Very few angels are named in the Hebrew Bible (known as the Old Testament in Christianity) or the New Testament. The angels Michael and Gabriel make appearances in the book of Daniel, and God sends the angel Gabriel to inform Mary that she will be the mother of Jesus. But the authors of the Bible took great pains to emphasize that God was the only one calling the shots, not angels. Indeed, in the Bible, there is no mention of an angel who ushers people from death to the afterlife.

The ancient world was full of polytheistic traditions that portrayed death as its own god with its own agency, explains Annette Yoshiko Reed, a religion professor at New York University and the author of “Demons, Angels and Writing in Ancient Judaism.” Mot, for example, was the death god of ancient Canaanites and Phoenicians, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead presents a vast pantheon of gods and fearsome creatures encountered in the afterlife.

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“In the Bible, though, the divine world is focused on a singular assertion of divine power, nothing akin to a polytheistic division of labor,” says Reed. “The same God who created the world masters both life and death.”

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That’s why the angel in the Exodus Passover story isn’t given a name, but rather a role — the destroyer. And it is God himself who passes over the houses of the enslaved Israelites and decides who lives and who dies, not the angel.

Reed says that in the third and second century B.C.E., there was a shift in ancient Jewish literature that gave angels distinct names and personalities, as well as roles. The book of “Jubilees,” written in the second century B.C.E., is one of those texts.

“Jubilees” starts out with Noah pleading to God to get rid of the demons that were roaming the Earth after the great flood and tormenting his family. A figure named Mastema, the “chief of the spirits,” stepped forward with a proposition that some of the demons remain with him to do his bidding. God agrees that a tenth of the spirits should do this while the rest descend into “the place of condemnation.”

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In “Jubilees,” Mastema is an angel — he’s called Prince Mastema — but God employs Mastema and his evil army to tempt and torture humankind, “to do all manner of wrong and sin, and all manner of transgression, to corrupt and destroy, and to shed blood upon the earth.”

Mastema is the one that comes up with the idea of testing Abraham’s faith by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. And it’s Mastema, we learn in Jubilees, who was the “destroyer” of the Passover story.

Still, Reed emphasizes, Mastema is not working against God to counter his divine will, but to be the “bad guy” who carries it out.

“Like Satan in the book of Job, Mastema has a divine role,” says Reed. “He’s part of the divine justice system.“

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