Danel

Danel enters the story inside an enumeration. The Book of the Watchers, the oldest part of the Book of Enoch, tells that two hundred angels came down to earth, and in 1 Enoch 6:7 it gives the names of their leaders: «Samîazâz, their leader, Arâkîba, Râmêêl, Kôkabîêl, Tâmîêl, Râmîêl, Dânêl, Êzêqêêl, Barâqîjâl, Asâêl, Armârôs, Batârêl, Anânêl, Zaqîêl, Samsâpêêl, Satarêl, Tûrêl, Jômjâêl, Sariêl», adding in the next verse: «these are their chiefs of tens». Danel is the seventh on that list, and that position is very nearly all the text grants him. R. H. Charles himself, who fixed the English translation still in use, noted that the enumeration is incomplete: a name has been lost after Tûrêl, so the nineteen one reads should be twenty. The name explains itself. Dan-el is made of the Semitic root «to judge» and the divine element ’el, and means «El judges» or «God is my judge»: it is the same workshop that produces Kôkabîêl («star of God»), Barâqîjâl («lightning of God») or Zaqîêl, and not a sign that this angel held any magistracy. Much later, in the part of the book called the Parables, another list of angelic names appears, and there he stands, seventh again, as Dânjâl. Charles lines up the two spellings in the same cell of his comparative table: it is the same being, written by two different hands.

The most quoted part of the Book of the Watchers is the sharing out of forbidden knowledge: each chief teaches men something they had no business knowing. In 1 Enoch 8:3 the text lists them one by one: «Semjâzâ taught enchantments and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Êzêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon». Danel is not there. He does not appear in that verse, nor in the rest of the chapter: the eighth of 1 Enoch does not mention him even once. It is worth saying so plainly, because the opposite circulates. Encyclopaedias and popular pages credit him with «the signs of the sun», which in Charles's translation belong to Shamsiêl; others give him astrology, which is Barâqîjâl's, or the course of the moon, which is Sariêl's. The attribution exists because the manuscripts of 1 Enoch do not agree among themselves and some variant shares the knowledge out differently, but what one reads in the text Charles established is what has just been quoted, and there Danel teaches nothing. The consequence is a being awkward for an encyclopaedia and honest for the reader: there are Watchers with a biography (Azazel, who teaches the forging of weapons and the painting of eyelids; Semyaza, who proposes the pact) and there are Watchers who are only a name and a post. Danel is one of the latter. Everything else told about him comes from other Danels.

That the text gives him no deed of his own does not mean he has no story: he has it entire, only in the plural. Everything 1 Enoch tells of the two hundred belongs to him by membership. The opening scene is of a tremendous simplicity: the angels see that the daughters of men are fair and say to one another that they should take wives and beget children. Semyaza, who is the chief, fears something very concrete and says it aloud: that the others will draw back and he alone will be answerable for the great sin. The solution they find is a mutual oath. «And they were in all two hundred, who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it», says 1 Enoch 6:6. Danel swears there, with the rest, and from that moment his fate is no longer his own. Neither does his rank single him out: the nineteen names on the list are «chiefs of tens», that is, middle officers commanding ten of the two hundred. It is not a hierarchy of magical power but of organisation, and its most honest reading is also the most uncomfortable: the fall of the Watchers is told in the text as an operation with officers, not as a rebellion of titans. Danel is one of those officers. Whatever happens next (the women, the giants, the sentence) will happen to him exactly as to the other hundred and ninety-nine.

Almost everything told over and above about this Watcher comes from other characters who bear his name, and they are worth separating one by one. The first is the Danel of Ugarit, protagonist of the Epic of Aqhat, on tablets of the fourteenth century BC: a man who asks the gods for a son, obtains him, and loses him when the goddess Anat has him killed over a bow. Of him the tablets say that he sits at the gate, beneath a tree, «judging the cause of the widow, adjudicating the case of the fatherless», and his name too means «El judges». The second is the Daniel whom Ezekiel names twice beside Noah and Job as a model of righteousness, and a third time to the prince of Tyre: «behold, thou art wiser than Daniel». Most scholars identify that Daniel of Ezekiel with the Ugaritic one rather than with the hero of the Book of Daniel, though the identification has been disputed. The third is a human Danel who appears in the Book of Jubilees as Enoch's uncle and father-in-law. And the fourth is this one, the Watcher. What matters is what is missing: no ancient source and no study relates the Watcher to the king of Ugarit, nor to Ezekiel's judge, nor to Enoch's father-in-law. The coincidence is explained without mystery, for «El judges» was among the commonest names in Northwest Semitic. When an entry credits this angel with the judicial wisdom of Ugarit or the righteousness Ezekiel praises, it is not summarising a tradition: it is stitching four different gentlemen into one.