ARIEL (Heb. 'Āri'ēl). - A biblical Hebrew term which, because of its double etymology (from 'āri' "lion" and from 'ārah' "to burn"), means now "lion of God" and now "hearth of God," expressing different symbolisms.
1. A personal name ("lion of God"): one of the 10 (or 11) leaders sent to Casiphia to invite the Levites and the Nethinim to the service of the Temple (Eid. 8, 16); the seventh son of Gad (Num. 26, 17, according to the Septuagint and the Vulgate), whose true form of the name is 'Ar'ēl (Gen. 46, 16).
2. In a metaphorical-hyperbolic sense, still in use today among Arabs and Persians, 'āri'ēl or "lion of God" designates a most valiant warrior (cf. the Egyptian 'ar'ar, "hero"):
Benaiah "slew the two 'āri'ēl of Moab" (II Sam. 23, 20; I Chron. 11, 22, Masoretic text). But the Septuagint, followed by R. Kittel (Die Hl. Schrift des A. Test., by E. Kautzsch, I, 4th ed., Tübingen 1922, p. 490) and by many moderns, reads: "the two sons of A. of Moab": A. would be the name of a Moabite. The Vulgate translates "percussit duos leones Moab"; A. Klostermann and K. Budde obtain the same sense, accepting the Septuagint text and separating 'āri' from 'ēl: "the two young lions in Moab."
3. The altar of holocausts is called in Ex. 43, 15 ff. 'āri'ēl "hearth of God," because on it burns the perpetual fire that consumes the victims (Lev. 6, 12 ff.). Already in the 9th century B.C. the Moabite king Mesha (stele, line 12) says he took Ataroth from Israel "carrying off from it the 'ar'ēl ("altar") of Dōd (David?). Ezekiel (loc. cit.), with a solemn paronomasia, also calls the same altar har'ēl ("mountain of God"). The Assyrian arallu, which designates the underworld, has often been compared with it (especially by H. Gressmann).
4. Jerusalem is called symbolically A. five times in the menacing oracle - the first outline of an apocalyptic description - of Is. 29, 1-7, in the most probable sense of "hearth of God," to which verse 6 § seems to allude. The city is regarded as "the altar of God," and verse 2 predicts, on the eve of Sennacherib's invasion, that it "will be like a.," that is, will drip blood like the altar of holocausts during the sacrifices. "Jahweh has his fire in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem" (Is. 31, 9; cf. 30, 33).
5. Most today understand the enigmatic 'er'ēllām of Is. 33, 7 as a plural of 'āri'ēl in the sense of "hero" (see above, 2): "their heroes (or: the heroes) will cry out"; this seems to be required by the parallelism with mal'ākē falām. But the ancient versions translate it as a verb (from rā'āh, "to see"; Vulgate: "videntes").
6. On the basis of this passage, the rabbinic tradition, which understands mal'ākīm ("messengers") in the sense of angels (Vulgate: "angeli pacis"), has made the 'ar'ēlim ("the mighty") the 5th of its 10 angelic categories (M. Maimonides, Foundations of the Law, II; D. Petavius, De Angelis, II, 1, 14). In later popular belief and in the Cabala, A. is a spirit (generally an evil one) of water and air. He appears as a beneficent spirit in Shakespeare's Tempest and in Goethe's Faust, where he corresponds to the Swedish ström-kalr, a demonization of the submerged musical tremor, originally connected with water.
Bibliography6 works
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