Gabriel

The cave on Hira is a slot in bare volcanic rock, high enough above Mecca that the town below is a scatter of pale roofs and the wind never stops. Muhammad had been going up there to sit alone for nights at a stretch. Then, in the account his wife Aisha gave and Bukhari placed at the head of his collection, something came into the cave and told him to read. He said he could not. It seized him and squeezed him until he could not bear it, released him, and told him again. Three times. Then it gave him the words about the Lord who created, who created man from a clot, and he went down the mountain with his heart slamming and told Khadija to cover him.

He did not know at first what he had met. Khadija’s cousin Waraqa, an old blind Christian who copied out the gospel in Hebrew letters, told them: this is the same one who was sent to Moses.

That identification is the whole shape of Gabriel. He is the being who arrives at the moment a message has to cross from God to a person, and he has been doing it, in three traditions and across roughly two thousand two hundred years of text, without ever once turning up on his own business.

He enters the record in the Book of Daniel, standing by the Ulai canal while Daniel struggles with a vision of a ram and a goat. A voice tells him to make the man understand. Gabriel comes near, Daniel falls on his face in terror, and the angel sets him on his feet and explains. It is a small scene and an odd one, because nothing in it is grand. He is there to do a job of interpretation, and he does it, and the text moves on. Daniel calls him only a man, and later “the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly.”

The rabbis filled that outline in with fire. Michael is snow and Gabriel is fire, they said, and yet it is the prince of fire who is sent to pull Abraham out of Nimrod’s furnace. Michael crosses to earth in one flight; Gabriel needs two. He is set over the serpents, over paradise and over the cherubim. He stands at God’s left, Michael at the right, and when the three visitors come to Abraham’s tent, Michael walks in the middle with Gabriel on his right hand. The Talmud puts him at half the disasters and half the rescues in the Hebrew Bible: he slays Sennacherib’s army, he destroys Sodom and pulls Lot clear, he restores the tokens that prove Tamar’s innocence, he teaches Joseph the seventy languages, he strikes down the servants who try to talk Pharaoh’s daughter out of lifting Moses from the river. He takes fire from a cherub’s hand and throws it on the Temple. Girded like a smith at his bench, he shows Moses how the lampstand is to be made, because the description alone was not enough.

There is a wonderfully domestic image of him arguing with Michael over which stone the prophet Isaiah meant by *kadkod*, the two of them going at it like a Shammaite and a Hillelite. And there is a hard line running under all of it, laid down flat in the Jerusalem Talmud: pray not to Michael nor to Gabriel, but to Me, and I will answer at once. He is a functionary, and Judaism was careful to keep him one.

Luke gives him the two scenes that made him famous in the West. He appears to the priest Zechariah at the incense altar and promises him a son; Zechariah asks how he can be sure, and Gabriel answers with the only thing close to a boast anywhere in his record, that he is Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and then strikes the man dumb until the child is born. Six months later he goes to Nazareth and tells a young woman she will bear a son and call him Jesus. Almost every Annunciation painted in Europe is a version of that half-minute.

In the Qur’an he is named only three times, at 2:97, 2:98 and 66:4, and the commentators find him in several other places under titles rather than a name: the Holy Spirit, the Trustworthy Spirit, the one terrible in power, the noble messenger. Tabari, Zamakhshari and Baydawi hand him a long career in the stories of the prophets. He gathers the clays that Adam is made from. He takes pity on Adam and Eve after the expulsion and brings them a small sack of wheat, teaches them to sow it, gives Adam an ox to plough with, and shows him how to strike fire out of stone and iron. He catches Abraham in mid-air above Nimrod’s fire. He stops Pharaoh’s mouth with a fistful of sea mud so the man cannot say the words that might save him, and admits later that he did it because he was afraid God would relent. For Muhammad he is a constant presence: he and Mikal open the Prophet’s chest before the Night Journey, he guides him up through the heavens, and he comes to Badr with a great number of angels.

He never speaks for himself.

