Guardian Angel. A guardian angel is an angel that is assigned to protect and guide a particular person, group, kingdom, or country. Belief in guardian angels can be traced throughout all antiquity. The concept of angels that guard over particular people and nationalities played a common role in Ancient Judaism, while a theory of tutelary angels and their hierarchy was extensively developed in Christianity in the 5th century by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The theology of angels and tutelary spirits has undergone many refinements since the 5th century. Belief in both the East and the West is that guardian angels serve to protect whichever person God assigns them to, and present prayer to God on that person's behalf. The guardian angel concept is present in the books of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, and its development is well marked. These books described God's angels as his ministers who carried out his behests, and who were at times given special commissions, regarding men and mundane affairs. In Genesis 18-19, angels not only acted as the executors of God's wrath against the cities of the plain, but they delivered Lot from danger; in Exodus 32:34, God said to Moses: my angel shall go before thee. At a much later period, we have the story of Tobias, which might serve for a commentary on the words of Psalm 91:11: For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. The belief that angels can be guides and intercessors for men can be found in Job 33:23-6, and in Daniel 10:13 angels seem to be assigned to certain countries. In this latter case, the prince of the kingdom of Persia contends with Gabriel. The same verse mentions Michael, one of the chief princes. In Rabbinic literature, the Rabbis expressed the notion that there are indeed guardian angels appointed by God to watch over people. Rashi on Daniel 10:7Our Sages of blessed memory said that although a person does not see something of which he is terrified, his guardian angel, who is in heaven, does see it; therefore, he becomes terrified. Lailah is an angel of the night in charge of conception and pregnancy. Lailah serves as a guardian angel throughout a person's life and at death, leads the soul into the afterlife. According to Rabbi Leo Trepp, in late Judaism, the belief developed that, the people have a heavenly representative, a guardian angel. Every human being has a guardian angel. Previously the term Malakh, angel, simply meant messenger of God. Chabad believes that people might indeed have guardian angels. For Chabad, God watches over people and makes decisions directly with their prayers and it is in this context that the guardian angels are sent back and forth as emissaries to aid in this task. Thus, they are not prayed to directly, but the angels are part of the workings of how the prayer and response comes about. In the view of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: The nature of the angel is to be, to a degree, as its name in Hebrew signifies, a messenger, to constitute a permanent contact between our world of action and the higher worlds. An angel's missions go in two directions: it may serve as an emissary of God downward and it may also serve as the one carries things upwards from below. The angel cannot reveal its true form to man, whose being, senses and instruments of perception belong only to the world of action, it continues to belong to a different dimension even when apprehended in one form or another. The angel who is sent to us from another world does not always have a significance or impact beyond the normal laws of physical nature. Indeed it often happens that the angel precisely reveals itself in nature, in the ordinary common-sense world of causality. In the New Testament the concept of guardian angel may be noted. Angels are everywhere the intermediaries between God and man; and Christ set a seal upon the Old Testament teaching: See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. Other examples in the New Testament are the angel who succoured Christ in the garden, and the angel who delivered St. Peter from prison. In Acts 12:12-15, after Peter had been escorted out of prison by an angel, he went to the home of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark. The servant girl, Rhoda, recognized his voice and ran back to tell the group that Peter was there.