Seraph
There is emerging consensus that the motifs used to display seraphs in Hyksos-era Canaan had their original sources in Egyptian uraeus iconography.
In the early monarchic period of Israel and Judah, Egyptian motifs were evidently borrowed by the Israelites en masse, as a plethora of personal seals belonging to classes ranging from commonfolk to royalty have been discovered, which incorporate several pieces of ancient Egyptian iconography, including the winged sun, ankh, the hedjet and deshret crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, scarabs, and the uraeus cobra.
[21] Seraphim appear in the 2nd-century BC Book of Enoch,[22] where they are mentioned, in conjunction with cherubim, as the heavenly creatures standing nearest to the throne of God.
In non-biblical sources they are sometimes called the Akyəst (Ge'ez: አክይስት "serpents", "dragons"; an alternate term for Hell).
[23][24][25] In the Second Book of Enoch, two classes of celestial beings are mentioned alongside the seraphim and cherubim, known as the phoenixes and the chalkydri (Ancient Greek: χαλκύδραι khalkýdrai, compound of χαλκός khalkós "brass, copper" + ὕδρα hýdra "hydra", "water-serpent"—lit.
Both are described as "flying elements of the sun" that reside in either the 4th or 7th heaven, who have twelve wings and burst into song at sunrise.
[citation needed] A Judean seal from the 8th century BCE depicts them as flying asp (snake), yet having human characteristics, as encountered by Isaiah in his commissioning as a prophet.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his Celestial Hierarchy (vii), drew upon the Book of Isaiah in fixing the fiery nature of seraphim in the medieval imagination.
Taking his cue as well from writings in the Rabbinic tradition, the author gave an etymology for the Seraphim as "those who kindle or make hot" The name seraphim clearly indicates their ceaseless and eternal revolution about Divine Principles, their heat and keenness, the exuberance of their intense, perpetual, tireless activity, and their elevative and energetic assimilation of those below, kindling them and firing them to their own heat, and wholly purifying them by a burning and all-consuming flame; and by the unhidden, unquenchable, changeless, radiant and enlightening power, dispelling and destroying the shadows of darkness[31]Origen wrote in On First Principles that the Seraphim, in the Book of Isaiah, are the physical representation of the Christ and the Holy Spirit.
[32] This quote suggests that Origen believed the Seraphim are revealed this knowledge because of their anointed status as Son of God and the Holy Spirit.
Secondly, the active force which is "heat," which is not found in fire simply, but exists with a certain sharpness, as being of most penetrating action, and reaching even to the smallest things, and as it were, with superabundant fervor; whereby is signified the action of these angels, exercised powerfully upon those who are subject to them, rousing them to a like fervor, and cleansing them wholly by their heat.
Thirdly we consider in fire the quality of clarity, or brightness; which signifies that these angels have in themselves an inextinguishable light, and that they also perfectly enlighten others.The seraphim took on a mystic role in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man (1487), the epitome of Renaissance humanism.
Pico took the fiery Seraphim—"they burn with the fire of charity"—as the highest models of human aspiration: "impatient of any second place, let us emulate dignity and glory.
And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in nothing", the young Pico announced, in the first flush of optimistic confidence in the human capacity that is the coinage of the Renaissance.
Bonaventure, a Franciscan theologian who was a contemporary of Aquinas, uses the six wings of the seraph as an important analogical construct in his mystical work The Journey of the Mind to God.
Christian theology developed an idea of seraphim as beings of pure light who enjoy direct communication with God.
[37] Seraphim (Sarufiyyun or Musharifin)[39] are directly mentioned in a hadith from Al-Tirmidhi about a conversation between Muhammad and God, during the Night Journey, concerning what is between the Heavens and the Earth, often interpreted as a reference to the "Exalted assembly" disputing the creation of Adam in Surah Ṣād 38:69.
