In traditional Christian mythology, angels are sexless beings.
The Bible disagrees with that mythology.
Song of the Angels (1881), by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
In the Bible, angels are described as men. Not as generic, sexless human beings, but as men: male human beings.
And if there are male angels, of course there are female angels as well. It would make no sense at all for there to be male angels if there weren’t female angels. After all, God created humans male and female. It will be the same for angels. It’s just that the angels God sent to carry messages to people on earth as recorded in the Bible all happened to be men—as we would expect in that time and culture.
But the Bible does give us a few visions of celestial beings who are female.
Let’s take a closer look.
Angels are not sexless beings
In traditional Christian mythology, angels would have no time for sex, and no interest in sex. They’re far too busy spending eternity in rapturous worship and contemplation of God. Sex, by comparison, would be like a child’s pleasure in eating chocolate compared to an adult’s enjoyment of sexual intercourse. And if there’s no room for sex in heaven, why would angels be male and female? Angels, they say, are far beyond anything sexual, so they must be sexless beings.
There’s only one problem with this idea: the Bible doesn’t support it. (Well, there are lots of problems with this idea. But we’ll stick with the biblical problem for now.)
Both Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek have a non-gendered word for human beings.
In Hebrew, it is אָדָם (‘āḏām). This word is sometimes translated as the name “Adam.” But its basic meaning is “a human, humanity.” Even in most places the translators have chosen to translate it as “Adam,” it should probably be translated as “the human” or “humanity.”
The corresponding word in Greek is ἄνθρωπος (anthrōpos). This is the word that the New Testament uses when it is referring to all human beings together, both males and females. Interestingly, it is also the word used to refer Jesus in John 19:5, when Jesus goes out in front of the crowd just before Pilate sentenced him to be crucified. “Behold the man!” it says, in the traditional English translations. But in the original Greek, “man” here is ἄνθρωπος, not the Greek word for a male human being. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)
Now, if angels were sexless beings, we might expect that the Bible would use the non-gendered term to refer to them.
It doesn’t.
Instead, the Old Testament uses the word אִישׁ (‘îš), “a man, a male,” and the New Testament uses either ἀνήρ (anēr), “a man, a male,” or νεανίσκος (neaniskos), “a young man.”
Unfortunately, most English translations don’t make a distinction between the gendered and non-gendered terms. But if you have the proper lookup tools, here are some Bible passages you can look up to see that the gendered terms are used to describe angels as men: Genesis 19:1–23; Judges 13:2–23; Zechariah 1:7–11; Mark 16:5–7; Luke 24:4–7 (compare Matthew 28:2–7; John 20:11–13).
In short, in the Bible, when angels appear to humans on earth they do not appear as sexless beings. They appear as male human beings. And male human beings are not sexless beings. See also the section titled “Biblically accurate angels look like men” in the previous post, “What do ‘Biblically Accurate Angels’ Look Like?”
The Bible has visions of female celestial beings
It is true that the Bible never mentions any female angels. Some old-fashioned Christians have therefore come to the conclusion that all angels are male. It’s a silly idea. What would it even mean to be male if there were no female? Male and female have meaning only in relation to one another (more on this later).
Beyond that, the Bible itself has visions of heavenly beings who are female.
In the seventh vision in the book of Zechariah, the prophet sees winged women who fly off in the sky:
Then I looked up and saw two women coming forward. The wind was in their wings; they had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and sky. Then I said to the angel who spoke with me, “Where are they taking the basket?” He said to me, “To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it, and when this is prepared, they will set it down there on its base.” (Zechariah 5:9–11)
These women in Zechariah’s vision are not described as angels. But clearly they are not ordinary human beings, either.
Another female celestial being appears in the book of Revelation:
A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. . . . And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a scepter of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that there she can be nourished for one thousand two hundred sixty days. (Revelation 12:1–2, 5–6)
Later in the chapter, this woman is also given wings:
So when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had delivered the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to her place where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. (Revelation 12:13–14)
Contrary to popular belief, biblical angels do not have wings. See the section titled “Biblically accurate angels don’t have wings” in the previous post. However, in these two visions winged women are seen not only because wings have a spiritual symbolism, but also to show that these are not ordinary mortal women.
