I. Name

Gabriel appears in the Book of Daniel as the angel who explains the vision of the he-goat and the ram (8.16) and the prophecy of the seventy (weeks of) years (9.21). He is usually assumed to be also the revealing angel of Daniel. 10. In the New Testament, he is the angel of the Annunciation (Luke 1.19, Luke 26) and is identified with ‘the angel of the Lord’. The name is usually understood as ‘man of God’, but is better taken as ‘God is my hero/warrior’ (Fitzmyer 1981: 328, who argues from the analogy of th…