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Bernard J. Bamberger. Fallen Angels: Soldiers of Satan's Realm. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006.
Originally published in 1952, the Jewish publication society has re-released Bernard J. Bamberger's, Fallen Angels: Soldiers of Satan's Realm. Bamberger's text is an exceptionally well-researched and well-written introduction to the history of the idea of fallen angels within Judaism and Christianity, with a brief sojourn into Islam. What is most interesting about this book, however, is not necessarily the subject matter, but rather, the fact that Bamberger uses the differing conceptions of fallen angels within Judaism and Christianity in order to offer a critique of the dialectical and post-liberal Christian theology prevalent at the time of the book's original conception and publication.
Bamberger divides his text into nine major parts with thirty smaller chapters, which address the idea of fallen angels in a roughly chronological order from the Hebrew Bible to contemporary Christian theology. In the first part of the book, Bamberger begins by positing that the belief in fallen angels arose within Judaism as a means of explaining the existence of evil in the world, which was largely the result of the Jewish borrowing of Canaanite-Phoenician, as well as Babylonian, Persian, and Greek materials (6-7). Bamberger subsequently examines the most common biblical passages that are cited as evidence for the existence of fallen angels. Such passages include the Nefilim/Nephilim of Genesis 6, the supposed fall of Satan in Isaiah 14, the sin of the fallen angels in Psalm 82, the serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan in Genesis 3, and the existence of national angels in Daniel 10 and 12 as well as Isaiah 24 (8-12). Bamberger concludes that while these passages contain some of the materials from which the myth of fallen angels was later constructed, that these passages themselves do not actually speak of fallen angels, but are rather, figurative allusions to very corporeal forms of evil in the world. In Bamberger's own words, "The Hebrew Bible does not know an organized realm...