#or a more bizarre shaped biblically accurate ones

[rasticore]

Camael ripe for the "my pronouns are they/them not because i'm non-binary but because i'm Literally Everyone" joke

[thirdmagic]

nnnnnnnnn okay so disclaimer that i am not a scholar or an expert on this topic it's more like.... a hobby for me, as weird as it sounds, so this is all me speaking very, very generally. but here's the thing. when angels actually appear in the majority biblical texts, particularly the early ones, they just look like regular humans. the word originally used to describe angels didn't even mean any kind of supernatural being, the word that would eventually be translated as angel, mal'akh/מלאך, just means 'messenger' and can be used to refer to a regular human; the original text just calls them 'messengers of god', and i don't think it ever explicitly states what exactly they are, though the assumption that they're supernatural or divine in some way is a fairly obvious and reasonable one, and it is the natural, traditional reading. later translations would refer to messengers of god and regular human messengers using different terminology, and as i understand it that's where the word angel comes from in the first place, but this distinction doesn't exist in the original text. there's even times when angels are referred to using the same words as regular humans before the narrator and/or character recognizes them as god's messenger. the angel that jacob wrestled with, for example, is just referred to as 'a man', and you surmise that he's a divine messenger and therefore an angel through context clues, although there's also debate over who exactly it was that he fought and whether there even was an angel or in-between or if it really was god himself as we're meant to understand it, but that’s a very radical reading, but that's just one of the things that we don't have clear answers for and are up for interpretation.

anyway, there’s also many stories of angels coming in and blending in with the crowd amongst regular people; the reason people freak out when they recognize them as angels isn't because of the way they look, it's because if god went out of his way to sent his messenger specifically to be in your presence, the implications of that are pretty terrifying for any regular human being living in the ancient near east, and if you don't respect them you're fucked up, and the news they bring is really good or really, really bad. but it's their presence that people are generally reacting and/or freaking out over, not their actual appearance.

and speaking of the fiery concentric wheel with eyes thing: it comes from exactly one (1) passage in the entire hebrew bible, in the book of ezekiel, one of the books of the prophets, a book that comes fairly late both chronologically (in terms of when it was probably written) and its ordering, and has a lot of odd imagery and writing. like, all books and writings in the prophets section have a lot of vivid, creative, fantastical imagery for the purpose of allegory and/or making a specific point, but this particular prophet has a really, really vivid imagination that outdoes all of that. anyway this wheel is a vision he has in the first chapter, and it’s also never at any point referred to as an angel, and it’s how he describes seeing what’s basically a symbolic manifestation of god. the word for the thing he says it is appears in other places, but in these contexts it’s usually either not seen but is understood to be impossible to comprehend or is generally not described at all, making this just a generally very unusual choice of description. 

and to be honest, you could write a hell lot more about this particular passage because there's so much going on there, and this whole book, because it's such an odd one and it's so beyond bizarre in its content. it's actually really fascinating and it really says a lot about the author and his own mindset... like, for example, there’s one very memorable chapter that's incredibly sexual and about as actively graphic as any text in the bible ever gets to the point where it doesn't feel like it belongs there, and i'm actually kind of shocked this chapter even made its way into the canon? (the whole chapter uses adultery as a metaphor for betrayal, which is pretty standard, but there is a line where he condemns women preferring foreigners because they have bigger dicks???) and also possibly the one bit of writing across all these books that you can actually classify and define as virulently misogynistic to the point where it’s horrifically uncomfortable to read, but it's kind of fascinating how you can see these texts written by a man who's been dead for thousands of years and who you know little about beyond his 'job' and understand something like this about him just from his writing? but what i'm saying is, this passage, all of the writing in his book, and the descriptions in it are not at all standard and are the exception rather than the rule, so you can't apply it as a general statement of what x thing in the bible is like.

you also have other words like seraph, cherub, and so on, referring to other kinds of heavenly servants/messengers, but these references are more or less scattered across the bible in different contexts and places and aren't very consistent, and i know less about those beyond that. i do know a 'cherub' is a name for a kind of mythical beast from canaanite mythology that's a bit like a sphinx, which i guess is closer to the idea of angels are something terrifying, and i do know that seraphs are described as kind of flaming vaguely human-shaped beings basically covered with wings, which they use both for flying and for modesty, but the context in which these are written also means you can't really take it at face value and they could honestly very well be allegorical or just any other kind of literary devices. and while a lot of later traditions would re-contextualize them as a type of angel, i'm not sure if this was the intent or the idea behind these references or how they're meant to be understood or perceived, i think it's also one of these things that's up for a lot of debate even amongst actual scholars.

so that was an infodump but tl;dr if you want biblically accurate angels, you have options, and ‘fiery wheel with eyes’ is not one of them. mind you, the point that the original meme was trying to make, about how the way most art depicts them is inaccurate, is also true, because the image of them as people with halos and wings and harps/robes etc aren’t biblically accurate either.