Second City Standard · The Book of Enoch · Chapter 20
The Seven Holy Archangels and Their Assignments
Chapter 20 names the seven archangels who preside over the cosmos — Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel, and Remiel — and assigns each a specific office.
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Book of Enoch Chapter 20: Modern Reading
And these are the names of the holy angels who watch.
Uriel, one of the holy angels, who is over the world and over Tartarus.
Raphael, one of the holy angels, who is over the spirits of men.
Raguel, one of the holy angels, who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries.
Michael, one of the holy angels — to wit, he that is set over the best part of mankind, and over chaos.
Saraqael, one of the holy angels, who is set over the spirits who sin in the spirit.
Gabriel, one of the holy angels, who is over Paradise and the serpents and the cherubim.
Remiel, one of the holy angels, whom God set over those who rise.
That is the entire chapter. It is a list, delivered without narrative, and its placement is doing the work: it arrives immediately after Enoch has been shown two prisons — one for stars, one for angels — and immediately before he is taken to see the chambers of the dead.
Read against the Watchers cycle, the list is also an implicit contrast. Chapters 6 to 16 named angels who abandoned their posts. Chapter 20 names the ones who did not, and states the post each of them is still holding.
What Happens in Book of Enoch Chapter 20?
Chapter 20 names the seven archangels who preside over the cosmos — Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel, and Remiel — and assigns each a specific office.
What Does Chapter 20 Mean?
Chapter 20 organises the invisible administration of the world. Every domain that matters in 1 Enoch — the living, the dead, the luminaries, Paradise, chaos, Tartarus — is assigned to a specific archangel with a named jurisdiction rather than to a general angelic workforce.
The list is one of the earliest structured angelologies in Jewish literature and stands behind a great deal of later Christian and Islamic tradition. Its logic is bureaucratic in the best sense: authority is defined by portfolio, and a being who leaves their portfolio has left their authority.
Remiel's office — 'over those who rise' — is quietly remarkable. It is an institutional assumption of resurrection, stated in passing as an administrative fact rather than argued as a doctrine, in a text older than most of the biblical material that discusses the subject.
Historical and Biblical Context
The seven-angel list is preserved with small variations across the Ethiopic and Greek manuscript traditions; some witnesses list six names, and the spelling of Saraqael and Remiel varies considerably.
Four of these names — Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel — become the standard archangelic core in later Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition, though the fuller list of seven never fully stabilises.
'Tartarus' in Uriel's title is a Greek term imported into the Greek transmission of 1 Enoch; its appearance is one of the clearer signs of the text's circulation in a Hellenistic environment. The same word appears in 2 Peter 2:4 for the place where sinning angels are held.
Key Ideas
Angels have portfolios.
Each name corresponds to an assigned domain, not a general job description — authority here is jurisdictional.
Judgment and mercy are distributed.
Raphael tends human spirits while Raguel enforces vengeance; the same system contains both without contradiction.
Remiel and the resurrection.
The chapter assigns an angel to those who rise from the dead — an early, matter-of-fact reference to resurrection.
The list is a counter-list.
Set against the roster of fallen Watchers in Chapter 6, it names the angels who kept the stations the others left.
Questions Raised by the Chapter
Why 'seven'?
Seven recurs across Enoch — mountains, stars, archangels — and across Ancient Near Eastern cosmology generally as a marker of completeness.
Are these the same seven Christians later called archangels?
There is substantial overlap — Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel — but the exact list varies by tradition, and Raguel, Saraqael and Remiel do not survive in most later canons.
What does 'over chaos' mean for Michael?
The phrase is obscure in every manuscript family. It pairs Michael's care for humanity with authority over the unformed or disordered, but the text offers no further explanation.