How many seraphim did Isaiah see?

Isaiah does not say. The plural "seraphs" and the phrase "one called to another" (6:3) require at least two, and Origen and Jerome both worked with a pair, but the text gives no count.

Do any seraphim have names in the Bible?

No. Isaiah names none of them, and neither Pseudo-Dionysius nor Aquinas names an angel who leads the seraphim.

What is the difference between a seraph and an archangel?

In the nine-choir order the seraphim rank first and the archangels eighth. Gregory the Great described archangels as those who "announce the highest things," while Aquinas held that the highest orders, the seraphim among them, are never sent on missions to people.

What Are Seraphim, and What Do They Do in Isaiah 6?

Seraphim are heavenly beings with six wings who stand above God's throne in Isaiah's temple vision (Isaiah 6:1-7). They call "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts" to one another, and one of them flies to Isaiah with a live coal from the altar and touches his lips to take away his guilt.

Isaiah 6 is the only chapter in the Bible where the word names heavenly beings. Their rank at the top of the nine Christian choirs, the reading of their name as burning love, and the seraph in St Francis's vision all come from later writers, while Maimonides' Jewish list of ten ranks places them fifth.

Quick Facts

Only biblical scene: Isaiah 6:1-7; the word appears in 6:2 and 6:6
Wings: Six each: two cover the face, two the feet, two for flying (Isaiah 6:2)
Name: Hebrew saraph, "to burn"; the same word means a snake in Numbers 21:6-8
Singular and plural: Seraph and seraphim; the King James Version prints "seraphims"
Christian rank: First of nine choirs (Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 6-7)
Jewish rank: Fifth of ten in Maimonides, Foundations of the Torah 2:7

What are seraphim, and why does only Isaiah name them?

Seraphim are the six-winged beings Isaiah sees attending the Lord's throne in the temple, in a vision he dates to "the year that King Uzziah died" (Isaiah 6:1). The NRSVUE says they "were in attendance above him," and the chapter gives them faces, feet, voices and wings, with one of them carrying a live coal from the altar in 6:6.

Isaiah uses the word twice, at 6:2 and 6:6, and never calls the seraphim angels. The Hebrew word for angel, mal'akh, means a messenger, and the Jewish Encyclopedia's 1906 entry on seraphim argued that they "have nothing whatever to do with the 'messengers of God.'"

Christian theology later counted them among the angels. Aquinas explains that every heavenly spirit can be called an angel because the name describes what all of them share, even though each choir has its own name (Summa Theologiae I, q.108, a.6).

Seraph is the singular and seraphim the Hebrew plural. The King James Version adds an English -s to the Hebrew ending and prints "seraphims" in both verses, which is why older Bibles give the word a double plural.

What does the word seraph mean, and why does it also name serpents?

Seraph comes from the Hebrew root saraph, "to burn," and outside Isaiah 6 the Bible uses it only for snakes. In Numbers 21:6 the Lord sends "poisonous serpents" among the Israelites (the KJV has "fiery serpents"), and in 21:8 Moses is told to make a saraph and set it on a pole. That bronze serpent is the one King Hezekiah later broke up as Nehushtan (2 Kings 18:4).

Deuteronomy 8:15 remembers the same desert snakes, and Isaiah's own book has winged ones: "a flying fiery serpent" in an oracle against the Philistines (14:29) and a flying serpent in the Negeb (30:6). Within Isaiah the word appears in chapters 6, 14 and 30, and every time the creature flies.

That pattern led Emil Hirsch and Immanuel Benzinger, writing the Jewish Encyclopedia entry, to judge it "possible, even probable" that Isaiah's seraphim began as winged serpents. They also noted that 1 Enoch names the seraphim beside the cherubim and, in its Greek text, calls them drakones, "serpents." R. H. Charles's translation of 1 Enoch 20:7 accordingly sets Gabriel "over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim."

The other reading takes the name as "burning ones" and pictures fire rather than scales, because Isaiah's seraphim have faces, feet and speech. Pseudo-Dionysius, around 500 CE, reported that "those who know Hebrew" explain the name as "kindling or burning," and Jerome's letter on the vision gives two senses, "glow" or "beginning of speech."

Scholars have not settled the question, and each reading explains a different detail of the text. The serpent word accounts for creatures that fly, and the burning sense accounts for a seraph who carries a live coal.

What do the seraphim do in Isaiah 6?

They praise and they purify. The seraphim call to one another, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (6:3), and the thresholds shake at their voices. When Isaiah cries that he is "a man of unclean lips," one of them flies to him with a live coal and touches his mouth: "your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out" (6:7).

