When most people hear the word “angel,” a specific image likely comes to mind: glowing figures in white robes with feathery wings and gentle faces. But according to Bible scholar Wes Huff, that’s not quite what the Scriptures are actually talking about.
In a wide-ranging conversation on the Julian Dorey Podcast, Huff dove into the confusion many people have surrounding supernatural beings in the Bible. “One of the issues is that we often refer to a bunch of these things as angels,” Huff said. “Angel is not what the thing is, it’s what the thing does.”
That might sound odd to anyone who grew up thinking of “angel” as a specific kind of being. But Huff explained that the word malakh in Hebrew—or angelos in Greek—literally just means “messenger.”
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“These are supernatural beings who go and they communicate messages to people,” he said. “They’re in some sort of relation in terms of their supernatural [nature] to other creatures like the seraphim and the cherubim.”
So what are seraphim and cherubim? Not fat babies with wings, that’s for sure. According to Huff, they’re “supernatural divine throne guardians”—a concept shared across the ancient world. “You have lamu, which are the winged bulls with the human heads in Babylon, and you have sphinxes in Egyptian and Hellenistic culture. These were just concepts that existed within the ancient world: the gods have throne guardians.”
It’s these beings that show up in so-called “biblically accurate angel” memes. “Those are cherubim,” Huff clarified. “That’s what they are. It’s not actually an angel—it’s kind of a misnomer.”
The podcast also explored the murky waters of Genesis 6, where “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive” and fathered the mysterious Nephilim. Huff noted that ancient Jewish thinkers tried to unpack that strange story in the book of Enoch, a text that wasn’t considered Scripture by Jews or most Christians but was included in the Ethiopian Bible.
“The book of Enoch is part of the literature that’s trying to explain that—what on Earth is this?” he said.
Still, Huff was quick to clear up a major internet myth: “There is definitely a prevailing myth on the internet that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible, and that’s not true.” The oldest full copy of the Ethiopian Bible dates back only to the 14th century.
So what should we take away from all this? For starters, our modern language often flattens the complex spiritual categories the Bible uses. And second, the ancient Jewish worldview included a far richer supernatural realm than we often assume.
If nothing else, Huff’s comments invite us to re-read familiar texts with fresh eyes, and maybe stop calling everything an angel.
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James Lasher is staff writer for Charisma Media.
