A civil judgement is a non-criminal legal matter and in most of the scenarios requires the defendant to pay for the damages incurred. It gives me considerable pause, for example, to note that my alma mater, West Point, honors Robert E. Lee with a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks, the last of which was built during the 1960s. A portrait of Lee with an enslaved person adorns a wall of the cadet library, the counterpoint to a portrait of Grant, his Civil War nemesis, on a nearby wall. And it is God himself who passes over the houses of the enslaved Israelites and decides who lives and who dies, not the angel. Burge notes that in the Hadith, the angel of death knocks and asks Muhammad’s permission before he enters, a sign of ultimate respect for the Prophet. In Islam, the angel of death, Malak al-Mawt, receives a list of souls to take each year and does so according to God’s command, respecting the Prophet Muhammad’s consent. When Malak al-Mawt comes for Moses, for example, he slaps the angel so hard that one of his eyes pops out.

That’s why the angel in the Exodus Passover story isn’t given a name, but rather a role – the destroyer. In the popular retelling of the Passover story, the “destroyer” is often called the “angel of death,” but the words “angel of death” don’t actually appear anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament or the Islamic Quran. The Grim Reaper is a more recent version of the angel of death, born in the Middle Ages as a personification of the Black Death. In Islam, the angel of death, known as Malak al-Mawt, strictly follows God’s orders and is responsible for harvesting souls based on predetermined fixed dates of death. Once a year, in the month before Ramadan, God hands Malak al-Mawt a list of all those who will die in the coming year, and it’s Malak al-Mawt’s responsibility to harvest their souls. Moving people and equipment around the world for a month requires precise planning and a small army of people to pull it off.

Bertram van Munster, who starts planning out each Race edition three months ahead of time. Still, Reed emphasizes, Mastema is not working against God to counter his divine will, but to be the “bad guy” who carries it out. In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts, the angel of death is a figure that carries out God’s will, often unnamed but sometimes called Malak al-Mawt in Islam. After God fixes the angel’s eye, Malak al-Mawt goes back and strikes a deal with Moses that if he goes peacefully, he’ll be buried within a “stone’s throw” of the Holy Land. 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. And it’s Mastema, we learn in Jubilees, who was the “destroyer” of the Passover story.

For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. Given Soviet losses, there was rough numerical parity between the two armies. 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 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. In a world where you may feel that what you do has little impact on anyone else, becoming a soldier gives you a chance to make a difference. Knock out the names of premiere World War II artillery in one sizable scroll of your digital display!