For some scholars, it’s possible to see throughlines from the early days of the Hebrew scriptures to the modern Christian idea of angels. Some believe that it’s possible to go back even further and see the earlier inspiration for these semi-divine beings in a culture that would have been familiar though still very foreign to the ancient Jewish people moving throughout the region.

According to a PhD dissertation via Stellenbosch University, it’s quite possible that ancient Hebrews may have taken some angelic cues from the ancient Egyptians. Namely, Egyptian people thousands of years ago had already established a sort of divine hierarchy, with a primary god who used intermediaries to go between the world of the gods and the mundane realm of humans. Common motifs like those of heavenly thrones and divine fire link the two belief systems, which may have crossed paths most readily during the exile of Jewish people into Mesopotamia around 600 BCE.

Furthermore, Britannica notes that ancient Egyptians frequently used wings to mark out divine or semi-divine figures in their belief system, like a winged sun disk meant to represent Horus. To be fair, there’s no smoking gun here, like a clay tablet, stone inscription, or scroll wherein someone in the Jewish community admits that they took a liking to foreign religious influences. Yet, the parallels are intriguing and, for many scholars interested in Biblical angels, pretty hard to ignore.

For many people, the host of angels and demons are like two inextricably linked sides of one great battle. And the two are so deeply connected because, in the case of the demons, they were once angels as well. Or were they?

The truth, at least as it’s reflected in the Bible, is quite a bit more tangled than folklore might have you believe. According to the Journal of Biblical Literature, there’s very little at all in the Hebrew Bible to support the notion of fallen angels turning into demons. In fact, ancient Jewish people don’t seem to have thought they were connected at all, especially once you start digging into the details of translating texts from archaic or Biblical Hebrew into later languages such as Greek and English.

The conflation of angels and demons appears to have been the invention of Christian writers, only first showing up in the New Testament in some pretty vague language. The concept of rebellious angels being kicked out of Heaven and becoming fundamentally evil only really gained popularity sometime around the 3rd century CE. The confusion may have arisen in part because of a misunderstanding of the Greek word daimon, which could have been meant to refer to all manner of things. These could include inhuman spirits, gods, human souls or even the entire concept of the divine — and without a moral judgment as to the nature of these different beings.

Folklore traditions generally hold that there are seven archangels. According to The Guardian, they include Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, and Remiel. While that may make for some interesting stories and an overall concept of a heavenly hierarchy where this team of big-time angels act as upper management, it’s not strictly Biblical. Those last four angels are only named in the Book of Enoch. And, if you happen to have a copy of the Bible handy, you can easily confirm that Enoch isn’t a standard book of the Bible. It’s actually an apocryphal, non-canonical book that mostly focuses on the apocalypse (via Britannica). Some archangels also appear in other apocryphal works, but things like Raphael’s appearance in the Book of Tobit aren’t necessarily going to make an appearance in the next Sunday sermon.

So, which of the archangels are actually mentioned in the Bible? Only two, as it turns out. Per The Guardian, the archangel Michael pops up in the books of Daniel, Jude, and Revelation. Daniel 12:1 specifically references Michael as a “great prince” who watches over the Jewish people and will protect many during the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, the archangel known as Gabriel also appears in the Book of Daniel. He shows up again in the New Testament Book of Luke, where he’s tasked with announcing the coming of John the Baptist to the prophet Zechariah and then the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary (via Britannica).

Maybe you’ve seen angels in sugary sweet, mass-produced oil paintings or perhaps a curio on a grandparent’s knick-knack shelf. That particular angel probably looks like a beautiful human dressed in flowing robes and with great, feathery wings sprouting from their back. But, if you were to encounter a Bible-accurate angel like those described by the prophet Isaiah, you would surely be shocked by the strange creature in front of you.

The creature in question might well have been a seraph (or seraphim when they appear in a group). According to Britannica, these angels — also known as the “burning ones” — first appear in the Bible in the Old Testament vision of Isaiah. They have six wings, with one pair to hide their faces and another set reserved to conceal their feet (via Jewish Encyclopedia). The remaining set of wings is what allows these angels to fly about.

Isaiah sees them standing before the throne of God, praising the Almighty while one makes its way to Isaiah to cleanse the human man with a coal taken from the temple altar. Otherwise, there’s not much in the way of a clear description, though scholars think that the seraphim may have their roots in a half-lion, half-eagle Egyptian creature known as a seref. Other pre-Biblical scriptures linked to these angels also seem to reference serpents and dragons. Yet, we can still be sure that it’s all a far cry from a twee porcelain figurine.

While the Bible contains some information about high-ranking angels (implying but never really describing an overall hierarchy), more complete information comes from people writing only after the canonical Bible was more or less established. Early Christian author and philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who worked in the 5th and 6th centuries CE, was one of the earliest Christians to outline the hierarchy of angels, at least as he saw fit. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dionysius was pretty focused on establishing hierarchies within his religion, perhaps in an attempt to strengthen the structure of the church and Christianity in general.

In his writings, the hierarchy of heavenly beings includes nine ranks of angels, which rank the six-winged seraphim towards the bottom, followed up by four-faced cherubim, then a progressively exclusive set of higher beings that include “dominions,” “principalities,” and archangels (via The Arcanum). Meanwhile, the Mishneh Torah, a code of law written by medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, also discusses various ranks of angels and spirits. Yet, you won’t find much, if any textual evidence for this very complex sort of arrangement of the angels in the Bible itself.