The Angel of Death is a good angel

by David Grand
April 7, 2005

In watching a documentary on the History channel of the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz, a complex of concentration and death camps run by Nazi Germany during  World War 11 (in which more than 1.5 million people were killed through gassing, starvation, sickness and torture), I was curious as to why Dr. Josef Mengele was known as the "Angel of Death," in view of the the cruel and deadly, medical experiments he performed mostly on twins and dwarfs.      

To me, that's a misnomer. For I'd always believed that was not an evil angel but a good angel, who hovers over the dying and who accompanies their souls to Heaven. So as to see if my assumption was right or wrong, I did a little research and found it had an interesting origin.      

In Muslim and Islam theology, the Archangel Azrael (one of the four archangels of Islam) is the Angel of Death, who is "forever writing in a large book and forever erasing what he writes; and what he writes is the birth of man, and what he erases is the name of the man at death." (I'm sure that wasn't intended to mean that the feminine gender was excluded from his record-keeping, or that he was a sexiest.) Other faiths name the Angel of Death as a different angel:

• In Judeo- Christian lore, Michael, Gabriel, Sammael and Sariel are all named as the angel of death.
• In the ancient city of Babylon in Babylonia, it's Mot.
• In Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion founded in the sixth century B.C., it's Mairya.
• In Falasha lore, a variety of Judaism practiced by people of highland Ethiopia, it's Suriel.
• In Jewish lore, that angel is Rahab, who was destroyed by God for refusing to part the waters of the Red Sea; and was replaced by Yama (Malach ha-Mavet), the good angel of death.
• In the traditional celestial hierarchy, angels and archangels (the chief angels) are at the top of the pecking order. Gabriel, an archangel of high eminence in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition, is the heavenly messenger who appears to deliver God's will, and who will blow the trumpet to announce the second coming (the first time around in the Jewish religion).      

Now, I don't doubt that angels exist. Although I sometimes wonder why it is, that if God could invent angels, why he'd bother to invent man? I'll have to ask him that, if by some miracle I'm able to slip through the Pearly Gates while Saint Peter is asleep or taking a break.      

However, I've never doubted that I have a guardian angel watching over me, especially when I was in perilous situations; such as, in combat in Korea, in being aboard a plane that had to make a forced landing when one of its two engines conked out, in falling head over heels off a work horse I was riding bareback at a friend's farm when I was a kid and only breaking my arm, and in escaping by inches from being pinned under, or crushed, when my rider mower flipped over on a hill a few years ago.       

But I was thinking as I was writing this column, that perhaps that guardian angel may have grown weary of protecting me from myself and has passed the baton on to my long-lost, cousin Sister Pasqual, who I spoke of in my last column. For each time I call her, she always says how I'm constantly in her prayers, as is my son in Iraq. With her interceding with God on our behalf, we're in safe hands.      

So, I salute all angels for the good they do. And I pay special tribute to the Angel of Death, who's the busiest of 'em, and, who without concern for rank or privilege, attends, for example, to the dying of 10 million children (40,000 daily) younger than five each year throughout the world from diseases and malnutrition, and to each child dying every 53 minutes in this country due to poverty. He, or she, must be jet propelled. Now, I think I'll have a piece of angel food cake, and angel hair spaghetti tonight.