Angels are typically pictured to be the holier-than-thou servants of God adorned with cherubic faces and fluffy wings, but some books in the Bible paint a vastly different — and much scarier — being that is starting to top Christmas trees across the US.
Rev. Kira Austin-Young and her puppet-maker husband, Michael Schupbach, cooked up the idea of making their own series of biblically accurate angels over the pandemic to relieve their cabin fever.
“I think in, particularly, the times of the world that we’re in, where things seem kind of scary and weird, having a scary and weird angel sort of speaks to people,” Austin-Young said.
The Bible has sparse descriptions of what angels are actually supposed to look like. Many left it up to interpretation, which brought forth the usually white and blonde divine messengers most often seen in churches and Renaissance art.
The Book of Revelations at the end of the Bible and some of the books of the prophets in the Old Testament are the few portions that delve into what exactly God’s soldiers are supposed to look like — and they are nowhere near as pretty as the average churchgoer thinks.
“Some of them have six wings with eyes covering the wings. Others have multiple animal heads,” Austin-Young said.
“I think one of the delightful things about the Bible and the Scripture is just kind of how bizarre it can be and just how kind of out there it can be.”
Social media and pop culture are full of various interpretations of these “biblically accurate angels” that have cropped up in drawings, as tattoo inspiration, and even makeup tutorials.
One of Austin-Young’s favorite portrayals of the annunciation — the scene where the archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she is going to carry and give birth to the son of God — is by Henry Ossawa Tanner. It portrays Gabriel as being little more than a vague shape of light with no distinct humanoid features or even a physical figure at all.
“It kind of makes you rethink, ‘What would that be like to be approached by an angel?’” she said.
“If it’s somebody you don’t know, or if it’s a strange creature, or if it’s just this kind of manifestation of God’s message to you. … That could be anything.”
Esther Hamori, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary, delineates the key differences between angels and other “supernatural species” mentioned throughout the Bible like the seraphim and cherubim.
“It shows that people are thinking about ways in which the Bible contains far stranger things than what’s often taught,” Hamori wrote.
“The biblical heavens are filled with weird, frightening figures. In the Bible, God has an entourage of monsters.”
Even though people often confuse God’s angels with his other mystifying catalog of creatures, Hamori is still a fan of the biblically accurate angel trend.
About 7 in 10 adults in the United States believe in angels, according to a 2023 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Even so, there has never been agreement on what they are supposed to look like, or even what they truly are.