The woman John saw in heaven in Revelation 12 is also not described as an angel. But if there are women of any sort in heaven, then it makes sense that angels are not limited to being men only, but can also be women.
Male angels without female angels makes no sense
When God first creates human beings, God makes them male and female:
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humans in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27)
“Wait!” you say. “Didn’t God make Adam first, and then make Eve out of Adam’s rib?”
That happens in the second Creation story, which is not just a retelling of the first. In the first Creation story, male and female are created together, at the same time.
Even in the second Creation story, God did not make man first. As I said earlier, the Hebrew translated as the name “Adam” is the word for “a human, humankind.” Really, in the metaphorical language of these early chapters of Genesis, when God formed (not “created”) Eve out of a rib taken from Adam’s side, it represented a separation between men and women that hadn’t existed before. But that’s a subject for an entire post of its own. Meanwhile, please see:
Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis
For our present purposes, the main point is that as Jesus said, “from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6).
From the beginning of creation animals, too, were created male and female, as we can see in the early chapters of Genesis:
And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. (Genesis 6:19–20)
Clearly, it is part of God’s order of creation for there to be both male and female.
Once again, what would it even mean to be male if there were no female? If there were males only, they wouldn’t be called “males.” They’d just be called “humans.” There would be no sex or gender. Humans would be sexless beings that reproduce asexually.
Even in complex species that have two sexes but can reproduce asexually, such as Komodo dragons and some reptiles and fish, it is always the female that reproduces asexually. In some species, theoretically there could be females without males. But there could never be males without females. However, if there were no such thing as male, we wouldn’t call the remaining animals “female” any more than we call amoebas and bacteria “female.” If there were not at least two sexes, there would be no sexes at all.
There are no mammals that are capable of reproducing asexually. For mammals, including humans, when it comes to reproduction it’s both male and female or nothing at all.
Further, if humans were to reproduce asexually, then anatomically there would be no use for the organs that distinguish a male as a male. These organs would therefore not exist, and there would be no male human beings either.
But that’s not how human reproduction works. We humans reproduce sexually. That means we have males and females.
Why, then, would there be male angels but no female angels? Not only does this make no rational sense, but it would be contrary to the pattern of God’s creation, which is for males and females to be created together.
In short, if the Bible describes the angel messengers who visited people on earth as men, then there must also be angels who are women.
Besides, at least two centuries of Christian art, and centuries of people’s experiences of angel visitations, testify that there are female angels.
Does this mean there is sex in heaven?
Of course it does! See the last article linked below.
For further reading:
- Who Are the Angels and How Do They Live?
- What is the Biblical Basis for Humans becoming Angels after they Die?
- How does Marriage Fit In with a Spiritual Life? Is There Marriage in Heaven?
- Didn’t Jesus Say There’s No Marriage in Heaven?
- Marriage in Heaven: A Response to Randy Alcorn and John Piper
- Is There Sex in Heaven?
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Before I was a member of the Swedenborgian Church of North American, I was taught that angels were without gender. However this never felt right with me! Thanks for the article!
Hi Luke,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment. Glad you enjoyed the article!
Godspeed on your spiritual journey.
hi! I have a question: are there races and ethnicities in heaven? I know there is male and female there.
thanks,
Luke
Hi Luke,
Yes! When we die, we are still the same person we were when we were living on this earth. Europeans are still Europeans, Asians are still Asians, Africans are still Africans, and so on. Swedenborg spent most of his time among angels and spirits from Europe, because that’s where he came from. He mentions people from the various countries of Europe, all of whom are still the same nation and ethnicity that they were on earth. He did also meet Africans and Asians in the spiritual world, and mentioned people there from various lands and regions around the world.
Why would angels look more or less like specific races of Homo sapiens who emerged from various circumstances of natural selection adapted to that one third planet?
Hi K,
The relationship between the spirit and the physical body is complex. But there is a relationship. I think the spirit both influences the form of the body and is influenced by it. I don’t think that in heaven we will look exactly like what we do here. But our appearance is a part of our identity, and it doesn’t go away just because we have died. Again, it’s complicated. But the particular form our body takes is also not just arbitrary.
