Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Female Angels

Are there female angels? In the book of Genesis, the angels that visit Abraham were men. Other angels in the Bible have masculine names (Gabriel, Michael). These names describe attributes of God. Genesis 6 describes the sons of God that married the daughters of men. In all of these examples, angels are manifested as men.

But is it correct to go from specific examples and create a general rule? After all, there are no verses that say that angels are only masculine. In fact, there is one verse that shows what appear to be angels as women:
Zec 5:9 Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven.
Angels don't reproduce but that doesn't prove that they don't have gender. There is more to gender than the ability to reproduce. And there is more to gender than physical parts. Is gender a characteristic of the person?

At one point, some scientists believed that gender was only a matter of environment and hormones. There was a young man who was the victim of a failed circumcision as a child. But for him, something even worse was yet to come. The doctor told his parents that he should be raised as a female. He always knew that something was wrong in his life. It wasn't until he was much older that he was told what had happened to him.

1 comment:

Doug's Theology BLOG said...

Not really, thanks anyway.