An open book with a blank card on it, a pair of iron tongs, and a shallow dish holding one glowing ember — Iron tongs and a dish holding one glowing ember beside an open book. In Isaiah 6:6 the seraph takes the live coal from the altar with tongs.

The cleansing comes right before the Lord asks, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" and Isaiah answers, "Here am I; send me!" (6:8). The seraph's coal readies a prophet's mouth for the words he is about to be given.

Their hymn is the part of the scene still heard every week. Jewish worship says Isaiah 6:3 in the Kedushah of the Amidah, and Western churches sing it as the Sanctus of the eucharistic prayer, so congregations repeat the words Isaiah reports the seraphim calling.

What do the six wings of the seraphim mean?

Isaiah describes the wings and leaves them unexplained: "with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew" (6:2). The older English of the JPS 1917 translation and the KJV reads "with twain he covered his face," and early Christian readers argued over whose face was meant.

Origen, writing in the early third century, passed on the view of his "Hebrew master" that the two seraphim were the Son and the Holy Spirit (On First Principles 1.3.4). In book 4 he adds that their wings covered God's own face and feet, meaning that only those two could grasp the beginning and the end of all things.

Isaiah never says how many seraphim there were, so the pair is the teacher's assumption. Jerome rejected the reading in a letter to Pope Damasus written in 381, since John 12:41 says Isaiah saw Christ's glory, and he took the two seraphim as the Old and New Testaments instead.

Are seraphim the highest angels in the hierarchy?

In the Christian order of nine choirs they are, but Isaiah gives them no rank. Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500 CE, says scripture places "the most Holy Thrones, and the many-eyed and many-winged hosts, named in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim" immediately around God (Celestial Hierarchy 6.2). When chapter 7 takes up that first hierarchy choir by choir, the seraphim come first.

Dionysius drew the rank from the name. The name of the seraphim, he writes, "plainly teaches their ever moving around things Divine," along with warmth, keenness and the power of "purifying through fire," so the order nearest God is the one that behaves most like flame.

A wooden ladder against a wall with its top rungs broken away — A wooden ladder whose top rungs have broken away. Isaiah 6 places the seraphim above the throne without ranking them; the numbered order of nine choirs dates from around 500 CE.

Gregory the Great, in Homily 34 on the Gospels in the 590s, counts nine orders upward from the angels and ends with the cherubim and seraphim. Aquinas, comparing Dionysius and Gregory in Summa Theologiae I, q.108, a.6, keeps the seraphim at the top of both lists: the cherubim "know the Divine secrets supereminently," and the seraphim "excel in what is the supreme excellence of all, in being united to God Himself."

Aquinas also gave the name its best-known meaning. It comes "from the excess of charity, expressed by the word ardor or fire" (a.5, reply 5), and fire's upward movement, heat and brightness stand for the seraphim's steady turn toward God, their power to kindle the angels below them, and an "inextinguishable light."

Where seraphim stand in five sources
Source	Date	Place of the seraphim	What stands above them
Isaiah 6:1-7	Set in the year Uzziah died, 8th century BCE	Attending above the throne; no rank given	Only the Lord on the throne
1 Enoch 61:10; 71:7	Debated; the Similitudes (chapters 37-71) are usually placed around the turn of the era	Named with cherubim and ophanim, who "sleep not and guard the throne"	No order among the three
Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 6-7	c. 500 CE	First of nine choirs	None
Gregory the Great, Homily 34	590s	First of nine orders	None
Maimonides, Foundations of the Torah 2:7	c. 1180	Fifth of ten ranks	Chayyot, ofanim, er'elim, chashmalim

Maimonides' list is the clearest check on the idea that seraphim rank highest everywhere. His ten ranks descend from the holy chayyot, the living creatures of Ezekiel, to the ishim who speak with prophets, and the serafim stand fifth; he explains only the top and bottom ranks.

The Christian order itself is not binding doctrine. The Catholic Encyclopedia's 1907 article on angels says that "no proposition touching the angelic hierarchies is binding on our faith."

Why do seraphim outrank cherubim when cherubim appear far more often?

Cherubim run through the Bible, and seraphim appear in one chapter. Cherubim guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:24), spread their wings over the ark's cover (Exodus 25:20), stand in Solomon's temple (1 Kings 6:23-28) and carry the throne in Ezekiel's vision, while seraphim appear only above the throne in Isaiah 6.

