GABRIEL (⅛H¾ i.e., man of God, Taβpvηk) is the name of the heavenly messenger (see Angel) who was sent to Daniel to explain the vision of the ram and the he-goat, and to communicate the prediction of the Seventy Weeks (Dan. viii. 16; ix. 21). He was also employed to announce the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah, and that of the Messiah to the Virgin Mary (Luke i. 19, 26). Both Jewish and Christian writers generally speak of him as an archangel—a habit which is readily accounted for when Luke i. 19 is compared with Rev. viii. 2, and also with Tobit xii. 15. In the apocryphal Book of Enoch (c. ix.) he is spoken of as one of “the four great archangels,” Michael, Uriel, and Suri el or Raphael being the other three. His name frequently occurs in the Jewish literature of the later pυst-Biblical period. Thus, according to the Chaldee paraphrase of Pseudo-Jonathan, the man who showed the way to Joseph (Gen. xxxvii. 15) was no other than Gabriel in human form; and in Deut, xxxiv. 6 it is affirmed that he, along with Michael, Uriel, Jophiel, Jephephiah, and the Metatron, buried the body of Moses. In the Targum on 2 Chr. xxxii. 21 he is named as the angel who destroyed the host of Sennacherib; and in similar writings of a still later period he is spoken of as the spirit who presides overfire, thunder, the ripening of the fruits of the earth, and similar processes. In the Koran great prominence is given to his function aβ the medium of diviue revelation, and, according to tho Mahometan interpreters, he it is who is referred to by the appellations “Holy Spirit” and “Spirit of Truth.” He is specially commemorated in the calendars of the Greek, Coptic, and Armenian churches.
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