Where Do Angels Appear in the Book of Isaiah, and What Do They Do?

Which Isaiah verses mention angels, and which only seem to?

Isaiah runs to 66 chapters, yet angels or angel-like beings enter only a handful of verses, and two of the best-known turn out to be a king (14:12) and a snake (14:29; 30:6).

Two more verses gained angels from later interpreters. Rashi reports a rabbinic reading in which the "watchmen" set on Jerusalem's walls in Isaiah 62:6 are angels who remind God to rebuild the city. The er'elim of Isaiah 33:7 are people weeping over a failed peace, yet the word became the name of an angelic rank, and Maimonides lists the erelim third of his ten ranks of angels (Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2:7).

Isaiah never gives an angel a personal name. There is no Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael in the book; Gabriel and Michael arrive in the book of Daniel (chapters 8 to 12). Raphael appears in the Book of Tobit, which Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include and Jewish and most Protestant Bibles do not.

Why do the seraphim say "Holy, holy, holy"?

Hebrew repeats a word to strengthen it, and saying it three times is the strongest form of that device. "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (6:3) calls God's holiness complete and says his glory reaches past the temple into the whole earth.

Jeremiah uses the same threefold pattern for other purposes ("the temple of the LORD" in 7:4, "O land, land, land" in 22:29), while Isaiah turns it into praise that Jewish and Christian worship both took up.

In Judaism the verse is the center of the Kedushah, the sanctification said during the leader's repetition of the Amidah at every service except the evening one. The Kedushah pairs Isaiah 6:3 with a line from Ezekiel's chariot vision, "Blessed is the glory of the LORD from His place" (Ezekiel 3:12). It is said only with a minyan of ten, and many worshippers rise slightly onto their toes three times at "Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh," a custom the Jewish Virtual Library explains as imitating the angels' movement.

Christian use is almost as old as the church. Clement of Rome quoted Isaiah 6:3 around 96 CE and described believers crying it out together (1 Clement 34:6-7), and book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions has the people singing it at the eucharist.

The Latin text turned Isaiah's third person into direct address, "Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua," "heaven and earth are full of your glory." The Benedictus, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" from Matthew 21:9, was joined to it.

Readers often call Isaiah 6:3 the Trisagion. Adrian Fortescue, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, pointed out that the name belongs to a different Eastern hymn, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal," and that Byzantine liturgy calls the Isaiah text the Epinikion.

The New Testament repeats the scene in Revelation 4:8, where four living creatures, each with six wings, sing "Holy, holy, holy" day and night. Their six wings come from Isaiah's seraphs, and their faces come from Ezekiel's creatures.

Why does a seraph touch Isaiah's lips with a live coal?

Because lips are what Isaiah confessed. He calls himself "a man of unclean lips" in 6:5, and the seraph answers that exact confession by touching his mouth with a live coal: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out" (6:7). Only after the coal does Isaiah hear the question of 6:8 and volunteer, so the cleansing prepares a prophet to speak.

The coal comes from the altar, lifted "with a pair of tongs" (6:6), and the Hebrew says the seraph held it in its hand. Faces, feet, hands, and voices give the seraphs bodies in this scene, which matters for the debate over their name.

Isaiah does not say which altar. Albert Barnes took it to be the altar of burnt offering, where the fire was kept burning, while Keil and Delitzsch read it as the heavenly counterpart of the incense altar, which fits the smoke of 6:4.

Other prophets receive their words through the mouth in different ways. The LORD "touched my mouth" with his own hand for Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:9), Ezekiel is made to eat a scroll (Ezekiel 3:1-3), and in Daniel 10:16 "one in human form" touches Daniel's lips so that he can speak. Isaiah's is the only one of these touches that takes away guilt.

Eastern Christians hear the verse again at communion. In the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom the priest, after drinking from the chalice, says, "This has touched my lips, taking away my transgressions and cleansing my sins," applying the seraph's words to the eucharist.

Who struck down the 185,000 Assyrians in Isaiah 37?

The text names him plainly: "Then the angel of the LORD set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies" (Isaiah 37:36).

The Hebrew is malak YHWH, the title of the angel of the LORD who speaks to Hagar (Genesis 16:7) and to Gideon (Judges 6:11). Here the figure acts without a word and is never seen.

Rabbinic tradition filled that silence. In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 95b) one rabbi has God ask Gabriel, "Is your scythe honed?", and others argue over whether the soldiers were struck by hand, had the angel blow into their nostrils, or were made to hear the song of the heavenly creatures and died. Rabbi Abbahu shrinks the scale, explaining the 185,000 as regiment leaders.

The story appears three times. 2 Kings 19:35 matches Isaiah almost word for word and adds "that very night," while 2 Chronicles 32:21 says the angel "cut off all the mighty warriors and commanders and officers" and gives no number.

Isaiah 36 to 39 repeats the Hezekiah chapters of 2 Kings 18 to 20. The Assyrian envoy has mocked Judah's God, and Hezekiah has spread the Assyrian letter before the LORD and prayed to the God "enthroned above the cherubim" (37:16). Isaiah answers that the king "shall not come into this city" (37:33). After the night of the angel, Sennacherib goes home to Nineveh, where two of his sons kill him while he worships (37:37-38).

Outside the Bible, Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BCE is well recorded, and the other ancient sources agree that Jerusalem survived while disagreeing about why.

Readers therefore meet three positions: a direct act of the angel, a plague described in theological language, or a remembered rescue whose details grew with retelling. In each version the city the Assyrian king mocked is spared, as Isaiah said it would be.

Is "the angel of his presence" in Isaiah 63:9 an angel or God himself?

That depends on which text you read: the Hebrew Masoretic text says "the angel of his presence saved them," while the Greek Septuagint says it was "not an ambassador, nor a messenger, but himself."

Two short Hebrew words cause the split. The written lo means "not," but the Masoretes marked it to be read aloud as lo, "to him"; and the letters tsr can be voiced tsar, "distress," or tsir, "envoy."

Read one way, the verse says God shared Israel's distress and his angel saved them. Read with tsir and the negative, as the Greek translators did, it says no envoy or angel saved them, but God in person.

The phrase looks back to the exodus: in Exodus 23:20-21 God sends an angel ahead of Israel, and in Exodus 33:14 he promises, "My presence will go with you."

Later writers turned the angel into a figure of his own. The Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE retelling of Genesis and Exodus, has an "angel of the presence" write out Israel's history for Moses (Jubilees 1:27).

Matthew Henry, in his early eighteenth-century commentary, read the angel of his presence as "Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, that angel of whom God spoke to Moses," as Christian interpreters have done with other angel of the LORD passages. The Greek reading points the other way, stressing that God saved Israel without any go-between, and modern Bibles still divide along that line.