Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ According to Jeffrey1938 ultimately from Hbr Gaḇrīʔēl, »name of one of the high angels and the agent of Revelation, just as he is in the Qurʔān«, prob. via (ChrPal Syr) Aram Gaḇrīlā.
▪ The underlying Hbr words – Hbr geḇer ‘strong one, man’, and Hbr ʔēl ‘god’ – are of course etymologically related to Ar ↗¹ǧabr and Ar ăḷḷāh (↗ʔLH).
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hist

▪ eC7 Q ii, 91, 92; lxvi, 4.
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cogn

▪ ↗¹ǧabr
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disc

▪ 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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1. Vide al-Ǧawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 50, and Bayḍ. and Zam. on ii, 91. 2. See also Ibn Qutaybaẗ, ʔAdab al-Kātib, 78. 3. Schulthess, Lex, 34. 4. Brandt, Mandäer, 17, 25; Jidzharski, Johannesbuch, xxvi. It is interesting to note that Gabrāīl occurs in a Pers Manichaean fragment from Turfan; cf. F. Müller, SBAW, Berlin, 1904, 351, Salemann, Manichaeische Studien, i, 33. 5. Ṭulayḥa, one of Muḥammad’s rival Prophets, claimed support from Gabriel (Ṭab, Annales, i, 1890, Beladhorī, 96), but this may have been in imitation of Muḥammad, though the weight of evidence seems to point to his having come forward quite independently as a preacher of higher religion.

west

▪ Not from Ar ↗ǧabr, though ultimately from the same source is Engl Gabriel, from Hbr gaḇrîʔēl ‘my strong one (is) God’, from Hbr gabrî ‘my strong one’, from gabr‑, presuffixal form of geber ‘strong one, man’, from gābar ‘to be strong’ (for Hbr ʔēl ‘god’, cf. Ar ↗allāh, ʔLH) – Huehnergard2011.

deriv

For other values attached to the root, cf. ↗ǧabr, ↗ǧabbār, ↗ǧabara, ↗ǧābara, and ↗ǧibriyāʔᵘ, as well as, for the overall picture, root entry ↗√ǦBR.

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