The Development of the Archangel Gabriel in Jewish Lore

Feb. 18 2021

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

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics