The Development of the Archangel Gabriel in Jewish Lore

As the scholar Joseph Dan has pointed out, the Hebrew Bible has many names for God, but no proper names for angels—with the exception of the book of Daniel, likely its least ancient part. In one of his visions, Daniel reports seeing an angelic figure he identifies as Gabriel. Gabriel the archangel plays a greater role in the apocryphal book of Enoch, and is known to Christians from the first chapter of Luke, and to Muslims as Allah’s messenger to Mohammad. But Jews too developed their own lore about this supernatural being, as Chen Malul writes:

In talmudic and midrashic literature, Gabriel usually appears as Michael’s companion: both archangels are charged with the safekeeping of the Jewish people. If Michael typically appears in the form of water and snow, Gabriel—described by Daniel as having “a face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches”— appears as a fiery flame. Sometimes the descriptions are reversed.

Perhaps because of his connection to fire and lightning, Gabriel is occasionally portrayed as a “harsh” or “hard” angel, whom God charges with punishing sinners and inflicting on them various calamities. In Genesis Rabbah [a midrashic compilation from the 4th or 5th century CE], he is revealed as the destroyer of the sinful city of Sodom, and in the Babylonian Talmud as the smiter of the camp of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. But . . . he is also the one who saves Abraham from the fiery furnace [into which, according to rabbinic lore, he was thrown by the wicked King Nimrod] and ensures the ripening of fruits in time to feed the hungry.

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More about: Angels, Daniel, Hebrew Bible, Judaism, Midrash

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF