(Arʹi·el) [Altar Hearth of God; or, Lion of God].

1. A Moabite whose two sons were killed by Benaiah.​—2Sa 23:20; 1Ch 11:22.

2. One of the nine head ones especially used by Ezra in obtaining qualified “ministers for the house of our God.” This was in the spring of 468 B.C.E. when about 1,500 Israelite males under Ezra were about to depart from the river Ahava for Jerusalem.​—Ezr 8:15-17, 31.

3. A cryptic name applied to Jerusalem in Isaiah 29:1, 2, 7. Jerusalem was the location of God’s temple that had within its precincts the sacrificial altar. Because of this the city was, in effect, God’s altar hearth. It was also supposed to be the center of Jehovah’s pure worship. However, the message in Isaiah 29:1-4 is ominous in content and predicts the destruction due to come to Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 607 B.C.E., when she would become an “altar hearth” in a different sense: as a city running with shed blood and consumed by fire and filled with the bodies of victims of the fiery destruction. The underlying causes for this calamity are stated in verses 9 to 16. Isaiah 29:7, 8, however, shows that the nations wreaking such destruction on Jerusalem would fail in their ultimate purpose or goal.