Quick Answer
Seraphim are the highest order of angels in several traditions, described in Isaiah 6 as six-winged beings of fire surrounding the divine throne. Their name means "burning ones" in Hebrew. They continuously sing the Trisagion ("Holy, holy, holy") and serve as agents of purification and cosmic adoration. Rudolf Steiner called them Spirits of Love, the beings who receive and transmit divine creative impulses with the intensity of fire.
Key Takeaways
- Etymology: From Hebrew saraph, "to burn" or "burning one." The same root gives both the fiery serpents of Numbers 21 and the throne-beings of Isaiah 6, connecting fire, serpent, and cosmic holiness in a single word.
- Isaiah 6: The only canonical biblical appearance. Six-winged fire beings, the Trisagion, the purifying coal: the most vivid prophetic vision of the divine throne in all of Scripture.
- Six wings: Two covering the face (reverence), two the feet (humility), two for flight (service). The complete posture of a being in the divine presence.
- The Trisagion: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts" — the highest possible emphasis in Hebrew grammar, carried into both Jewish and Christian liturgy as the Kedushah and the Sanctus.
- Steiner's reading: Seraphim are Spirits of Love (Liebesgeister), the first hierarchy, who receive divine creative will and transmit it with such intensity of love that it becomes generative force for all creation below them.
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Etymology: Burning Ones and Fiery Serpents
The Hebrew word seraph (plural seraphim) derives from the root saraph, meaning to burn or to set on fire. The seraphim of Isaiah 6 are, quite literally, the burning ones: beings of fire, consumed by and constituted of the divine fire that surrounds the throne of God.
This is not merely a metaphor for spiritual intensity, though it is that. In the ancient Semitic world, fire carried a specific cluster of meanings: purification, divine presence, the energy that both destroys and transforms, the quality of life at its most intense. The Hebrew tradition consistently associates fire with God's own nature: the burning bush that is not consumed (Exodus 3), the pillar of fire that leads Israel through the desert, the fire that descends on the altar of Elijah at Carmel, and the seraphic fire that purifies Isaiah's lips in the throne room.
The Word That Contains a Mystery
The Hebrew word seraph contains an etymological mystery that theologians and scholars have debated for centuries: the same word means both "burning one" (the divine beings) and "serpent" (the venomous desert creatures of Numbers 21). This is not coincidence or confusion; it reflects a deep stratum of ancient Semitic symbolism in which the serpent, fire, and divine presence were connected in ways that later monotheistic theology found uncomfortable but never entirely erased. Understanding this connection is essential for a full picture of what the seraphim actually are.
The lexical evidence is unambiguous. In Numbers 21:6, God sends hannechashim hasseraphim (literally "the serpents the burning ones") against the complaining Israelites in the wilderness. In verse 8, God instructs Moses to make saraph and mount it on a pole: this becomes the bronze serpent Nehushtan, which heals anyone who looks upon it. The same root, used in the same biblical text, describes both the venomous serpents and the healing bronze serpent on the pole. These are seraphim, linguistically, even if not theologically identical to the throne-beings of Isaiah.
Isaiah 6: The Throne Vision
Seraphim appear by name in only one canonical Old Testament passage: Isaiah 6:1-7. The vision opens: "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew."
The vision continues: "And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!' And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke."
Isaiah's immediate response is not wonder but terror: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" This is the classic prophetic response to the divine presence: not serene contemplation but the acute awareness of one's own inadequacy in the face of absolute holiness.
The Year King Uzziah Died
Isaiah's vision is precisely dated to the year of King Uzziah's death, approximately 740-739 BCE. The historical specificity is not decorative; it frames the vision as happening at a moment of political and social crisis, when the human authority that had provided stability was gone. This is a consistent pattern in prophetic literature: the divine vision comes not in comfortable stability but at the threshold between one order and the next, when human certainties have failed and the soul is, however unwillingly, made more available to what lies beyond them. The seraphim appear at this threshold, not despite the crisis but through it.
