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Japanese No. Butterflies are never mentioned in the Bible, and Scripture gives them no meaning of their own. The moth appears instead, ten times in the King James Version, nearly always as something that eats away. Its place in Christian hope came later, from saints who heard how a crawling creature comes out with wings and thought of new life.
Among them was Basil, bishop of Caesarea, who died in 379. Preaching on the creatures God made, he turned to his hearers and asked, “What have you to say, you who do not believe in the change that Paul promises you in the resurrection, when you see so many metamorphoses among creatures of the air?” Paul’s promise is plain: “we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52). The Bible never shows us a butterfly. It does promise us that change.
Is the butterfly in the Bible at all?
Not by name, in any verse, in the Hebrew, the Greek or the English. Scripture names other insects. The law lists “the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind” (Leviticus 11:22). Proverbs sends the lazy man to the ant (Proverbs 6:6). The King James Version’s “caterpiller” is no butterfly’s young: the Hebrew word, chasil, means a kind of locust, and Joel lists it with the palmerworm and the cankerworm as one more wave of the swarm that stripped the land (Joel 1:4).
The butterfly’s nearest neighbour in Scripture is the moth, Hebrew ash, Greek ses, and it never flies there. It eats and wears away. Job speaks of us who “dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth” (Job 4:19). Isaiah says of those who revile God’s people, “the moth shall eat them up like a garment,” and in the same breath, “but my righteousness shall be for ever” (Isaiah 51:8). Jesus tells us not to lay up treasure on earth, “where moth and rust doth corrupt” (Matthew 6:19). The moth stands for everything that wears out. There is more on it in what the Bible says about moths.
Does the Bible talk about metamorphosis?
It does, though not about insects. The English word “metamorphosis” comes from a Greek verb, metamorphoo, that the New Testament uses four times, and every time for a change God works. Twice it describes Jesus on the mountain: he “was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matthew 17:2; also Mark 9:2). Twice it describes us. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul writes (Romans 12:2), and, “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
That is the change the butterfly makes Christians think of. Paul says it in plain words too: “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The butterfly is not in the verse. The new creature is.
What does a butterfly symbolize in Christianity?
For Christians the butterfly has come to stand for the resurrection and for the soul made new in Christ. That meaning comes from the church’s teachers, not from a verse, and two of them wrote of it.
The link between the butterfly and the soul is older than the church. The Greek word psyche meant “soul,” and Aristotle used the same word for a butterfly or moth. The New Testament uses psyche often, but always for the soul or the life, never for the insect.
Basil’s sermons on the six days of creation, the Hexaemeron, describe “the horned worm of India,” which “changes into a caterpillar, then becomes a buzzing insect.” He meant the silkworm, and he told the women of his congregation, who wove its silk into dresses, to think of it at their looms: “remember the metamorphoses of this creature, conceive a clear idea of the resurrection, and do not refuse to believe in the change that Paul announces for all men.”
Twelve centuries later Teresa of Ávila, the Carmelite nun and reformer, wrote the same creature into The Interior Castle. The silkworm, she says, spins “the house wherein it must die,” and she tells her sisters what that house is: “By this house, when speaking of the soul, I mean Christ.” She was remembering, she says, something she had read or heard, “that our life is hid in Christ”; the King James Version gives Paul’s words as “your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Teresa is describing a stage of prayer, which she calls the prayer of union. When, “by means of this prayer,” the soul has died to the world, “it comes forth like a lovely little white butterfly!” She saw in it a soul so changed that it hardly knows itself, “as different from what it was as is the white butterfly from the repulsive caterpillar.”
Is the butterfly a symbol of the resurrection in the Bible?
Not in the Bible. When Paul pictures the resurrection, his image is a seed. “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain… But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him” (1 Corinthians 15:36–38). “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory” (15:42–43). Jesus used the same picture of his own death: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).
The butterfly tells the same story the seed tells, which is why Christians have loved it, and we are free to love it too. Only let the promise rest on Christ’s word and not on the insect. Our hope is that the Lord Jesus Christ “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Whether we have fallen asleep before he comes or are still alive, the change is his work, not nature’s.
Is a butterfly a sign from God?
Scripture never says so. It gives no meaning to a butterfly that crosses our path, lands on our hand, or comes in a dream, and it gives no meaning to its colour. Scripture warns us away from reading signs in such things: “There shall not be found among you any one … that useth divination, or an observer of times” (Deuteronomy 18:10). The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise lists the “interpretation of omens and lots” among the kinds of divination that the Catholic Church tells the faithful to reject (paragraph 2116). The same answer is given for other creatures people ask about, such as the dragonfly.
If a butterfly came to you after someone you love had died, Scripture does not teach that it was a message from them, and it does not need to be. God has told us plainly what we may hope. “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14). The butterfly can remind us of that promise. It cannot add to it.
What a butterfly does tell us, Scripture invites us to hear. “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee… Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?” (Job 12:7, 9). Jesus told us to look at the lilies, which “toil not, neither do they spin,” and are dressed better than Solomon (Matthew 6:28–29). A butterfly on a summer flower is that same lesson with wings. God clothes it, and he will clothe us.
The moth in Scripture eats the old garment. The God of Scripture promises a new one. “And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
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