A Sephirotic Archangel

In this collection Tzadkiel appears as the archangel assigned to Chesed, one of the ten sephiroth (emanations) of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. The practice of assigning an archangel to each sephirah, together with a divine name and an angelic choir, was developed in Jewish Kabbalah and was taken up and systematised by Christian Kabbalists and, in its now-standard English form, by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Tzadkiel governs Chesed in that scheme. Several of the names recur elsewhere in this collection under the planetary and elemental systems, a sign of the three overlapping traditions that Western esotericism inherited and never fully harmonised. The scheme is presented as a documented esoteric tradition rather than as religious doctrine or as a claim about angelic beings.

Tzadkiel's name, "righteousness of God," and his attachment to Chesed, the sephirah of mercy, follow the same naming logic as Tzaphkiel's at Binah; some later, non-canonical devotional and occult sources identify an angel of this name with the figure who stayed Abraham's hand at the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, though the biblical text itself names no angel there at all, and other traditions assign that unnamed role to Michael or leave it unattributed entirely. The attribution to Tzadkiel specifically is a late and disputed one, not a reading the Genesis text supports on its own.