The angel Gabriel is our newest profile, courtesy of editor Hans Holznagel.
One surprising revelation: Gabriel had no trumpet.
Though Gabriel is commonly pictured blowing a horn, it turns out the Bible (and the Qu’ran — he’s mentioned in both) make no mention of him with a trumpet or an instrument of any kind.
That makes Gabriel a cousin to crazy Roman emperor Nero, who everyone knows played a fiddle while Rome burned… except that fiddles weren’t invented until 1500 years later. (The historian Suetonius did say that Nero watched the fire from a nearby tower while singing a song about the destruction of Troy, which is probably where the story started.)
There can’t be much else that Nero has in common with the angels. Dude did kill his own mother, after all, and possibly his father Claudius as well.
Trumpet or no, Gabriel sounds a wee bit closer to heaven.