Uriel, in the Jewish and Christian Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, a leading angel, sometimes ranked as an archangel with Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Because his name in Hebrew means “fire of God” or “light of God,” he has been variously identified in Jewish traditions as an angel of thunder and earthquake, as the wielder of the fiery sword in driving Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as the destroyer of the hosts of Sennacherib, as the figure who enlightens Ezra with visions, and, generally, as an angel of terror, prophecy, or mystery. The English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost described Uriel as “Regent of the Sun” and the “sharpest sighted spirit of all in Heaven.” In his poem “Uriel,” the American Transcendentalist essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson portrayed the archangel as a symbolic and mythical advocate of his own theory of poetics.