The Angels under Reserve in 2 Peter and Jude

In both 2 Peter and Jude, the reader encounters the rebellious angels, a paradigm of hard-heartedness that appears frequently in Jewish tradition. In both epistles, OT characters and events (and exegetical traditions extending from them) are paraenetic rather than didactic in nature. That is, they are illustrative and serve as moral types to warn the reader. In their function the rebellious angels constitute an important weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of both writers. Despite similarities in their appearance, they function in slightly different ways in the two epistles, suggesting a literary-rhetorical strategy that is unique to each writer.