Chief of Ten

Of the thirteen chiefs of tens, his is the only name that reaches English in a single form — the rest arrive with two spellings or three. What does not arrive at all is any account of what he did after the descent.

Stands second among the leaders, immediately after Semjaza, and the text never returns to him. His name travels worse than any other Watcher's: Arâkîba where Charles translates the Ethiopic, Urakabarameel in the witnesses behind the Greek — barely recognisable as the same word.

Taught how to break enchantments — the counter-spell to Semjaza's spell, and the only Watcher whose art is purely defensive.

Batârêl in Charles, Batraal in the lists that reached English through Greek. Under either spelling he swears the oath on Hermon and does nothing further that the text records.

Three unrelated figures carry this name — a Ugaritic king, the biblical prophet, and this Watcher — and only the coincidence connects them. 1 Enoch records his oath and nothing he taught.

Meteorology is on the charge sheet. He taught men to read the clouds, and 1 Enoch files that beside metalwork and astrology as one of the crimes that brought the flood.

His entire biography as a Watcher is one act: binding himself by the oath on Hermon in 1 Enoch alongside the other chiefs. Yomiel is what the name becomes once the diacritics are dropped, and it is no better attested than the original.

Shares a name with Remiel, one of the holy archangels — a collision 1 Enoch keeps apart and later lists do not, which is how the same figure ends up filed on both sides of the rebellion.

Holds the sun's share of a three-way division of the sky, with Sariel on the moon and Kokabel on the stars. What 1 Enoch condemns is not what the signs foretold but that he explained them at all.

Only nine of the leaders named in 1 Enoch 6:7 are given a teaching in chapter 8, and he is not among the nine. He is recorded as Satarêl and as Sartael, and silent under both.

Later tradition made him a teacher of astronomy. 1 Enoch does not: it gives him an oath, a rank over ten of the two hundred, and no art at all. The astronomy is an inheritance from somewhere else.

No teaching, no punishment, no later appearance: of the Watchers named in 1 Enoch he is among the emptiest entries. He binds himself by the oath and leaves the narrative there — the fate of most of the twenty, and of none of the ones anybody remembers.

The two forms his name reaches English in, Zaqîêl and Sathiel, have almost nothing in common but the ending — the -el that marks him as one of God's, and that survives in these names long after everything else about them has been lost. Neither form is given a teaching.