Suggest an Edit — Gabriel

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Biography

Short Description

Gabriel is an archangel in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His Hebrew name, Gavri'el, is ordinarily understood as “God is my strength” or “man of God.” He is not a human being and therefore has no documented earthly birth, death, or burial; Christian and Jewish theology treat angels as created spiritual persons. In the Hebrew Bible he appears in the Book of Daniel. In Daniel 8 he is named as the one who is to make Daniel understand the vision of the ram and the goat; in Daniel 9 he comes to Daniel during the evening offering and delivers the prophecy of the seventy weeks. These passages present him as a heavenly interpreter of revelation rather than as a warrior. Later Jewish literature, including strands of the Talmud and apocalyptic writings, ranks him among the principal angels, often alongside Michael, though the precise functions assigned to him (judgment, fire, the left side of the divine presence, and the like) vary by source and period and should not be treated as a single uniform doctrine.

In the New Testament the Gospel of Luke gives Gabriel the two announcements that most shaped his Christian cult. He appears to the priest Zechariah in the Temple to foretell the birth of John the Baptist and, when Zechariah doubts, leaves him unable to speak until the child’s naming. According to the same Gospel he is later sent to Nazareth to Mary and announces that she will conceive Jesus by the Holy Spirit—the Annunciation. Those Lucan scenes established him in Christian piety as the angel of the Incarnation and of glad tidings. Patristic and medieval writers counted him among the archangels (commonly seven in Eastern lists; in later Western usage the three named archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael). Mainstream Christian teaching holds that angels neither marry nor are given in marriage and have no offspring; nothing in the canonical narratives attributes a spouse or children to Gabriel.

Liturgical calendars commemorate him on several dates rather than on a birthday. In the Roman Rite a distinct feast of Gabriel was long kept on 18 March (with a brief transfer to 24 March in the seventeenth century) and, after the 1969 reform of the General Roman Calendar, on 29 September together with Michael and Raphael. Eastern Orthodox churches keep a Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel on 26 March (the day after the Annunciation) and on 13 July, and include him in the Synaxis of the Archangels on 8 November. Because his scriptural role is to carry divine messages, he has been invoked as patron of messengers, postal workers, telecommunications and broadcasting, diplomats and ambassadors, and related trades; Portugal is among the places associated with his patronage. In art he is usually a youthful winged figure with a lily, sceptre, globe, or scroll, most often in Annunciation compositions opposite Mary.

In Islam he is identified with Jibrīl, the angel who, according to Muslim belief, conveyed the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad and who is described in the Qur’an as a trustworthy spirit and messenger; Islamic tradition also links him to earlier revelations given to other prophets. Across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, therefore, Gabriel remains a figure of announcement and interpretation known from scripture and from later liturgical, exegetical, and artistic reception. He has no human biography in the ordinary historical sense, was not canonized or beatified as a former mortal, and held no earthly ecclesiastical office such as pope or patriarch.

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