth beyond the standard seven of the Synaxis. His name is read as "mercy of God" or "God raises up." Because his sources lie outside the canon received by most churches, his standing is uncertain and his cult limited; where he is honoured, it is as the archangel of hope in the interval before the resurrection, the one who answers the dead who wait.

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.