How much of the roles and characters of archangels in UNSONG is based off biblical or talmudic canon?

You know how no two Jews ever agree on anything? This goes double for agreeing on how many archangels there are. The two most popular schemes are one with seven archangels (probably corresponding to the seven classical planets?) and one with ten archangels (probably corresponding to the ten sephirot).

I use a pretty classic version of the ten archangel hierarchy which I think derives from the Zohar but whose completed version Wikipedia associates with the Golden Dawn. These include Metatron, canonically the Voice of God (although he’s more verbal in canon than in Unsong) Raziel (who both in canon and Unsong is a master kabbalist who knows divine secrets), and various others who don’t show up that much in either source.



I made two changes to the OGD system. First, I replace Tzaphkiel with Sataniel, both because an angelology that includes both a Tzaphkiel and a Tzadkiel is an angelology that everybody is going to misremember, and because of Satan’s “star power” in the Christianized West. Second, I replace Sandalphon with Uriel, for a bunch of complicated reasons that I don’t want to reveal entirely right now because I’m hoping against hope that readers will eventually figure them out.



But here’s a free one - the idea of Uriel as obsessed with celestial machinery comes to me from the Book of Enoch via the mediocre pseudoscience book Uriel’s Machine.

