Well, here we are at the end of April 2012's A-Z blogging challenge. Last year's final post, Z is for Zoomorphic Angels, is my second most popular post of all time, so, I'm revisiting the subject this year. If you missed it, I recommend going back and reading that one first (linked above) and then coming back for this year's.

Unlike the anthropomorphic ("human-shaped") angels that dominate the occasions of hierophanies or angelic visitations to humans in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, there are two species or classes of angels that are definitely zoomorphic. These monstrous angels are the cherubim and seraphim (note the plural forms in Hebrew end in -im). While we do not have Hebrew images of these creatures, we know do have the Phoenician images that were made for Egyptian and Assyrian markets, and the images made with a visual imagination dominated by Egyptian and Assyrian conceptions seem to have been the same images that were sold in Israel by Phoenicians.


Scripture References
Genesis 3:24
Exodus 25:18-20; 37:6-9
Numbers 7:89
I Samuel 4:4
II Samuel 22:11
I Kings 6:23-28; 8:6-7
Psalms 18:10; 80:1
Isaiah 6:2-6; 30:6 (cf. Num. 21:6-8; Deut. 8:15)
Ezekiel 1:4-28; 10:3-22; 28:14,16
Syrian Figure from Tell Halaf |