Trivia: Jacob’s Lucky he Didn’t Have to Wrestle any of These Angels

So, after yesterday’s trivia about the angel Gabriel, I got curious about the expanded angelic lore of Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology. I’ve skimmed through it a couple of times before and even that experience led to some weird discoveries. This time however, I stumbled across somethings that made my jaw drop several times.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the generic description of supernatural beings so tall that their head (or heads in Typhon’s case) reached the heavens. Well, not only are several angels that tall (Israfil), but some angels are even taller and are given exact heights. Doing some basic calculating and guess-timating I’ve converted the older forms of measure to modern ones. This is gonna be a little longer than my other trivia posts. Let’s get to it!

First up is Af and Hemah, the angels of Anger and Wrath respectively. They are described in The Ascension of Moses as each being five hundred parasangs tall. Now, while parasangs were a relative measurement, like leagues, five hundred of them equals roughly 1,864 MILES! Now that’s pretty tall, but they aren’t the tallest.

Hadraniel, who guards the second gate to heaven, is over “sixty myriads of parasangs” tall. In our measurements, that’s 2.1 MILLION miles in height. For comparison, our Sun is roughly 2.8 million miles in circumference. That means that this angel can basically hug the Sun (though he wouldn’t be able to reach all the way around).

But wait! There’s more! Samael and Sandalphon are both angels described as being so huge that it would take five hundred years to walk from the bottom of either angel’s foot to the top of their head. The farthest distance any human has ever traveled on foot in a day is 175 km. With some rudimentary math, traveling that far each day for five hundred years equals a distance of 20 MILLION MILES. That’s roughly ten times as tall as our Hadraniel, who I remind you could hug the Sun!

Yet even they are apparently smaller than the most powerful angel of all. Metatron (yes that is seriously his name) is an angel who is so powerful he is second only to God himself, in fact he is sometimes called the lesser Yahweh. The name Metatron might also be the name of a position that holy men like Enoch might ascend to, but that is a discussion for another time. He is apparently able to change his height from that of a man to that taller than any angel in heaven. However, no exact height is given for his maximum size, so it might be anywhere from a few miles taller than Sandalphon and Samael to the size of our entire solar system.

Anyway, I suggest you do some research on angels yourself cause these guys can be pretty freaky. Of course their physical forms are nothing compared to the disturbing jumble of limbs some demons take on as physical forms, but luckily demons can’t get big enough to swallow the Sun. *Dramatic zoom* Or can they!?

Till next time. Keep it Reel!