Who is Gadreel in the Bible?

Who is Gadreel in the Bible?

The name “Gadreel” is not found in the Bible. It comes from another highly influential ancient text called the Book of Enoch. In that book, Gadreel is listed as one of the mighty angelic beings called “Watchers,” many of whom fell and became rebel angels. Gadreel is listed as the angelic being who taught humans how to make and use cosmetics and weapons of war, which led to the violence and destruction that prompted the Flood of Noah. Even though the Book of Enoch is not part of the canonical scriptures, it still influenced both the ancient Israelites’ and the early Church’s understanding of spiritual beings.

Is Gadreel a real angel?

The answer to this question depends on what kinds of writings you find authoritative. If you only care about what the Bible says, then because Gadreel isn’t listed in the Bible you may not be inclined to believe that he is or was a real being. But it’s important to understand the influence and value of so-called “extra-biblical” writings like the Book of Enoch or the Book of Jubilees. While the early Christians didn’t include them in their canon of scripture, that didn’t mean that they thought that these works were untrue or worthless—or that they didn’t find them authoritative. The Book of Enoch in particular exercised a great deal of influence on the early Church, and was seen as authoritative by the writers of the New Testament, who frequently referenced passages and ideas from it. The early Church fathers, who were massively influential in defining the core elements of Christianity (such as the Trinity), likewise saw Enoch as influential and authoritative to a real degree, including Sts. Justin the Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus, as well as influential teachers like Origen and Tertullian. So, if you find the views of the early Church fathers and the authors of the New Testament to be compelling, then yes, Gadreel was probably a real fallen angel.

But if the authors of the New Testament and the early Church fathers viewed the Book of Enoch as authoritative, why didn’t the early Church include Enoch in the canon of scripture? The answer is a little more complicated than you might expect. In our modern world, we tend to think about truth in a binary way: something is either true or false. But ancient people didn’t think this way. They tended to think in terms of degrees of truth and degrees of authority. The early Christians even thought of the different parts of the Bible as having different levels of authority: they believed that the Gospels had more authority than the other parts of the New Testament, that the New Testament had more authority than the Old Testament, that certain parts of the Old Testament had more authority than others, and so on. In the same way, there were many ancient texts that early Christians saw as authoritative, but that had a different kind of authority than the texts which they ultimately decided should be the canon of scripture—what you might call the “standard” for the truth of other texts. To better understand how they thought about these things, you can check out our other articles on how to read the Bible and the Book of Enoch.

Is Gadreel good or bad?

If we take the Enochian narrative as generally true, then Gadreel is not a good angel. The short version of the Book of Enoch is that God placed a group of angelic powers called “the Watchers” in charge of the various nations of the world, but instead of watching over and taking care of the humans, these “lesser gods” became consumed by their desire for earthly things and ended up becoming “fallen gods”—the same concept as fallen angels.

According to the author of Enoch, these angelic beings were mainly ensnared by the beauty of human women. They found human women so beautiful that they lusted after them and desired to take human wives for themselves. After they did so, their wives gave birth to horrible, half-human beings called the “Nephilim,” often called “giants” in English translations of the Old Testament. But the angelic beings also taught their wives and sons hidden, angelic knowledge that was almost always used for evil. This knowledge included everything from cosmetics to the art of “root cutting” for making poison. Gadreel in particular is said to have taught humans the use of weapons.

Who are the seven fallen angels?

There have been a variety of lists and numberings of angels over the centuries. How such lists are organized and grouped depends on who you ask. Medieval thinkers were especially fond of creating tidy lists and parallels according to symbolic systems of numbering. For example, there are early lists of vices going back to the fourth century, which often featured eight or even nine vices, but by the medieval period the standard list of vices had been edited to focus on “seven deadly sins,” in large part because seven is a symbolic number for something complete. Naturally, there was a parallel list of seven heavenly virtues, and a “prince of hell” was additionally assigned to each of the seven deadly sins. There’s also a tradition that lists the seven archangels, which were often associated with the seven virtues, and so on. But the further back you go in Christian history, the less tidy these things become. For the Book of Enoch, where Gadreel’s name is (likely) first mentioned, he appears in an extensive list of fallen Watchers.

Pop culture is especially fond of skimming these sorts of sources, taking the names of angelic beings, and spinning vague hints about them into elaborate tales that have little to do with a Christian or ancient understanding of religion. Shows like Supernatural, the Good Place, and Hazbin Hotel present modern, secular fiction of these entities rather than anything real. As a result, the internet is littered with fandom wiki entries rife with “details” about characters that are, ultimately, just the imaginative creations of popular culture.

Such articles are very misleading. This one, for example, has a section called “history” with a subsection called “Genesis,” which may lead you to believe that it was taken from the Biblical book Genesis. In fact, this section includes characters and events—like Lilith or the gates of Eden—that aren’t in Genesis at all! These stories perpetuate so many misunderstandings of ancient religious ideas. Most curious to me is that almost all of these pop-culture versions paint the fallen angels in a sympathetic light—exactly the way the Watchers tried to portray themselves to human beings after they fell. As Justin Martyr explains, they pretended to be the gods or founders of true religions, disguising the fact that they fell from grace because of their vices.