Seraphim

The year King Uzziah died, Isaiah went into the temple and the building came apart around him. The pivots of the doorposts shook. Smoke filled the hall until the far end of it was gone. Above the throne, where the hem of a robe was still spilling out across the floor and covering everything, there were things in the air with six wings each, and they were shouting at one another.

Two of those wings were for flying. The other four were for hiding. Each seraph held one pair across its face and one pair across its feet, which means two thirds of the equipment on a creature built for the presence of God is given over to not being seen and not seeing. The Hebrew word rendered as feet does polite duty elsewhere in the language as a substitute for the genitals, so the modesty may run deeper than the translation lets on. Either way the arithmetic is the point. They are close enough to the throne to need the cover.

What they were shouting has outlived everything else in the chapter. Holy, holy, holy, YHWH of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. They called it back and forth to each other rather than down at the prophet, an antiphon with no audience in mind, and the thresholds moved at the sound of it. Isaiah’s response was not awe. It was panic about his mouth. A man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips, and he had just seen the King.

Then one of them left formation. It flew to him carrying a live coal lifted off the altar with a pair of tongs, touched the coal to his mouth, and told him his guilt had departed and his sin was wiped out. A being whose name means burning still would not pick the ember up barehanded. Avigdor Hurowitz set that moment beside the Mesopotamian mis pi, the mouth washing performed on a person or a cult image so that it could stand in front of the gods, and the parallel holds: the fire here is not punishment, it is clearance. Isaiah speaks next, and volunteers.

That is the whole appearance. Six verses, and the seraphim never come back.

The name is where the strangeness starts. Śārāp̄ means the burning one, and as a noun it turns up seven times in the Hebrew Bible, most of them describing snakes. In Numbers, the seraphim that come at the Israelites in the wilderness are venomous serpents and nothing else. Deuteronomy files them alongside the scorpions as one of the hazards of the desert road. Isaiah himself, in two later oracles, writes of the flying seraph, a serpent on the wing, among the creatures that come out of the southern waste. Only in chapter six does the word attach to something standing beside God.

The likeliest bridge between the snake and the throne attendant runs through Egypt. Royal Egyptian iconography is full of the winged uraeus, the rearing cobra of the goddess Wadjet, who says of herself in the Book of the Dead that she is the Lady of the Devouring Flame and that few approach her. Pharaohs wore her on the crown and were carved standing beneath her outspread wings, and the image travelled. Judean personal seals of the eighth century BCE carry four winged uraei, and King Hezekiah used the winged serpent on his own seals until he surrendered to Sennacherib in 701 BCE, after which it disappeared from the official Judahite repertoire. Isaiah worked in that court. Richard Lederman reads the six wings as an escalation of a shape everyone in the room would have recognised, two better than the four on the seals. Hugh Williamson takes the seraphim as a hybrid, the serpent name from the rest of the Hebrew Bible crossed with the form and function of the temple cherubim. Menahem Haran proposed the colossal cherub statues in the sanctuary as the visual prompt, though Isaiah was not standing in the inner room where those stood, and his seraphim move independently while the statues do not. There is also Nehushtan, the bronze serpent credited to Moses, venerated in Jerusalem and smashed by Hezekiah, which may well have been in the building.

Nobody can prove any of it. What can be said is that the text gives them wings, a voice loud enough to move stone, hands sufficient to work a pair of tongs, and faces and feet worth covering, and then stops. No colour, no scale, no body. The silence is not an oversight. A creature that keeps its face behind its own wings is a creature the vision has deliberately declined to describe.

Later writers had no such restraint. The Enochic literature stations seraphim, cherubim and ophanim around the throne of glory together as the ones who do not sleep. Revelation gives its four living creatures six wings apiece and the same threefold cry, fusing Isaiah’s burning ones with Ezekiel’s wheeled beasts into one composite that Christian art has been painting ever since. The cry itself became liturgy twice over, as the Kedushah in the synagogue and the Sanctus in the Mass. Around the year 500 the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite built the whole angelic civil service, nine orders in three ranks, and put the seraphim at the top of it, immediately about God. He glosses the name from Hebrew authorities as those who kindle or make hot, calls them the Glowing Ones, and gives them a restless wheeling heat whose function is to fire everything below them to their own temperature and burn off the dark.

The most famous seraph in the West is not in scripture at all. In September 1224, on Mount La Verna, Francis of Assisi was keeping a forty day fast in honour of Michael when, by Bonaventure’s account, a seraph came down out of the sky on six flaming wings with the figure of a crucified man between them. When it left, Francis carried the wounds. Whatever happened on that mountain, the shape that arrived to deliver it was Isaiah’s.

Their powers are all one power, differently applied. Proximity is the whole of it: they stand where nothing else stands, and the heat that follows from standing there can shake a building, sanctify a syllable, or unmake a sin by touching it. Their limits are the same fact seen from the other side. They cannot look. They do not act until there is something to be done, and the one that flies to Isaiah announces the pardon rather than granting it. Not one of them is ever named, given a history, or singled out from the rest. They are a rank rather than a cast of characters, and the record keeps them that way on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the seraphim?

The seraphim are the six-winged beings who attend the throne of God in Isaiah’s temple vision, and their name means “the burning ones” in Hebrew. They call out God’s holiness to one another, and one of them purifies the prophet’s mouth with a coal taken from the altar. In later Christian angelology they became the highest of the nine orders of angels.

Why do seraphim have six wings?

In Isaiah’s vision each seraph uses two wings to fly, two to cover its face, and two to cover its feet, so only one pair is for movement. The covering is usually read as a response to standing in the immediate presence of God. Some scholars also see the number as a deliberate escalation of the four-winged serpents that appear on eighth century BCE Judean seals.

Are seraphim serpents?

The Hebrew word saraph almost always means a venomous snake elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, including the serpents of the wilderness in Numbers and the “flying seraph” of Isaiah’s later oracles. Several scholars therefore connect Isaiah’s throne attendants to the winged uraeus cobra of Egyptian royal art, an image King Hezekiah used on his own seals. Isaiah 6 itself never calls them snakes, so the serpent identification is an argument from the word and the iconography rather than from the text.

Where do seraphim appear in the Bible?

Seraphim appear as heavenly beings in only one passage, Isaiah 6, which runs to a handful of verses and never returns to them. The same word appears elsewhere for desert serpents in Numbers, Deuteronomy and two later chapters of Isaiah. The six-winged creatures crying “Holy, holy, holy” in Revelation 4 are a later fusion of Isaiah’s seraphim with Ezekiel’s four living creatures.

Why are seraphim the highest order of angels?

The ranking comes from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who around the year 500 arranged the angels into nine orders in three ranks and placed the seraphim first, immediately around God. He read their name as meaning those who kindle or make hot, and assigned them a purifying fire that spreads downward through the rest of the hierarchy. Isaiah 6 itself gives no hierarchy at all.

Related Entries

Cherubim, Angels, Guardian angel, Gabriel, Grigori, Nephilim, Moses, Leviathan, Azazel, Satan, Lucifer, Israfil, Wadjet, Amphiptere