Swedenborg’s theology is so uplifting. I just think that sometimes it seems, by reading the writings, that the bar is vey high and so few people will be saved. I think that’s a turn off. Among other things that the seer wrote, I prefer to focus on the doctrine of equilibrium, which says heaven and hell are aproximatelly of the same size and so there are as many angels in heaven as there are devils in hell. This way, one doesn’t get desperate thinking it’s almost an impossible task to be saved. What do think, Lee?
Hi Josué,
Boy, does Swedenborg have a chapter for you!
It starts at Heaven and Hell #528. You can read it by following the link, and clicking on the right arrows to read the next sections. Here is a brief excerpt:
And another one from #530:
And one more from #533:
So no, the bar is not high at all. Ordinary Joes and Janes can live a life that leads to heaven just by engaging in their work and their daily lives with an attitude of being honest, fair, and good to the people around them and to the people they are serving in their job. And, when there’s a temptation to do something that isn’t honest, fair, and good, say, “I know that I want to do this, but I won’t do it, because it is wrong and against God’s commandments.” Perhaps we’ll sometimes fail, but next time we’ll succeed . . . or the time after that.
As we build up a life of avoiding things that are wrong and living a life of love, thoughtfulness, and service for our fellow human beings because that is how God wants us to live, we will be walking the path to heaven, and we will make our eternal home in heaven after we die.
Hi! It’s me luke. I have a question: is it possible if I can be a Swedenborgian and a Catholic? I ask this because I am part of a family of Catholics and if I were to completely convert to Swedenborgianism it would break their heart. Is it possible if I can follow the teachings of Swedenborg and be part of a Swedenborgian church while attending Catholic Church services with my family? I would describe myself as a Swedenborgian catholic. Personally I would like to completely convert to Swedenborgianism but it’s not possible for me.
Hi Luke,
There are many people who do this. My own sister is an ardent Swedenborgian, but there are no Swedenborgian churches in the area where she lives. She therefore attends a Protestant church where she is accepted and enjoys the services and the choir. And of course, there are people who come from Catholic or Protestant families who continue to go to church with their families, especially on special occasions, even after they have accepted Swedenborg’s teachings.
You may not agree with everything the priest says, but you can still participate in worshiping the Lord with other Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. After all, Jesus himself said that his followers are those who have love for one another (John 13:35), not those who believe the right thing.
The Bible provides a wonderful story about being converted, but continuing to worship with one’s own people because that is what’s expected. It is the story of Naaman the Syrian being healed from leprosy by the prophet Elisha, in 2 Kings 5:1–19. See especially the last two verses. In closing his final speech, Naaman says:
Hi Luke,
One more thing: Keep in mind that you are in a Catholic church. It’s not your job to “fix” anything or “correct” anything there. Respect their right to believe and practice as they wish, even if you don’t agree with them about certain things. This will make your life and your family’s life a lot easier. Don’t get into arguments with the priest or with your family about this or that doctrine. No good will come of that. Allow your family to practice their Catholic faith in peace, and they will know that you still care about them even if they come to realize that you don’t think the same way they do about everything.
hi!
it’s me Luke-I have one final question. I asked God what culture my soulmate would be and i had a dream which confirmed that my soulmate is Indian (from India). How can i know if this dream came from God and if I’ll be with her forever.
-Luke
Hi Luke,
That’s not a question I can answer, since I am not God, and I don’t have access to your dreams or your psyche. All I can say is that if you want to have an eternal soulmate, and you do the work of becoming a man who can love a woman unselfishly, then God will give you a soulmate when the time is right.
Does everyone who makes it to Heaven who wants to be with a soulmate get to be with one, or are there still some in Heaven that are somehow still too selfish for a relationship like that?
Hi K,
Anyone too selfish to be in a marriage relationship would be in hell, not heaven. And yes, anyone who goes to heaven who wants to be with a soulmate will be with one.
But Genesis 2:20 – “There was not a helper suitable for him.” Doesn’t that mean that man was created before woman, and woman was created after man? I plan to post a comment on one of the posts you linked to.