Isaiah 6 is the account of a prophetic call: the prophet is being commissioned. The seraphim are present not merely as decoration or background to the divine throne but as active participants in this commissioning: they sing the holiness of God, they carry the coal that purifies the prophet, and they create the condition in which Isaiah can say "Here I am; send me." The seraphim are not spectators of the divine will. They are its immediate agents.
The Six Wings and Their Meaning
The six wings of the seraphim have attracted sustained exegetical attention from Jewish and Christian interpreters across more than two millennia. The standard analysis identifies three pairs of two, each pair with its own function and symbolic meaning.
| Wings | Function in Isaiah 6 | Symbolic Meaning | Theological Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| First pair | Cover the face | Reverence before the divine | Even the highest spiritual beings cannot look directly at God's face |
| Second pair | Cover the feet | Humility, modesty | In Hebrew idiom, covering the feet is a gesture of modesty; the seraph is wholly subordinate to the divine presence |
| Third pair | Used for flight | Active service and mission | The seraph can act in the world on behalf of the divine will |
The medieval Jewish commentator Rashi (1040-1105) emphasised that the seraphim cover both their faces and their feet as gestures of humility and reverence: even they, the highest beings, cannot stand exposed before the divine holiness. This interpretation implies that the six wings are not primarily about capability or power but about the proper posture of a finite being, however elevated, in the presence of the infinite.
The Christian interpretive tradition, particularly in the writings of Gregory the Great (540-604 CE) and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 CE), elaborated the symbolic meanings further. Gregory connected the six wings to the six days of creation, suggesting that the seraphic being encompasses and surpasses the entire temporal order. Pseudo-Dionysius focused on the burning quality: the seraphim are not merely near the divine fire; they are constituted by it, moving and acting as fire itself moves and acts.
Four Wings or Six? The Ezekiel Difference
Ezekiel's throne vision (Ezekiel 1 and 10) describes four-winged living creatures (hayyot in chapter 1, identified as cherubim in chapter 10). Isaiah's seraphim have six wings. Later tradition harmonised these visions by placing the living creatures of Ezekiel in the category of cherubim (a different class) and the six-winged beings of Isaiah as seraphim properly so called. The difference in wing number has been interpreted symbolically: four is the number of the earthly and spatial (four directions, four elements, four faces of the creatures in Ezekiel), while six transcends the four-fold spatial order into a higher dimension that the extra pair of wings represents.
The Trisagion: Holy, Holy, Holy
The central act of the seraphim in Isaiah's vision is liturgical: they call to one another continuously, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." This threefold repetition, the Trisagion (from Greek tris, three times, and hagios, holy), is the grammatical superlative of Hebrew: a threefold repetition of the same word is the most emphatic possible statement in the language. "Holy, holy, holy" does not mean merely very holy; it means holiness beyond all possible qualification, holiness as the ultimate irreducible character of the divine.
The theological content of the Trisagion is dense. The Hebrew word qadosh (holy) has a primary meaning of "separate, set apart, other": it refers to the quality by which God is radically distinct from everything created. The seraphim's proclamation is therefore a continuous affirmation of the infinite qualitative difference between the divine and all else, even as they also proclaim that "the whole earth is full of his glory": the divine holiness, precisely because it is infinitely other, is also omnipresent in its expressions.
The Trisagion entered Jewish liturgy as the Kedushah, the sanctification prayer recited during the Amidah, where the congregation enacts the role of the seraphim by saying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." It entered Christian liturgy as the Sanctus, the acclamation in the eucharistic liturgy: "Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory." In the Eastern Christian tradition, the Trisagion ("Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us") is a separate prayer of venerable age, thought to be particularly powerful as a direct repetition of the seraphic cry. The seraphim's song, in these liturgical traditions, is not merely something that was sung in Isaiah's vision; it is the model for all genuine worship.
In Steiner's angelology, the continuous singing of the Trisagion is not a repetitive ritual act but an accurate description of the seraphim's actual mode of being. They are constituted by their relationship to divine holiness; they do not do other things and then worship. Their entire existence is this orientation of adoration, and the sound they produce is the expression of what they are rather than an activity they perform. This is what Steiner means when he calls them Spirits of Love: love, in its highest expression, does not do other things and then love. It simply is love, as fire simply is fire.
