What are seraphim?

What Isaiah saw

Seraphim appear in a single scene of the Bible. About 740 BC, “in the year that King Uzziah died,” Isaiah has a vision in the Temple in Jerusalem: the Lord on a high throne, the train of his robe filling the sanctuary, and above him these creatures.

Above him stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two he covered his face. With two he covered his feet. With two he flew.

They call to one another, “Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh of Armies! The whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3), and the thresholds shake. Then one of them flies to Isaiah with a live coal from the altar and touches his lips, the prelude to his famous answer (what “Here I am, send me” means). Notice what the text gives them: faces, feet, a hand, voices. It never calls them angels, and the Hebrew Bible never mentions them again.

Why six wings?

Isaiah does not explain, so readers have. The usual reading: even beings this close to God shield their faces from his glory and cover their feet in humility, while the last pair keeps them ready to fly at his word. Some scholars add that “feet” can be a discreet Hebrew word for the lower body, which would make the gesture one of modesty too. Either way it is a picture of awe: creatures of fire hiding themselves before the one they serve.

“Burning ones” and fiery serpents

Seraph comes from the Hebrew verb saraph, “to burn.” Seraphim is already the Hebrew plural, so the King James Version’s “seraphims” doubles it. The surprise is where else the word turns up. When snakes bite the Israelites in the wilderness, the Hebrew calls them seraphim, translated “venomous snakes” (Numbers 21:6), and God tells Moses:

Make a venomous snake, and set it on a pole. It shall happen that everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.

The Hebrew behind “venomous snake” there is saraph. Isaiah himself twice mentions a “fiery flying serpent” (Isaiah 14:29; 30:6). And Moses’ bronze serpent was still receiving incense in Isaiah’s lifetime, until King Hezekiah broke it in pieces (2 Kings 18:4). Seals from Judah in that period show winged serpents, and Egyptian kings wore the uraeus, a rearing cobra, on their crowns. That is why many scholars think Isaiah pictured the seraphim as fiery winged serpents. Others imagine blazing figures closer to human, since they have faces, feet and hands.

Seraphim and cherubim

People often mix them up with cherubim, who are all over the Bible. Cherubim guard the way back to Eden (Genesis 3:24), spread two wings each over the lid of the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25:20) and, in Ezekiel’s vision, have four faces and four wings (Ezekiel 10:21). The book of Revelation blends the two: its four living creatures have six wings, like seraphim, and sing their song.

The four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within. They have no rest day and night, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come!”

Seraphim in prayer and tradition

Their words never left worship. Jews say them in daily prayer in the Kedushah, kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, and Christians sing them in the Sanctus of the Mass. Reginald Heber’s hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826) pictures “cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee.” Around AD 500 the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius ranked the angels in nine choirs and put the seraphim at the top, nearest to God, an order medieval theologians kept. In 1224, on Mount La Verna, Francis of Assisi saw a six-winged seraph in a vision and, his biographers say, received the wounds of Christ. Franciscans still call him the Seraphic Father.