Hi World Questioner,
On this, please see:
Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis
Man and woman were both created together in Genesis 1:26–27, and they were called “humankind,” often translated “Adam”:
Later, in Genesis 2, Eve (woman) was taken out of Adam (humankind). This was not the creation of woman. That had already happened in Genesis 1. Rather, it was the separation of woman from man, creating a division between male and female that had not existed before. This is covered in the above-linked article.
The Gospel of Thomas teaches “the two will become one” and that woman will be one with man agaain. But that gospel was a forgery, probably written in an attempt to discredit the canon books. It was almost certainly not even written by Thomas. It was pseudopigraphical, right?
Hi World Questioner,
I don’t mean one in the sense of an androgynous being that is both male and female. I mean one in the sense of man and woman being of one mind with each other. The separation of Eve from Adam represents a divergence in the mindsets of men and women, such that they no longer see eye-to-eye with one another, and are no longer fully equal to each other.
The formation of Eve out of Adam’s (humankind’s) rib happened after the first thing is said to be “not good,” in Genesis 2:18. Before that, everything had been good. Genesis 2:18 marks a shift in the narrative. As covered in the article I linked for you, this is the point at which the fall of humankind actually begins.
Hi World Questioner,
I don’t know a lot about the Gospel of Thomas. But it is highly unlikely that it was written by the Apostle Thomas. More likely, as you say, it was just attributed to him. It seems to have come out of the Essenes or some similar Gnostic sect.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was intended to discredit the canonical Gospels. Rather, it was intended to present a different—Gnostic—view of Jesus and his message.
About Zechariah 5:9-11 and Revelation 12:1-2, 5-6… The Bible never says those females are angels, it never uses the Hebrew word Malakh or Green Angelos to describe them. Remember what you said in https://leewoof.org/2024/05/12/what-do-biblically-accurate-angels-look-like/ about the wings, wheels, and four faces, and such? Couldn’t the same apply to the females in these Zechariah and Revelation verses?
Hi World Questioner,
The article doesn’t say they’re angels. Rather, it says they are examples of female celestial beings. This suggests that the spiritual realms are not exclusively male.
I said in the other article that angels don’t have wings. But some of the celestial beings described in the Bible do have wings, including the two women in Zechariah 5:9—11.
The woman in Revelation 12 didn’t have wings at first, but she was given wings in verse 14. That in itself makes it clear that she is not a literal woman. You can’t just give someone wings and expect that they’ll be able to fly with them. The human body simply doesn’t have the skeletal structure or musculature to fly using wings. It’s been tried.
I might have miscommunicated. The wings, wheels, and four faces were not all of the things to mention. To clear things up, if the Cherubim and Seraphim and the thrones, powers, and principalities are not angels, then I would say those celestial females are not either.
Hi World Questioner,
Right. None of these celestial beings pictured in the Bible are angels, including the female ones.
Hi,
I recently thought about how Swedenborg saw aliens (extra terrestrials) in Heaven and I was wondering if humans and aliens could marry one another or is that prohibited.
Hi luke,
No good thing is prohibited in the spiritual world. However, it would be unlikely for people from different planets to marry each other in the spiritual world because their culture and character would be quite different from one another’s due to their having lived in entirely different planetary cultures.
However, Swedenborg does say that people from different planets live together in the highest, heavenly (traditionally “celestial”) level of heaven. That is the heaven of love, and love draws all people together in mutual harmony. Perhaps there, marriages between people from different planets are possible.
hi lee!
Just a quick question: can god create (or have already created for me in Heaven) a specially made anime figure just for me? Anime is one of my special interests (I have autism) and I like anime characters like Misato from Evangelion.
Hi Luke,
Sure. But it will be an anime character. It won’t be a human being with whom you can have a human relationship.
Okie, cool!
dear Lee,
hello. I was just wondering if transgender people (like me) can be the sex that we want if Swedenborg says that a man remains a man and a woman a woman. I’m discouraged by what he says.
Hi Faye,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question.
The whole transgender issue goes beyond what Swedenborg wrote about. He lived two and a half century ago, before we had much knowledge or understanding on this subject, so he really couldn’t write about it.
