In spite of the general
belief that there were no prayers to angels from these early times, we shall
attempt to show, upon closer examination of the sources, various indications of
their existence.
PT Ber 9:1, 13a, cites the
following (presumably in the name of the Lord):
If a person faces trouble,
he should not cry out to the angels Michael or Gabriel. But he should cry out
to me, and I will immediately answer him. In this regard [it says], ‘All who
call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered’ [Joel 2:32].
This is presumed to be the
only source in Rabbinic literature from which we learn that Jews had been
accustomed to praying to angels, and that the sages prohibited the practice.
However, in spite of this prohibition, prayers to angels can still be found in
Talmudic texts. In reference to the Midrash of Canticles, for example, Tanya
Rabbati, laws of Rosh Hashana, paragraph 72, there is this quotation:
In the Midrash of Canticles
on the verse ‘I adjure you’, the community of Israel says to the angels
monitoring the gates of prayer and the gates of tears: convey my prayer and
tears to the Holy One blessed be He and be you advocates before Him to forgive
me the wicked deeds and the unintentional sins.
Although this passage does
not appear in the various versions of the midrash available today, it is
claimed to be authentic, and if this is the case, the text was probably deleted
by internal censorship because of its ‘problematic’ content which did not seem
to suit religious teachings.
. . .
B. Halachik Texts
The issue of appealing to
intermediaries is addressed in M Hul 2:8:
If a man slaughtered [an
animal] as a sacrifice to mountains, hills, seas, rivers, or deserts, the
slaughtering is invalid.
This mishnah is cited in BT
Hul 40a, where it is discussed in respect to a Baraita found more
concisely in T Hul 2:18:
He who slaughters for the
sake of the sun, for the sake of the moon, for the sake of the stars, for the
sake of the planets, for the sake of Michael, prince of the great host, and for
the sake of the small earthworm – lo, this is deemed to be flesh deriving from
the sacrifices of corpses.
The Babylonian Talmud sought
to comprehend the difference in the terminology of the Mishnah and Tosefta,
i.e., the “unfit slaughter” of the Mishnah and the “sacrifices of corpses”
(=for the dead) of the Tosefta. Abbaye explains: ‘One refers to the mountain,
the other to the divinity of the mountain’. More plausibly, however, the disparity
seems to reflect different textual versions without any real difference in substance.
Thus, uttering the name of one of those ‘intermediaries’ in connection with a
ritual slaughter makes it void. It was, therefore, the intent of both the baraita
and the Mishnah to ban sacrificial slaughter in which the slaughterer
invokes an intermediary, either by name or by uttering the name of the angel
appointed over it.
Clearly then, although the
sages had established that the blessing recited at the time of the slaughter
should be addressed to God, some Jews continued to invoke the names of angels,
such as Michael, or those of specific mountains, lakes, and the like. Similarly,
in M Hul 2:9 the sages state: ‘One may not slaughter [in such manner that the
blood runs] into the sea, or into rivers…’ and the Talmud explains: ‘Why is it
that a person may not slaughter into the sea?… because it might be said that he
is slaughtering to the deity of the sea?.’ (Meir Bar-Ilan,"Prayers of Jews
to Angels and Other Mediators in the First Centuries CE," pp. 3-4, 6-7)
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