Angel names in Judeo-Christian angelology all mean something in Hebrew. Gabriel means “God is my might”; Michael means “who is like God?”; Uriel means “God is my light”; Raphael could mean either “God healed” or (as an imperative) “God, heal!” I’m not completely sure that Gaiman and Pratchett intended for the name Aziraphale to mean anything in particular in Hebrew, but because I’m obsessive, I wanted to figure something out. People who know more Hebrew than I do are welcome to make corrections or suggestions.
I think Neil Gaiman said in an interview at some point that the original spelling was Aziraphael, in keeping with the typical -el ending of angel names. If that’s the correct spelling, then the name might be a strange way of saying “God, my strength, healed” or “God, my strength, heal!” Or it might contain the name Raphael as a part, meaning “Raphael is my strength.” I don’t really buy the recent fanon proposal that Crowley was Raphael before his fall, because all the angel lore, including the Book of Tobit, has Raphael as an angel long after Lucifer’s rebellion would have taken place (in Paradise Lost, Raphael is the one who tells the story to Adam). But if we do go in for that bit of fanon, then we can imagine a scenario like the one at the beginning of this fic, in which our two heroes were in love in Heaven before the Fall and Aziraphael (who we assume ranked lower) had a different name to start with but took the name “Raphael is my strength.”
But there are other interesting translation possibilities if we take the current spelling to indicate that the name has 4 syllables rather than 5 (i.e., there’s no extra aleph between the pheh and the lamed). I’m not aware of a Hebrew root rap[h]al, so that means we’d need to break the name up into Azir - aphel or Azir(a) - phel. As noted in this wonderful post, in which someone wrote a letter from “Crawly” to Azirapil in Akkadian cuneiform (!!), the “Azir” part can be derived from a Hebrew root and mean “helper, one who helps.” That speculative translation continues:
The second element appears to be āpilu, literally “the one who answers,” but also used to mean “the one who dissents, the one who talks back.” Thus, together, the name would mean “the one who helps the dissenter.”
Which is very cool, but I wasn’t sure whether there was any Hebrew equivalent, so I went looking for the meaning of a Hebrew root ‘ap[h]al. The first thing I found was this article called “The Sin and Danger of Presumption,” which I immediately knew was a Christian thing because Christians get way more worked up about presumption than Jews do. Anyway, here’s the relevant bit:
apal - presume. (So ASV, RSV; NASB, “to be heedless.”) - This root, to which we may compare Arabic gafala “to be heedless, neglectful, inadvertent,” is found in only one OT passage, Num 14:44 (Hiphil), of Israel’s rash and reckless attack on the Amalekites and Canaanites, following her lack of faith and great rebellion. There are some authorities who suggest that the Pual of apal in Hab 2:4 may be from the same root, “to presume, be proud.”
Whoa this is getting super long. The rest is under a cut.
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