The Burning Coal and Prophetic Purification
One of the seraphim in Isaiah's vision takes a live coal from the altar with tongs and flies to Isaiah. He touches it to the prophet's lips and says: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for." Isaiah had just declared himself a man of unclean lips; the seraph responds to this confession not with condemnation but with the fire of divine purification.
The coal comes from the altar. In the Jerusalem Temple, the altar was where sacrifice was offered and the fire burned continuously (Leviticus 6:13: "The fire on the altar shall be kept burning; it shall not go out"). The seraph's coal is therefore not merely hot; it is holy, consecrated by its origin in the place of sacrifice and divine presence. It carries, concentrated in a single physical object, the purifying fire of the divine holiness that fills the seraphim themselves.
Why the Lips?
Isaiah's confession was specifically about his lips: "I am a man of unclean lips." In the prophetic tradition, the mouth and lips are the instruments of the prophetic word: what the prophet speaks is either a true transmission of the divine word or a false one, and the distinction depends on the purity of the instrument. The seraphic fire touches precisely the lips because the prophecy that Isaiah is about to be commissioned to speak requires a purified instrument. The burning coal does not punish; it consecrates. It transforms the prophet's capacity for speech into a vessel fit for the word that will be spoken through it.
In the mystical tradition, the burning coal of Isaiah 6 is a model for transformative union: the encounter between the human soul and the divine fire that does not destroy but refines. The mystic Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416) in her Revelations of Divine Love describes God's love as a fire that burns away sin without burning the soul itself, a direct echo of the seraphic fire. The Carmelite tradition of John of the Cross uses the same image: the flame of love that purifies what it touches without consuming it. These are all variations on the seraphic fire of Isaiah 6, transmitted through two and a half millennia of contemplative reflection.
Seraph and Serpent: The Burning Connection
The connection between seraphim and serpents is one of the most theologically awkward aspects of the seraphim tradition, and it is therefore one of the most interesting. Later Christianity, which associated the serpent entirely with Satan's deception in Eden, found the serpent-seraph connection deeply uncomfortable and largely suppressed it. But the Hebrew texts are explicit, and the scholarly literature on this connection has grown substantially since the 20th century.
In Numbers 21:4-9, the Israelites in the wilderness speak against God and Moses, and God sends "fiery serpents" (seraphim) among them. Many die. The people repent and ask Moses to intercede. God instructs Moses to make a seraph (a serpent) and mount it on a pole; whoever looks at it is healed. The bronze serpent Nehushtan (from nachash, serpent, and nechoshet, bronze) became an object of veneration that had to be destroyed by Hezekiah centuries later because the people were burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4).
Isaiah's Seraphim: Serpentine Beings?
Some scholars, most notably John Day in Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (2000) and Karen Randolph Joines in Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament (1974), have argued that Isaiah's throne-beings were originally serpentine in form, related to the winged serpents depicted in ancient Near Eastern iconography (including the Egyptian uraeus, the royal cobra worn on the pharaoh's crown). The seraph would then be a divine serpent: winged, fiery, and associated with royalty and divine protection. Whether or not this historical reconstruction is correct, it illuminates the semantic range of the word seraph and the cultural context in which Isaiah's vision was formed. The later tradition of six-winged humanoid beings, familiar from Christian iconography, represents a theological development that moved away from the serpentine imagery while retaining the fire.
In the Neoplatonist tradition and in Steiner's spiritual science, this connection between serpent and fire is not a theological embarrassment but a meaningful insight. The serpent is one of the oldest symbols of the life-force and of regeneration (its skin-shedding symbolising death and rebirth) as well as of the kundalini-like energy that runs through the spine of the cosmos. The seraphim, as beings of fire and life, carry a dimension of this same energy at its highest, most purified expression. The fiery serpent of Numbers and the fiery throne-beings of Isaiah are not the same, but they share a root in the same symbolic complex: fire, life, the transforming power that heals when approached rightly and destroys when encountered wrongly.
