Samael

Also Known As: Hebrew סַמָּאֵל; also Sammael, Samiel and Sammuel, with Greek forms Sammane and Semiel; the first element read as *sami*, “blind,” which produced the medieval Spanish epithet Sar Suma, “the blind angel”; called simply Samekh Mem after Isaac Luria forbade saying the name aloud
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He prosecutes and he collects, and the accusations he files in heaven and the souls he is sent down to take are the same office worked from opposite ends.
Role in Mythos: He is the chief of the accusers and the head of the devils, guardian angel of Rome and of every nation except Israel, and from the thirteenth century onward the ruler of the sitra ahra with Lilith beside him.
Relation to Humans: He has no grip on Israel for all but one day of the year, when the goat driven into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement is understood as a bribe that buys his silence. Everywhere else he is the reason a deathbed has a visitor, and Jewish practice answered him with amulets, with renaming, and finally with refusing to pronounce his name at all.

The woman looked up from the fruit and saw him, and the old Aramaic paraphrase of Genesis says only that she was afraid. That is all of it. Eve beholds Sammael, the angel of death, she is frightened, and then she eats anyway. No face is described, no wings are counted, nothing is explained. Whoever slipped that line into the verse assumed his readers already knew who was standing under the tree, which says something about how settled the figure had become, and how little anyone thought he needed introducing.

The name never appears in the Hebrew Bible.

Its earliest surviving outing is a list. In the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, among the leaders of the angels who came down and rebelled, Samael is entered without ceremony and without any hint of the career ahead of him, one name among names. The Greek versions of the lost Hebrew original give him as Sammane and Semiel, and that second form preserves what the name was long taken to mean. Read the first syllable as *sami*, blind, and you have the blind one, or the god who cannot see. Irenaeus, writing against the Ophites, reports that they gave the serpent a double name, Michael and Samael. Gnostic writers took the same reading and ran with it, calling him the blind god and identifying him with Jaldabaoth, the botched maker of the world. A thousand years later, Spanish kabbalists were still calling him Sar Suma, the blind angel, without quite remembering why.

Other early sources make him the author of a specific disaster. In the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch it is the angel Sammuel who plants the vine that undoes Adam, and who is cursed for it and becomes Satan; in a later chapter of the same book he takes the shape of a snake to do the tempting himself. The version that stuck came from a late midrash, where he is a prince in heaven with twelve wings, six more than the seraphim have, standing above the holy creatures themselves, and where he leads the rebel armies. Cast down, he goes looking for an accomplice and finds the serpent, which was the most cunning thing God had made and which, in those days, had legs. It looked like a camel. He mounted it and rode.

That gave the rabbis an actor for a job they needed filled. Samael is the prosecutor. When Israel goes out of Egypt, Michael and Samael stand before the divine Presence, one to defend and one to accuse. He turns up on the road to the binding of Isaac to raise objections. Around 260 CE, Hama ben Hanina named him as the guardian angel of Esau, which makes him the wrestler at the ford who cannot beat Jacob and cannot break loose either, and in one telling Jacob later looks his brother in the face and says his countenance is the countenance of his angel. He is prince of Rome, and Rome, in that literature, means the empire that burned the Temple. The Hebrew Book of Enoch calls him prince of the accusers and greater than all the princes of the kingdoms on high, and puts him at a desk: he sits with Dubbiel, prince of Persia, and the two of them write down the sins of Israel on tablets, hour after hour, in the ordinary way of clerks.

The tradition does not entirely agree with itself about him. One midrash on the Red Sea has Samael prying the wheels off the Egyptian chariots, on Israel’s side for the length of a single verse, and notes that the numerical value of his name equals the Hebrew word for wheel.

His other office arrived through the Targum and never left. Samael is the angel of death, and by the time the storytellers reach the end of Moses he is Samael the wicked, the head of all the devils, waiting on the last hour with obvious impatience and asking when the end will come so he can go down and take the soul. He is sent. He arrives. Moses looks at him, and he runs. The soul is taken instead by God, with a kiss, and Michael weeps while the arrangements are made. The same body of legend gives Samael charge of all the nations and denies him any purchase on Israel except on the Day of Atonement, when the goat driven out to the wilderness with the year’s sins on it is read plainly as a bribe paid to keep him quiet. He is also said to have hidden inside the golden calf, which is the sort of detail that makes a fright out of a piece of jewellery.