Seraphim and cherubim in scripture and later theology
	Seraphim	Cherubim
Where they appear	Isaiah 6 only	Genesis 3, Exodus 25, 1 Kings 6, Ezekiel 1 and 10, and elsewhere
Wings	Six each (Isaiah 6:2)	Four in Ezekiel 1:6; two on the temple cherubim (1 Kings 6:24)
Faces	Mentioned but not described	Four each in Ezekiel: human, lion, ox and eagle (1:10)
What they do	Call "Holy, holy, holy"; cleanse Isaiah's lips	Guard Eden, overshadow the ark, carry the throne
Name in Dionysius	"Kindling or burning"	"A fulness of knowledge or stream of wisdom"
Place among nine choirs	First	Second

How often a choir appears in scripture played no part in the ranking. Dionysius ordered the choirs by what their names signified, so a choir found in a single chapter could stand above one found from Genesis to Ezekiel, with burning placed above knowledge.

Are the four living creatures in Revelation seraphim?

Revelation borrows from the seraphim without using their name. In Revelation 4:8 each of the four living creatures has six wings and sings "Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty" day and night, which carries Isaiah 6:2-3 into John's vision.

The rest of their description comes from Ezekiel. They are "full of eyes all around and inside," and they look like a lion, an ox, a human and a flying eagle (4:7), the four faces each of Ezekiel's creatures has (Ezekiel 1:10). Ezekiel 10 calls those creatures cherubim.

John's Greek word is zōa, "living beings," so calling them seraphim, cherubim or a blend of the two is an interpretation. The same chapters explain the eyes in modern "biblically accurate" drawings of seraphim: Ezekiel puts eyes on the wheels' rims and the cherubim's bodies (Ezekiel 1:18; 10:12), and Revelation puts them on the living creatures. Isaiah mentions no eyes on the seraphim.

Was Lucifer a seraph?

No biblical text says so, and the best-known medieval answer is that he was a cherub. Isaiah 14:12, the verse behind the name Lucifer, mourns a fallen "Day Star" in a taunt against the king of Babylon and names no rank of angel.

The cherub label comes from Ezekiel 28:14, a lament over the king of Tyre that the King James Version renders "Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth" and the NRSVUE "You were a cherub." Christian readers who applied that passage to the devil gave him a cherub's rank.

Aquinas kept the label for a theological reason. He thought it "the more probable view" that the angel who sinned had been the highest of all, yet in Summa Theologiae I, q.63, a.7, he explains that the first sinner is called a cherub because that name comes from knowledge, "which is compatible with mortal sin," while the seraphim's name comes from "the heat of charity, which is incompatible with mortal sin."

The popular claim that Lucifer was the highest seraph therefore joins Aquinas's ranking to a title he deliberately withheld.

Why is St Francis of Assisi linked to a seraph?

Francis saw a seraph shortly before he received the stigmata. The Catholic Encyclopedia places him on La Verna in August 1224, keeping a forty-day fast before Michaelmas, and dates the vision to on or about 14 September, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The marks of Christ's five wounds appeared on his body afterward.

Bonaventure, the Franciscan theologian, went to La Verna in 1259 and wrote the Journey of the Mind into God (Itinerarium Mentis in Deum) there. His prologue describes what Francis saw as "the winged seraph in the form of the Crucified" and reads its six wings as "six uplifting illuminations" by which the soul climbs toward God, so the wings of Isaiah 6:2 became the plan of a book on contemplation.

Bonaventure himself is called the "Seraphic Doctor," a title the Catholic Encyclopedia traces to 1333. It honours the love of God in his writing, the same quality Aquinas read into the seraphim's name.

Do seraphim watch over or help people?

In Isaiah 6 a seraph acts on a human being once, and the theologians who ranked the seraphim highest argued that even that act was indirect. Dionysius gives chapter 13 of the Celestial Hierarchy to the problem, because in his system the higher orders reach people only through the lower ones, and a reader could object that "not one of the inferior Angels" but a seraph cleansed the prophet.

He records two answers. One holds that the angel who cleansed Isaiah belonged to a lower rank and was called a seraph because the cleansing came "through fire." The other says that angel credited his power to God as cause and to the seraphim as "first-operating Hierarch."

Aquinas followed him. In Summa Theologiae I, q.112, a.2, he concludes "that the superior angels are never sent to the external ministry" and reads Isaiah's seraph as a lower angel called a seraph because he came to kindle the prophet's lips. Missions to people fall to the lower orders, and the example Aquinas takes from Gregory is the archangel Gabriel sent to Mary.

Books and websites that present seraphim as personal guardians, healers or a source of cleansing fire for the reader find no support in Isaiah, Dionysius or Aquinas, whose seraphim are the order furthest removed from human affairs.