To lay a foundation on what biblically accurate angels look like, first of all, take a look at what the Scriptures say about them. What do angels really look like according to the Bible? What are their features? How Did The Bible Describe Angels? That is what we will explore in this article. The Old Testament, the book of Revelations, as well as a few other texts, give angelic descriptions contrary to what most people have come to know. Though the Bible doesn’t give a specific form for all angels, it does describe a few of them and this description is very different from what many people have imagined them to be. However, it is inaccurate by biblical standards. This ideology was greatly influenced and it gained popularity from the depiction of angels in Christian art and media over the years. Some people even imagine angels like cherubims to look like little plump children with halos, tiny wings, and white loincloths, floating around on clouds with their harps. Since 2004, it has been successively replaced by the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), which is initially being published in individual fascicles.When most people think of angels, a mental picture of a huge glowing human-like figure in white robes, massive white wings, and perhaps a halo, immediately comes to mind. It provides the basis both for clerical training and for all reputable biblical translations. The BHS is in worldwide use today and is esteemed among all denominations as a highly reliable edition of the Hebrew Bible. The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), which reflects the findings from more than a hundred years of Old Testament textual research, is structured according to this principle.
To be able to present a uniform text in a printed edition, it is thus expedient to present the Masoretic Text, with the respective extant variants in a critical apparatus – where applicable in combination with proposals for correction of the Masoretic Text. However, in view of the haphazard and incomplete nature of these text witnesses, complete reconstruction of a text of the Hebrew Bible is not possible. With the discovery of numerous manuscripts, above all the Qumran texts, we have at our disposal renderings of the Old Testament text that predate the Masoretic version. The Masoretic Text does not reproduce the original biblical text in all instances. In this form, it was handed down further with meticulous care by the so-called Masoretes. Originally comprising only consonants, this text was provided with vowel marks as of about 700 AD. The Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex are two prominent and exemplary instances of the so-called Masoretic Text, the version that was proclaimed definitive by Jewish scribes around 100 AD. The oldest complete transcript of the Hebrew Bible that we know today is the Codex Leningradensis from the year 1008 almost a hundred years older, but unfortunately no longer complete, is the Aleppo Codex from 930. Further ancient translations subsequently arose as additional indirect witnesses, in particular the Latin Vulgate, the Syrian Peshitta, and the Aramaic Targum. This is the oldest and most significant indirect witness of the wording of the Hebrew text as it existed at that time. Textual witnesses in significant quantities that are important to Old Testament textual research are today only available from around the 3rd century BC: The first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the so-called Septuagint, dates back to this era.
With the exception of one single transcript of the Book of Isiah retained in its entirety, the biblical texts from Qumran exclusively comprise fragments on which in most cases only a few connected words, and often no more than individual letters, can be identified. Among these were the remains of some 200 transcripts of individual books of the Bible from the period between 150 BC and 70 AD. The oldest direct textual witnesses are the manuscripts that were discovered from 1949 onwards in the Judean Desert in the caves of Qumran on the Dead Sea. This would not be possible on the basis of the manuscripts available: The oldest portions of the Old Testament date back to the time of the Kingdom of Israel (8th/9th centuries BC), from which period no manuscripts are extant today. Unlike the scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia does not set out to reconstruct the original text of the Hebrew Bible. To this day, it is the only complete scholarly edition of the Codex Leningradensis and contains all significant text variants and proposals for correction in the critical apparatus. The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is the successor to the Biblia Hebraica edited by Rudolf Kittel.
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