Swedenborg’s point in staying that a man remains a man and a woman a woman is that we do not lose our gender and become sexless beings in heaven, as was believed by many Christians of the day. Rather, we retain our gender and live as men and women just as we do here on earth. He was not arguing against the possibility of a change in gender, or that a person’s psychological gender could not be a mismatch for his or her physical gender. He was arguing against the idea that we have no gender at all in the afterlife, and that there is no marriage or sex in the afterlife, as was the common “Christian” teaching of the day.
Because Swedenborg didn’t make any statements about transgender people, we have to come to our own conclusions based on what he did say not just about gender, but about the nature of the afterlife, and what happens to us when we die and move on to the spiritual world.
The first point, of course, is that in the afterlife we don’t lose our gender and become sexless beings. We continue to have the same gender we had here on earth, and we continue to express it in marriage and lovemaking just as we do here on earth.
The question in relation to transgender people is: What gender are they here on earth? The traditionalist argument is that a person is whatever gender he or she is physically. But this becomes hard to maintain, for example, in the case of people who are born intersex. Will they be intersex in the spiritual world also, having no definite gender, but elements of both male and female, because that is how they were born physically? Will they be whatever gender was assigned to them at birth, even though they could have had the other gender assigned to them, and grown up as the other gender? These are not questions that Swedenborg grappled with, meaning that he made no statements about them.
What Swedenborg does say is that after death we remain the same person that we were inwardly here on earth. By this he means that we continue to be our true inner self, whereas any outward parts of ourselves that don’t match our inner self are stripped away during the second stage after death. During that stage, our true inner self comes out, and we can no longer pretend outwardly to be something we aren’t.
His point in saying this is that there is no faking or facades in the spiritual world. Whatever we are like inwardly, that’s what we will be like outwardly also.
However, it’s not too big a jump to say that if someone is female inwardly, but physically male, that person’s inward self will be her true self, whereas the outward maleness will drop away during the transitional period after death—in the second stage after death, if not before. This, at any rate, is what I have come to believe.
In other words, I believe that unlike in the physical world where physical gender is commonly considered a person’s “real” gender, in the spiritual world it will be a person’s inner or psychological gender that will be that person’s real gender. If I am right about this, then in the spiritual world, people whose physical gender does not match their psychological gender will no longer have a body that doesn’t match their psychological gender. It will be their physical gender that changes, not their psychological gender.
In plain terms, I have come to believe that in the spiritual world, trans women will have female bodies, and trans men will have male bodies.
Am I right about this?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to go to the spiritual world and find out for sure. But based on my reading and understanding of what Swedenborg teaches about the afterlife, this seems to me to be the most solid conclusion.
Hi Reverend Lee,
I have a question that’s related to gender in heaven but is somewhat different. I’ve been thinking about who I am and my body and I was wondering if i can have a copy of my face but a female version of it in my spiritual body in Heaven while remaining a male. So a male body with a female face/head. I think that would make me the most happiest. I still see myself as a male/guy but it’s complicated because I’d rather have a female version of my face than a male version.
Hi luke/faye,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question. I wouldn’t want to say this is impossible, because I don’t really know for sure. As Swedenborg describes them, angels are either fully male or fully female. But angels’ bodies also fully correspond to their mind and character. Would it be possible to have a character that corresponds to a female face on a male body? Honestly, I’m skeptical of that. However, in these days of people not fitting into the usual patterns of gender, orientation, and so on, again, I wouldn’t want to say that it’s impossible.
Swedenborg describes people being able to make something like holographic imagery with mental ability in the spirit realm. I think that means New Church angels could use such an ability to make ethereal wings and maybe even halos appear, especially to accommodate expectations of people from this modern world.
Hi K,
Yes, this would be perfectly possible. Wings correspond to spiritual truth, which is why they are commonly associated with spiritual beings. Halos are also an expression of spiritual truth radiating out from the faces of spiritual people. Even in the Bible, Moses was seen with a halo around him, which wasn’t the stylized circle of light common in artwork, but an actual light flowing out from his face. If, as you say, these things are possible even for us here on earth, they are certainly possible for angels in heaven.