▪ Jeffery1938: »Always as the Angel of Revelation, and by name only in Madinan passages. (There is possibly a reference to his name [Hbr]
Gaḇrîʔēl ‘mighty one of God’, in liii, 5, ‘one mighty in power’.) / There was considerable uncertainty among the early authorities as to the spelling of the name, for we find
Ǧibrīlᵘ,
Ǧabraʔīlᵘ,
Ǧabrāʔilᵘ,
Ǧabrayīlᵘ,
Ǧabrāʔīlᵘ,
Ǧabraʔillᵘ,
Ǧabrīlᵘ,
Ǧabrāllᵘ, and even
Ǧabrīnᵘ and
Ǧibrīnᵘ.
1
as-Suyūṭī,
Muzhir, i, 140, notes that these variants point to its non-Arabic origin,
2
and this was admitted by some of the philologers, cf. Ṭab. on ii, 91; al-Ǧawālīqī, 144, and al-Khafājī, 60. / The ultimate origin, of course, is the Hbr
Gaḇrīʔēl, and in Dan. viii, 16; ix, 21, Gabriel is one of the high angels and the agent of Revelation, just as he is in the Qurʔān. There is, however, the possibility that the Gabriel of the Qurʔān is of Christian rather than Jewish origin, and the form
Gbrylʔ which is found in the Christian Palestinian dialect,
3
gives us the closest approximation to the usual Arabic form. / There is some question how well the name was known in Arabia before Muḥammad’s time. Gabriel was known and honoured among the Mandaeans,
4
and this may have been a pre-Islamic element in their faith. The name occurs also in verses of poets contemporary with Islam, but seems there to have been influenced by Qurʔānic usage. Cheikho,
Naṣrāniyya, 235, gives an instance of a personal name containing the word, but Horovitz,
KU, 107, rightly insists on the incorrectness of this.
5
Muḥammad seems to have been able to assume in his Madinan audience some familiarity with the name, and the probabilities are that it came to him in its Syr form.«
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