Descriptions of him refuse to settle. Aisha said the Prophet saw him twice in the shape he was made in; Ibn Mas’ud reported six hundred wings. Other times he came looking exactly like Dihya al-Kalbi, a companion so handsome that Umm Salama mistook the angel for the man. The popular picture across the Muslim world is plainer still, an ordinary turbaned figure in two green garments, mounted. The Talmud’s Gabriel wears linen. No source anywhere makes him female; the soft androgynous Gabriel of the galleries is a European painter’s decision, not a text’s.

His powers all follow from the one function. He can explain what a prophet cannot understand, because he was there when it was decided. He can burn, because he is fire. He can carry a city into the sky by one wing and drop it, and he can stand a mountain over the heads of a nation until they agree to the Law. What he cannot do is initiate. Every act on the list is done under orders, and in the Jewish ranking he sits below Michael, who was given the guardianship of Israel while Gabriel was given the errands.

The trumpet is not his. It is not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, which never assign the last blast to any named angel, and in Islam the trumpeter is Israfil. Gabriel got the horn from English poetry, hymnody and the spirituals, and it stuck so hard that most people now assume it is scripture. The Catholic feast worked in the opposite direction and kept moving: he entered the Roman calendar in 1921 on 24 March, the eve of the Annunciation, and was folded into the 29 September feast with Michael and Raphael in 1969. In 1951 Pius XII made him patron of telecommunications, which is the single most literal-minded thing the Church has ever done with an angel.

The strangest object attached to him surfaced without an excavation. The Gabriel Stone, also called Hazon Gabriel, is a grey limestone slab carrying eighty-seven lines of Hebrew written in ink rather than carved, dated to around the turn of the era and said to have come from the eastern shore of the Dead Sea about the year 2000. It is a first-person apocalypse, and partway down the angel names himself. Israel Knohl read line 80 as an instruction to a slain messiah to live again in three days, which would put a dying-and-rising figure in Jewish text before the gospels. Ada Yardeni and Binyamin Elizur read the damaged word as “sign” instead, which drains most of the drama out of it. The stone has no findspot and no chain of custody, so the argument is being conducted over an object nobody can place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the angel Gabriel?

Gabriel is the messenger angel of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the one sent when something has to be explained or announced to a human being. He first appears by name in the Book of Daniel, interpreting Daniel’s visions. Christians know him from the Annunciation to Mary, and Muslims know him as Jibril, the angel who brought down the Qur’an.

What does the name Gabriel mean?

The Hebrew Gavri’el is usually read as “God is my strength” or “might of God,” from a root meaning strength or manhood. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia glosses the Greek form as “man of God.” Arabic tradition takes it differently: the commentator Baydawi explains Jibril as “servant of God.”

Is Gabriel the angel with the trumpet?

No. Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament assigns the trumpet at the end of the world to any named angel, and in Islamic tradition the trumpeter is Israfil, not Jibril. Gabriel’s horn is an English-language convention that grew out of poetry, hymns and the spirituals, and it has no scriptural basis.

What does Gabriel look like?

The sources do not agree. Daniel says only that he had the appearance of a man and flew swiftly, while the Talmud makes him fire to Michael’s snow and dresses him in linen. A hadith reported from Ibn Mas’ud gives him six hundred wings, yet other reports have him arrive looking exactly like Dihya al-Kalbi, an ordinary and famously handsome companion of Muhammad.

What is Gabriel’s role in Islam?

Jibril is the angel of revelation, who brought the Qur’an to Muhammad beginning with the command to recite in the cave of Hira. He is named directly three times in the Qur’an, at 2:97, 2:98 and 66:4, and commentators identify him with several unnamed titles such as the Holy Spirit and the Trustworthy Spirit. He also purified the Prophet’s heart before the Night Journey and guided him through the heavens.

Related Entries

Angels, Guardian angel, Holy Spirit, Irin, Grigori, Allah, Yahweh, Mary, Jesus, Adam, Noah, Moses, Burak, Satan, Nephilim