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