Are there Female Angels?
Bonus Post for the Week!
I was just sent an amusingly bad video featuring three bearded gentlemen, who clearly all use the same tailor, and what was really weird was their speculation about angels and gender in heaven.
Their takeaways were:
1. The Godhead is male: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
2. Angels can be male but are not female.
3. Demons can be male and female.
4. Heaven is a “male space.”
All I can say is …
First, the Godhead is not intrinsically male.
The invisible God does not have a body, so God cannot be male. That’s not wokeness, it is an orthodox doctrine of God.
Fatherhood is the analogous language for God as creator and sovereign. God is not a divine monad with a gonad!
Yes, the Son of God now has a glorified resurrection body in heaven, so human maleness is hypostatically united to God, but only in the Son.
The gender of the Holy Spirit varies depending on your language. In Hebrew, ruach is feminine; in Greek, pneuma is neuter; and in Latin, spiritus is masculine.
I know our culture is big on pronouns, but pronouns in the Greek NT do not mean that God, who is Spirit, is a gendered being!
Second, the names for angels are usually male, but there are exceptions in wider Jewish traditions.
In the OT and NT, angels have male names like Michael and Gabriel, and more examples in the Apocrypha include Raphael and Uriel, etc.
Otherwise, one could argue that the seraphim and cherubim are gender neutral, they are not identified as male or female, perhaps they are either.
Are there female angels? Well, I like to think that I married one!
Looking beyond the Bible, in Jewish tradition, there actually are female angels, spirits, and heavenly entities.
There is a Jewish incantation bowl that invokes Solomon for protection against demons and spirits: “Solomon, the son of David, who worked spells on male demons and female Liliths” (Charlesworth OTP 1:948). I don’t know what a “Lilith” is, maybe it’s that evil lady from Frasier!
In the many lists of angels in the Enochic literature, there are some that are probably female, but it’s hard to tell because the names are not gender obvious, and I don’t read Ethiopic or Slavonic, so I can’t be sure (see 1 Enoch 6.7; 8.3-4; 3 Enoch 14.4).
In a quick search I did find one interesting article on this subject:
Mika Ahuvia, “Gender and the Angels in Late Antique Judaism,” JSQ 29.1 (2022): 1-21.
Scholars have tended to overlook or dismiss the possibility of feminine angelic beings in ancient Judaism. Close reading of texts reveals that gendered divine beings do not exceed the biblical source material, Hebrew linguistic possibilities, Late Antique Jewish texts or the Jewish imagination. Altogether, evidence found in rabbinic literature, Yannai's liturgical poetry, liturgical practices, ritual texts, and synagogue art demonstrates that feminine angels were conceivable by ancient Jews.
Note too that the sexuality of angels is peculiar. Perhaps the “sons of God” who took wives in Gen 6:2 are “fallen” angels, but remember too that Jesus said that the future resurrection body will be asexual because we will be “like the angels” (Mt 22:30).
Third, if there are female demons, and if demons are fallen angels, then I guess there are female angels.
Fourth, is heaven a “male space”? No! So many jokes I could make, mainly about bars in San Francisco, but I will be a nice boy and abstain.
What is it with these dudes that they are so obsessed with maintaining their male superiority??
(OK, now shoot me!)
Thanks for this research and work. It often feels too exhausting to continually defend female image bearers from such unexpected, strange interpretations. An eye-roll is often all I can muster. Thanks for not being satisfied with an eye-roll.