ARIEL (Heb. 'āri'ēl). — A biblical Hebrew term which, owing to its dual etymology (from 'āri' “lion” and from 'ārah' “to burn”), means at times “lion of God” and at times “hearth of God,” expressing different symbolisms.
1. Personal name (“lion of God”): one of the 10 (or 11) leaders sent to Casphia to invite the Levites and the Nethinim to serve in 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 among Arabs and Persians, 'āri'ēl or “lion of God” denotes a most valiant warrior (cf. the Egyptian 'ar'ar, “hero”):
Benaiah “slew the two 'āri'ēl of Moab” (II Sam. 23, 20; I Par. 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 modern scholars, 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 arrive at the same meaning by accepting the Septuagint text and separating 'āri' from 'ēl: “the two young lions in Moab.”
3. The altar of burnt offerings is called in Ex. 43, 15 ff. 'āri'ēl, “hearth of God,” because the perpetual fire burns there, consuming the victims (Lev. 6, 12 ff.). As early as the 9th century B.C., the Moabite king Mesha (stele, line 12) says that he took Ataroth from Israel, “removing from it the 'ar'ēl (“altar”) of Dōd (David?). Ezekiel (loc. cit.), with solemn paronomasia, also calls the same altar har'ēl (“mountain of God”). It has often been compared (especially by H. Gressmann) with the Assyrian arallu, which designates the underworld.
4. Jerusalem is symbolically called A. five times in the threatening oracle—which is the first outline of an apocalyptic description—of Is. 29, 1-7, most probably in the sense of “hearth of God,” to which verse 6 § seems to allude. The city is regarded as “the altar of God,” and verse 2 foretells, on the eve of Sennacherib’s invasion, that “it shall be as a.,” that is, it will drip with blood like the altar of burnt offerings during sacrifices. “Jahweh has his fire in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem” (Is. 31, 9; cf. 30, 33).
5. Most scholars today understand the enigmatic 'er'ēllām of Is. 33, 7 as the plural of 'āri'ēl in the sense of “hero” (v. SORA, 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”), made the 'ar'ēlim (“the mighty ones”) the 5th of its 10 categories of angels (M. Maimonides, Fondamenti della Legge, II; D. Petavio, De Angelis, II, 1, 14). In later popular belief and in the Kabbalah, A. is a spirit (generally an evil one) of water and air. He appears as a benevolent spirit in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in Goethe’s Faust, where he corresponds to the Swedish ström-kalr, the demonization of the submerged musical vibration, originally associated with water.