Seraphim in the Angelic Hierarchy
The position of seraphim in the angelic hierarchy varies significantly by tradition, which is one of the more illuminating points of divergence in the angelological literature.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500 CE), in The Celestial Hierarchy, placed the seraphim in the highest position of the first and highest triad of beings: seraphim, cherubim, and thrones together constitute the innermost circle of the divine, the beings most closely united to God and most fully irradiated by the divine light. This became the standard Christian ordering, transmitted through Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and remaining influential into the present.
Maimonides (1135-1204), in the Mishneh Torah, placed the seraphim at the fifth of ten levels in the Jewish angelic hierarchy, well below the highest beings. His ordering reflected a different set of interpretive priorities: he was drawing on the Talmudic tradition and on his own philosophical approach rather than on the Neoplatonist framework that shaped Pseudo-Dionysius.
| Tradition | Seraphim's Position | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500 CE) | Highest of the first triad | Most closely united to God; model of the burning love that unites to the divine |
| Thomas Aquinas (c. 1270) | Highest choir of the first hierarchy | Follows Pseudo-Dionysius; seraphim as the summit of created intelligence |
| Maimonides (c. 1180) | Fifth of ten levels | Jewish hierarchical ordering based on Talmudic and philosophical sources |
| Rudolf Steiner (1904-1925) | First hierarchy, first order | Spirits of Love; receive divine creative will and transmit it as love to cherubim |
Seraphim and Cherubim: The Two Highest Orders
Seraphim and cherubim are regularly grouped together as the two highest orders of spiritual beings, but they are distinct in character and function.
Cherubim (singular: cherub, from Hebrew kerub, meaning unknown but possibly related to "to guard" or "to intercede") appear much more frequently in the canonical texts than seraphim. They guard Eden's entrance (Genesis 3:24), hover over the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:18-22), appear in Ezekiel's complex throne vision as four-faced four-winged living creatures (Ezekiel 1 and 10), and are described by David as the bearers of God's chariot (Psalm 18:10). They are beings of divine knowledge and wisdom, the guardians of sacred space and the transmitters of divine information.
Seraphim, by contrast, appear only in Isaiah 6 in the canonical texts and are beings of fire and love rather than of knowledge and guardianship. Where cherubim are the divine architects, the bearers of God's wisdom and the keepers of sacred thresholds, seraphim are the divine worshippers: the beings whose entire existence is the continuous adoration of the divine holiness.
The Popular Image of Cherubs Is Wrong
The popular image of cherubs as chubby winged infants (the putti of Renaissance art) bears no relationship to the biblical cherubim. The biblical creatures are four-faced (human, lion, ox, and eagle), four-winged or six-winged depending on the text, associated with the divine throne and chariot, and treated with consistent awe and reverence. The infantile image entered Western art through a conflation of the Hebrew kerubim with the Greek Eros and the Roman Amor, both depicted as winged children. Botticelli, Raphael, and later Baroque artists popularised this conflation until it became completely standard. The actual biblical cherubim are among the most formidable beings in the Scriptural imagination.
Rudolf Steiner: Seraphim as Spirits of Love
Rudolf Steiner's treatment of the seraphim is one of the most distinctive and philosophically rich aspects of his angelology. In multiple lecture cycles, including The Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World (1909, GA 110), Occult Science: An Outline (1909, GA 13), and The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth (1914, GA 153), Steiner describes the seraphim as Seraphim or Liebesgeister (Spirits of Love), the highest of the three orders in the first hierarchy.
In Steiner's framework, the divine will does not pass directly from the highest divine principle to the lower spiritual beings and then to humanity. It passes through the hierarchies, each of which receives, transforms, and transmits it according to its own nature. The seraphim receive the divine creative intentions in their most primordial form: not as formulated thoughts or as commands but as the pure creative impulse of the divine will. They receive this impulse with such completeness and such intensity of love that it becomes, through their mediation, a force that can now be received by the cherubim below them.
