Haniel is a Hebrew biblical name meaning 'grace of God' or 'God is gracious.'
Haniel is a name of ancient Hebrew origin, constructed from the elements hana (grace, favor) and El (God), yielding the meaning 'grace of God' or 'God has favored me.' It belongs to the same linguistic family as Hannah, Johanna, and John — names built on the root h-n-n that have persisted across three millennia of Abrahamic religious culture. The name appears in the Hebrew Bible in the genealogies of the tribe of Manasseh (Numbers 34:23) as a minor leader, lending it quiet scriptural legitimacy.
In Jewish mystical tradition, Haniel (also spelled Anael or Aniel in other traditions) is identified as one of the seven archangels in certain angelological texts, associated with the planet Venus and governing love, harmony, and the beauty of the natural world. This angelic dimension gave the name a luminous, celestial quality that appealed to Kabbalistic thinkers and later to esoteric Christian traditions in medieval Europe. Today Haniel is experiencing a modest but genuine revival, particularly among Jewish families seeking names that feel both rooted and relatively undiscovered.
It has a melodic, three-syllable cadence — HAH-nee-el — that sits comfortably in modern ears without sounding invented. In Hebrew-speaking Israel, it functions as a given name for boys, while in diaspora communities it occasionally crosses gender lines, perhaps pulled by its phonetic similarity to the feminine Hannah.