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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Seraphim
Six-winged beings around God's throne in Isaiah's vision, described with a word that elsewhere means burning serpent.
Isaiah 6:2, in every translation this tool compares.
The word means burning ones, and five of its seven appearances are snakes. The serpents in the wilderness are seraphim. So are the six-winged figures around the throne in Isaiah's vision. The image many scholars trace behind them is the Egyptian winged cobra, not anything with a harp.
The same word names the burning serpents in the wilderness and the throne attendants of Isaiah 6, and five of its seven occurrences are serpents. The iconography behind it is the winged uraeus, not a chubby European angel. DDD's Mettinger puts a limit on the parallel: Judahite seals of the period show two-winged and four-winged uraei, but a six-winged uraeus, Isaiah's count, isn't attested anywhere in the iconographic record, so the match between text and image is close without being exact. Isaiah also turns the motif around. Elsewhere the uraeus protects the god or king it guards, while in Isaiah 6 the seraphim cover themselves with their wings before a Yahweh who needs no protecting. The antiphonal "holy, holy, holy" of verse 3 means there are at least two of them.
H8314 (שָׂרָף), 7 occ
The winged cobra is standard Egyptian royal-guardian imagery in the period, and royal Judahite seals carrying Israelite names show four-winged uraei in the eighth century BC, so Isaiah's audience already knew the picture. The uraeus's Egyptian name means "flame," which lines up with saraph's "burning" better than a literal-fire reading does, since cobra venom causes the searing pain the word describes elsewhere.
- Isaiah 6:2,6
- Numbers 21:6,8
- Deuteronomy 8:15
- Isaiah 14:29
- Isaiah 30:6
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/divine-council-index\/isaiah-6-1-8\/","n":"Isaiah 6:1-8","s":"The throne room, the seraphim, and the plural question, who will go for us.","r":"Isaiah 6:1-8"}
- T. N. D. Mettinger, "Seraphim," DDD, 743
- Stocker & Barry, "Seraphim," *Lexham Bible Dictionary*
- Heiser, *Unseen Realm*, ch. 31