The most famous thing about him is the most recent. In Castile, in the second half of the thirteenth century, Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen wrote a treatise on the left emanation, a text Gershom Scholem published in 1927, and there for the first time in any dated Jewish work Samael and Lilith are husband and wife. Nothing before that pairs them. Samael had no consort in the earlier sources and Lilith had no husband, and the join seems to have been made by an editor patching a hole in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, who needed a reason Lilith could not be returned to Adam and invented a Great Demon to have slept with her first. There was only one available name for a great demon. Rabbi Isaac took that piece of narrative gossip and built cosmology on it: Samael and the elder Lilith born together in one body, as Adam and Eve were, two pairs of twins, one above and one below, emanated from beneath the Throne of Glory. Asmodeus, king of the demons, ranks under him and is married to the younger Lilith, and is envied for her. The Zohar adopted the couple and mostly stopped using her name, writing simply of Samael and his spouse, rulers of the sitra ahra, the other side. In the Zohar the serpent has become Lilith’s own symbol, so that the rider and the ridden are now man and wife.

The kabbalists also gave him a face at last, and it is not a flattering one. He squints. He is dark. Later strata add horns, which may be borrowed from the Christian devil. Elsewhere in the same literature the writer throws up his hands: there is Samael and there is Samael, and they are not all the same. Astrologers assigned him Mars and the day Tuesday, the Sabians of Harran called him Mara Samia, and from there he passed into Christian magical handbooks, where the medieval reader had no idea he was handling a rabbinic prosecutor. In fifteenth-century Spain he headed a whole demonic administration with an assistant named Amon of No, and a legend grew up about the kabbalist Joseph della Reina, who tried to bind the pair and came off worst. Isaac Luria ended the naming altogether. After him, you said Samekh Mem, two letters, and moved on.

His powers all come from being seconded rather than sovereign. He accuses because he was given the brief; he takes souls because he is sent; he rules the nations because the nations were assigned to him. He flies through the air, and can wear a man’s shape well enough to be mistaken for him. What he cannot do is the interesting part. He is blind, and the tradition never lets him forget it. He does not know the road to the tree of life, though he crosses the sky above it. He can be bought off for a year by one goat and a rope. He ran from the face of an old man on a mountain. One long hair in his navel holds his whole reign upright, and the sound of the shofar at the end of days will bend it, and he will go down. When that day comes the older midrash has him handed over to Israel in iron shackles, blind and bound, to be looked at by the people he spent the world’s history writing up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Samael?

Samael is the chief of the accusing angels in Jewish tradition and, from the amoraic period onward, the principal name of Satan in Judaism. He acts as prosecutor in the heavenly court, serves as the angel of death, and is named as the guardian angel of Rome and of the nations. In later kabbalah he becomes the head of the demons and the ruler of the sitra ahra, the other side.

Is Samael the same as Satan?

Mostly yes, but not everywhere. From the amoraic period Samael is the major name for Satan in Jewish sources, and the Ascension of Isaiah uses Samael and Beliar interchangeably. The Hebrew Book of Enoch, however, treats them as two different beings, with Samael identified separately as the prince of Rome.

Why is Samael called the blind angel?

The first part of his name was read as the Hebrew *sami*, meaning blind, so the name itself was understood as “the blind one.” Gnostic writers used this reading to call him the blind god and to identify him with Jaldabaoth, and Spanish kabbalists of the thirteenth century still referred to him as Sar Suma, the blind angel. The tradition also says he does not know the path to the tree of life even though he flies through the air.

Is Samael the husband of Lilith?

In kabbalah, yes, but the pairing is medieval rather than ancient. Samael and Lilith are first described as husband and wife in a treatise on the left emanation by Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen of Castile in the second half of the thirteenth century, a text published by Gershom Scholem in 1927. No earlier Jewish source connects them. The Zohar took up the couple and made them the rulers of the sitra ahra.

What happened when Samael came for Moses?

Samael was sent to take Moses’ soul and could not do it. The legends at the end of Deuteronomy Rabbah have him waiting impatiently for the hour, then fleeing in terror when Moses looks at him, and the soul is finally taken by God with a kiss while Michael weeps. It is the clearest example of the angel of death being refused.