Steiner's Description of Seraphic Love
In the lectures of The Spiritual Hierarchies (GA 110, 1909), Steiner says: "The Seraphim are so highly developed that what they experience as perceptions from the Godhead they are able to pass on to the Cherubim and, through the Cherubim, to all the other Hierarchies." He goes on to describe the seraphim as burning with love to the point of self-sacrifice: their love is not sentimental or self-preserving but the absolute orientation of their entire being toward the divine, from which they receive and toward which they return whatever they transmit. This is fire as a description of ontology: the seraphim are, in their deepest nature, the burning love that receives the divine and gives it freely to all below.
Steiner's identification of the seraphim as Spirits of Love connects directly to the theological tradition of describing God as love (1 John 4:8: "God is love"). If the divine is ultimately love, then the beings most closely united to the divine are those most fully constituted by love. The seraphim, in Steiner's reading, are not merely obedient servants of a loving God; they are beings who have so completely received and embodied the love-nature of the divine that they have become, in a real sense, its primary expression in the created order. The Trisagion, in this light, is the sound of love recognising itself: the seraphic fire reflecting back to the divine source its own quality of absolute holiness and love.
For those interested in how Steiner's understanding of the hierarchies relates to the broader philosophical tradition, our articles on emanation in Neoplatonism and the Logos provide the philosophical context that Steiner was working within and extending.
Working with Seraphic Fire: A Contemplative Approach
The seraphim do not work with individual human souls in the way that guardian angels (Angeloi) or even archangels do. They inhabit the first hierarchy, far above the human sphere, and their activity is directed toward the most primordial levels of cosmic creation rather than toward the details of personal development. This means that direct "working with the seraphim" in the style of practical angel communication is not quite the right frame.
What can be cultivated, however, is what might be called the seraphic quality: the orientation of love as fire, the willingness to burn with genuine care for what is absolutely true and absolutely holy, the capacity to orient the entire being toward what is most real rather than toward what is merely comfortable or familiar.
The Seraphic Fire Meditation
Sit quietly and bring to mind the image of the divine throne surrounded by fire: not the literal imagery of Isaiah 6 unless that speaks to you, but the quality it represents. Allow a felt sense of absolute holiness to arise: not as a thought about holiness but as the soul's encounter with something infinitely greater and purer than itself. From this encounter, allow a flame to arise in the centre of your chest: not manufactured but invited. Ask: what would it mean to love with the completeness of fire, holding nothing back, oriented entirely toward what is most real? Remain with this question without answering it analytically. The seraphic tradition teaches that genuine love, like fire, does not calculate its own survival. It simply burns toward what it loves.
The seraphic fire in the contemplative tradition also has an ethical dimension. The burning coal that touched Isaiah's lips purified him for prophetic speech: the fire that came from the altar consecrated the instrument of the word. Working with seraphic fire means submitting one's speech, one's creative expression, and one's relationships to the same question that the burning coal posed to Isaiah: is this worthy of the divine presence? Does what I say and do carry any trace of the seraphic quality, the orientation toward what is genuinely holy rather than toward what is merely expedient or pleasing?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are seraphim?
Seraphim (singular seraph) are the highest order of angels in several traditions, described in the Hebrew Bible in Isaiah 6 as six-winged beings of fire who surround the throne of God and continuously sing the Trisagion: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." The name derives from the Hebrew root saraph, meaning to burn. They serve as beings of divine adoration and cosmic purification, and in Rudolf Steiner's angelology they are the Spirits of Love who receive and transmit the divine creative will.
Where do seraphim appear in the Bible?
Seraphim appear by name in one canonical Old Testament passage: Isaiah 6:1-7. In this vision, Isaiah sees six-winged fire beings above the divine throne, crying "Holy, holy, holy," and one seraph purifies the prophet's lips with a burning coal from the altar. The word seraph also appears in Numbers 21 to describe venomous serpents in the wilderness, and in Isaiah 30:6 as a description of a winged serpent, reflecting the same Hebrew root connecting fire, serpent, and divine intensity.
What do the six wings of the seraphim mean?
