The messengers of scripture — before the hierarchies were drawn, there were only the ones who came and spoke.
The Angels of Scripture
Long before Pseudo-Dionysius sorted the heavenly host into nine ranks, the angels of the Bible appear as something plainer and stranger: messengers (the Hebrew mal'akh and the Greek angelos both mean simply "messenger") who arrive, deliver a word or a judgment, and depart. They are rarely described in detail and almost never named. Only a handful carry names across the canonical and deuterocanonical texts, and those names became the seed of the whole later system of Archangels and choirs.
The Named Ones
Michael — the only angel scripture calls an archangel by name (Jude 1:9), the great prince who stands guard over Israel (Daniel 10, 12) and wars against the dragon in Revelation 12. Gabriel — the herald who interprets Daniel's visions and announces the births of John and of Christ (Luke 1). Raphael — who walks with Tobias and binds a demon in the Book of Tobit, naming himself "one of the seven who stand before the Lord." Uriel — not in the Protestant canon but prominent in the Book of Enoch and 2 Esdras, the angel of light and of the questions that have no easy answer.
The Living Creatures
The strangest angels are the ones scripture does describe. The Seraphim ("burning ones") appear once, in Isaiah 6 — six-winged, crying Holy, holy, holy around the throne. The Cherubim guard Eden with a flaming sword (Genesis 3), overshadow the Ark, and reappear in Ezekiel's vision as the four-faced, many-eyed hayyot, the living creatures beneath the chariot-throne. John's Revelation gathers them again as the four beasts around the throne. These are the raw material the tradition later ranked and tamed.
The Angel of the Lord
A recurring and ambiguous figure — the mal'akh YHWH who speaks to Hagar, stays Abraham's knife, wrestles Jacob, and burns in the bush before Moses — often speaking as God in the first person. Whether a distinct angel or a veiled appearance of the divine itself is a question the text leaves open.
Related
Choirs — Seraphim · Cherubim · Thrones · Dominions · Virtues · Powers · Principalities · Archangels · Angels Archangels — Michael · Gabriel · Raphael · Uriel · Haniel · Sandalphon · Metatron
- Angels & Demons — the collection this belongs to
- KJV Study — the scriptures these figures appear in