According to Britannica, the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit mentions not just the archangel Raphael but a group of seven archangels whose job is apparently to take up all the prayers of saints and deliver them to God. That’s backed up somewhat in the canonical Book of Revelation; in particular, Revelation 8:2, which references the sight of “the seven angels who stand before God.” Yet, if you’re looking for any more information in either the deuterocanonical texts or the rest of the Christian Bible, you’re out of luck.

However, that doesn’t mean that other churches don’t have a tradition of naming those angels or even occasionally adding to their number. Eastern Orthodox churches typically venerate seven archangels and even go so far as to name them. Transfiguration of Our Lord Russian Orthodox Church maintains that these seven include: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Selaphiel, Jegudiel, and Barachiel. Each angel has a particular aspect to their being and how they interact with the human world, like Uriel’s mission to bring awareness of God and faith to people with “the fire of divine love.”

Coptic Christians recognize the same number of archangels, though they go by Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Suriel, Zedekiel, Serathiel, and Ananiel (via Become Orthodox). They’re part of an angelic and spiritual hierarchy that’s said to include tens of thousands of angels, along with a separate group named the Twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse.

While Christian and Jewish concepts of archangels may dominate the minds of many Western readers, make no mistake: these religions don’t have a monopoly on these mysterious heavenly figures. In Zoroastrianism — an ancient religion that has its roots in Iran — supreme god Ahura Mazdā is known to have created six “divine beings” that are often identified as archangels and called the Amesha Spenta. And where many Christian traditions tend to assume that the archangels are all male, Britannica notes that this group is specifically gendered — three of the Amesha Spenta are female, while the other three are male. They also all have their own specific attributes, like Asha Vahishta, who presides over cosmic order and justice. Elsewhere, Spenta Armaiti uses her powers to protect the faithful and has presiding power over the Earth. Each of these archangels is said to be set against a particular high-ranking demon, as well.

Encyclopedia.com reports that the full complement of Amesha Spenta is: Vohu Manah, Asha Vahista, Khshathra Vairya, Spenta Armaiti, Haurvatat, and Ameretat. All seem to straddle the line between divine and human, with connections to Ahura Mazdā and links to encouraging good human attributes like justice, good thoughts, devotion, and more.

In many of the belief systems that include archangels, their mere presence implies a hierarchy. After all, if there are regular old angels who are then outranked by various levels of other divine beings, then it stands that there’s some sort of heavenly pecking order in place. But despite that seemingly straightforward assumption, there’s a lot about how that hierarchy is interpreted that can set your head spinning. In short, it’s complicated. Really, really complicated.

Consider the way that many Eastern Orthodox churches interpret the angelic hierarchy. According to Orthodox Church in America, there are nine ranks of angels, which are then further subdivided into high, middle, and low hierarchies. At the top are seraphim, which can get the closest to God and the rest of the Trinity, followed by the cherubim and the thrones. The middle rank encompasses dominions, powers, and authorities. And the lowest hierarchy includes principalities, angels, and — surprisingly enough for some non-Orthodox folks — archangels.

This actually isn’t a strictly new interpretation of the angelic hierarchy, which tends to rank the archangels towards the bottom of the divine heap because they’re effectively God’s messenger boys. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a 5th-century religious figure, put down a similar ranking. It’s all a part of his mystical work, “The Celestial Hierarchy,” one of the earliest Christian works of angelology that goes into great detail about the nature of all these angels, their situations, duties, general look, and more.

While many archangels are now venerated in religion — Michael is revered as a saint in the Catholic Christian tradition, for instance — that doesn’t always mean that they come across as cuddly, benevolent creatures a la “Touched by an Angel.” That was painfully obvious to Jacob, who wrestled with a mysterious man in Genesis 32. The figure in question is often interpreted as an angel, having the supernatural power to dislocate Jacob’s hip and then give him a blessing for his troubles.

However, archangels can do a lot worse than popping someone’s hip out of joint. After all, an archangel could hound you about intimate body parts, as happened to Moses in Exodus 4. Most English translations of the Bible maintain that God was about to kill Moses for dragging his feet on the issue of circumcision. The matter was resolved when Moses’ wife, Tzipporah, hastily grabbed the couple’s son and did the deed with a sharp stone.

But things change depending on where you are on the timeline. Earlier Greek translations of the original Hebrew text say that it was actually an “angel of the Lord” that was about to do the killing, according to “Eerdmans Critical Commentary: Exodus.” And rabbinical commentaries on the episode also indicate the general belief that an angel was the one about to do the smiting. This may have been a mistranslation, or a shuffling off of responsibility somewhat onto the shoulders of a powerful and vengeful archangel.

According to How Stuff Works, the angel of death isn’t specifically identified as an archangel in the Christian tradition — that’s a more modern development in archangel lore. That said, there are plenty of angels that appear to bring death and ferry souls to the afterlife in the Bible, per Christianity.com. For instance, angels kill thousands of enemy combatants, and you can make the case that they’ll have a hand in all the death and destruction that’s set to take place at the end of the world. Yet, nothing clearly marks these terrifying figures out as archangels rather than another type of named angel.

However, Islamic belief maintains that the deadly angel is, in fact, an archangel. But there’s no clear evidence that said angel goes by Azrael, as some sources will have you believe. Instead, most call the archangel Malak al-Mawt, which translates from Arabic to “angel of death.” Whatever the archangel’s name, they have a fearful reputation. In Islam, Malak al-Mawt is tasked with listing and collecting all of the souls that are due to die. And some popular retellings of the Passover story say that it was the angel of death who visited the firstborns of Egypt — but clear evidence of that angel’s presence in Exodus is scanty.