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Updated: June 24, 2025
While they at the same time retained its angelology they had to distinguish good and evil beings intermediate between god and man; but they carefully avoided designating the angels as demons, and kept them distinct from the pagan gods, who were all demons and evil. The application of demonology to the pagan worship caused certain difficulties in detail.
In the Babylonian Talmud, the references to evil spirits are numerous. Specific incantations are introduced, and an elaborate system of angelology and demonology forms a feature of Talmudical Judaism in which, by the side of Persian influences, we may detect equally strong traces of Babylonian ideas.
"The whole angelology," says Deutsch, "so strikingly simple before the Captivity and so wonderfully complex after it, owes its quick development in Babylonian soil to some awe-stricken desire which grows with growing culture, removing the inconceivable Being further and further from human touch or knowledge."
There seems, however, no parallel to such a use of "angel," and it is doubtful whether the monarchical government of churches was fully developed when the Apocalypse was written. Later Jewish and Christian speculation followed on the lines of the angelology of the earlier apocalypses; and angels play an important part in Gnostic systems and in the Jewish Midrashim and the Kabbala.
That it must have been so will be seen at once when we think of the sources from which Philo's doctrine was derived. It included in itself the Platonic theory of Ideas, the diffused Logos or anima mundi of the Stoics, and the Oriental angelology or doctrine of intermediate beings between God and man.
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