The six wings represent the complete posture of a supreme spiritual being in the divine presence. Two cover the face: even the highest angels cannot look directly at God's face, reflecting the overwhelming nature of divine holiness. Two cover the feet: a Hebrew gesture of humility and modesty. Two are used for flight: the capacity to act in service of the divine will. Together, the six wings express reverence, humility, and active service as the three defining qualities of seraphic existence.
What is the Trisagion?
The Trisagion ("Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts") is the continuous proclamation of the seraphim in Isaiah 6. The threefold repetition is the Hebrew grammatical superlative, meaning holiness beyond all possible qualification. It entered Jewish liturgy as the Kedushah and Christian liturgy as the Sanctus, both of which invite the congregation to join the seraphic song. In Steiner's framework, this is not ritual repetition but an accurate description of the seraphim's mode of being: they are constituted by this orientation and it is their natural, continuous expression.
Are seraphim related to serpents?
Yes, etymologically. The Hebrew seraph means both "burning one" (the divine throne-beings) and "serpent" (Numbers 21). The bronze serpent Nehushtan that Moses raised in the wilderness is literally called a seraph. Later Christian tradition largely suppressed this connection due to the serpent's association with the Fall, but scholars have traced the seraphim to ancient Near Eastern imagery of winged serpents connected to divine royalty and protection. Steiner's tradition sees the fire-and-serpent connection as meaningful: both point to the life-force at its most concentrated and transforming expression.
What did Rudolf Steiner say about seraphim?
Steiner placed the seraphim in the first and highest hierarchy alongside cherubim and thrones. He called them Spirits of Love (Liebesgeister), describing them as beings who receive the divine creative will in its most primordial form and transmit it with such intensity of love that it becomes generative force for all below them. In Steiner's cosmology, the seraphim do not merely worship; they participate in the creative activity of the divine by receiving its impulses and passing them, transfigured by love, to the cherubim.
How do seraphim differ from cherubim?
Seraphim are beings of fire and love, primarily associated with the continuous adoration of divine holiness and purification. Cherubim are beings of knowledge and wisdom, associated with guarding sacred space (the Ark, Eden's entrance) and with the transmission of divine information. Where seraphim burn with love, cherubim hold the structure of divine wisdom. In Steiner's terms, seraphim are Spirits of Love; cherubim are Spirits of Harmony (Cherubim in German: Geister der Harmonie). Both belong to the first hierarchy but differ in their relationship to the divine: seraphim receive and transmit love; cherubim receive and transmit wisdom.
What is the spiritual meaning of the burning coal in Isaiah 6?
The seraph's burning coal, taken from the altar and touched to Isaiah's lips, represents the purifying fire of divine holiness that prepares the prophet for his mission. Isaiah had confessed "unclean lips"; the coal responds to this confession not with condemnation but with transformation. In the mystical tradition from Julian of Norwich to John of the Cross, this coal became the model for transformative union: the divine fire that refines without destroying, that consecrates what it touches for a purpose beyond the individual's own capacity. The coal is the concentrated seraphic fire, the love of the divine presence applied to a specific human instrument.
The Fire That Does Not Consume
The seraphim burn, but they are not consumed. Isaiah's lips are touched by fire, and rather than being destroyed, they are consecrated. The burning coal does not remove the prophet; it makes him capable of something he was not capable of before. This is the seraphic promise: that the fire of divine love, when it reaches us, does not come to take away what we are but to transform it into what we were always meant to be. The only question is whether we are willing to hold still long enough for the coal to touch us.
Sources & References
- Steiner, R. (1909). The Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World (GA 110). Anthroposophic Press.
- Steiner, R. (1909). Occult Science: An Outline (GA 13). Rudolf Steiner Press.
- Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. (c. 500 CE / 1987). The Celestial Hierarchy in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Paulist Press.
- Day, J. (2000). Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield Academic Press.
- Joines, K.R. (1974). Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament. Haddonfield House.
- Davidson, G. (1967). A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels. Free Press.
- Maimonides. (c. 1180/1967). Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah (translated by Yale Judaica Series). Yale University Press.
- Julian of Norwich. (c. 1395/1978). Revelations of Divine Love. Penguin Classics.