Cherubim

Two figures of hammered gold stood in a room with no windows, turned to face each other across a lid, their wings reaching forward until the tips nearly met above it. Nobody looked at them. The chamber was sealed, the air inside heavy with resin smoke that had soaked into the curtains for generations, and once a year one man went in through it and came out again alive. Everything ancient Israel believed about where its God sat was concentrated in the gap between two pairs of wings.

The cherubim are the most frequently mentioned and least described creatures in the Hebrew Bible. Exodus gives their metal, their manufacture and the direction of their gaze. Kings gives their timber, their height and their wingspan to the cubit. Neither text pauses to say whether the thing being measured had a beak, a muzzle or a face like a man, and that silence is not carelessness. You do not explain to your readers what a lion is.

Their name almost certainly came into Hebrew from further east. The Akkadian karibu were minor divine beings, blessed ones, whose job was to stand in front of a god with their hands raised and pray on behalf of somebody else, and the root behind the word means to bless. Hebrew has its own word for blessing built from the same three consonants in a different order, which is one reason scholars read keruv as an import rather than a native coinage. Mesopotamian and Levantine builders set colossal hybrid guardians at the doors of palaces and temples, and Israel’s neighbours knew them under a whole family of names, karibu and apkallu and lamassu and shedu among them. Israel built its own, and put them where the doors mattered most.

The first of them appears at the worst possible moment. Adam and Eve are driven out, and God stations the cherubim east of the garden of Eden along with a sword of fire that turns in every direction, to guard the road back to the tree of life. There is no negotiation in the scene and no dialogue. The gate simply acquires a garrison, and the story of humanity begins on the wrong side of it. Ezekiel later returns to Eden with a variation, addressing a fallen figure on the holy mountain as the guardian cherub who was expelled from among the stones of fire, an image that would be pressed into Christian service centuries afterwards to explain how an angel fell.

In the tabernacle they change function entirely. Two of them, beaten from a single piece of gold with the lid they stand on, face one another with wings spread forward to shelter the kapporet, and from the space between them God speaks. In Solomon’s temple they grow monstrous. The pair in the inner shrine are carved from olive wood and gilded, each ten cubits high, roughly twenty-two feet, with a wingspan to match, so that one wing of each touched a side wall while the inner wings met in the middle of the room. A visitor would have seen a wall of gold-covered wing running the full width of the holiest space in the country. Ibn Ezra, reading the Eden verse a couple of thousand years later, called them frightening images, and the architecture supports him.

They also fly. A poem preserved twice, in Second Samuel and in the Psalms, has God mount a cherub and take off, swooping on the wings of the wind, and a recurring divine title calls him the one who sits upon the cherubim. Ezekiel, watching from exile by a canal in Babylonia, saw the whole apparatus in motion: four living creatures under a crystal platform, each with four faces, human and lion and ox and eagle, and the sound of their wings like a great water, like an army, like the voice of God. When the glory left the temple, they carried it out. In the second telling of the same vision the ox face has become the face of a cherub, which either means a cherub looks like an ox or means the prophet stopped bothering to distinguish. The wall carvings he describes elsewhere in the temple have only two faces each, human and leonine, alternating with palm trees. The record does not agree with itself.

Neither does the long argument about what they were. The prevailing modern view, argued forcefully by William Albright and carried by most scholarship since, is that a cherub is a winged sphinx: a human-headed, winged lion of exactly the sort that flanks the throne on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos. The nineteenth century preferred the Assyrian human-headed winged bull, dug up at Nineveh and Khorsabad and paraded through European museums, a case that rested partly on a reading of the Akkadian that has since been withdrawn. Dillmann argued for the griffin. Rashbam thought they were birds. Raanan Eichler has made the sharpest recent case for winged humans, on the grounds that the temple cherubim’s wingspan is given as equal to their height, a proportion that looks absurd on a four-legged animal and looks exactly right on a person, whose outstretched arms match their stature. Seals from Beth Shemesh and Tell el-Ajjul show armless winged figures with their wings held out in front of them, sheltering, precisely as Exodus describes.

The chubby infant is the youngest answer and the worst. A third-century rabbi in Caesarea, R. Abbahu, read keruv as though it contained the Aramaic word for a small child, at a period when Greco-Roman art was full of winged boys, and the reading stuck. Renaissance painters finished the job by merging the biblical creature with the putto, so that the word now conjures a nude toddler on a cloud. Nothing in the sources supports it. Around the same time, an anonymous Greek writer working somewhere between 485 and 528 and signing himself as Paul’s Athenian convert built the nine ranks of angels that Christian tradition inherited, placing the cherubim second, below the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah’s vision and above the thrones, and glossing their name as a fullness of knowledge. That hierarchy is late antique Neoplatonism, not scripture, and it has outlived nearly everything that was written about them earlier.

What they can do follows from what they are for. They bar, they lift, they cover, they carry. Their wings do the work in every context, whether spread over a gold lid, filling a stone room, or hauling the glory of God across a foreign sky. Their limits follow just as directly. Not one cherub in the Hebrew Bible is given a name, a will, or a word to say; they are placed and they hold position, and when the temple was stripped, the ones in Jerusalem could be prised off the walls and melted like any other fitting. They are also, in the end, unreachable. The talmudic tradition claims the curtain was drawn back at festivals to show the pilgrims the two cherubim on the Ark with their wings intertwined, and that the priests told them this was what God’s love for Israel looked like. It is a warm story about two objects nobody was allowed to touch, standing over a box in the dark, guarding a road that had already been closed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are cherubim in the Bible?

Cherubim are winged divine beings who guard sacred space and support or shelter the presence of God. They appear at the gate of Eden with a turning sword of fire, as two gold figures on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, as ten-cubit gilded statues in Solomon’s temple, and as the four-faced living creatures that carry God’s glory in Ezekiel’s vision.

What do cherubim actually look like?

The Bible never says. It records their materials, their dimensions and the position of their wings in great detail but never describes their form, which suggests the original readers already knew. Modern scholars have identified them with the winged sphinx, the winged bull, the griffin, birds and winged humans; the winged sphinx is the most widely held view, and Ezekiel’s cherubim have four faces each, human, lion, ox and eagle.

Why are cherubim drawn as chubby winged babies?

That image is late and has no basis in the biblical text. It begins with a third-century rabbinic wordplay linking keruv to an Aramaic word for a child, at a time when Greco-Roman art was full of winged boys, and it was finished by Renaissance painters who merged the biblical creature with the putto. The cherubim of Genesis and Kings are guards and thrones, not infants.

What is the difference between cherubim and seraphim?

They come from different texts and do different jobs. Cherubim guard and carry, appearing from Genesis onward with two or four wings; the seraphim appear in Isaiah’s vision with six wings and are associated with fire and praise. The nine-rank angelic hierarchy that places seraphim first and cherubim second was composed by an anonymous Greek author writing between roughly 485 and 528, not by any biblical writer.

Where does the word cherub come from?

It is generally taken as a loanword from Akkadian karibu, meaning a blessed one, from a root meaning to bless. The karibu were lesser divine beings who stood before a god in an attitude of prayer on behalf of others, and the wider ancient Near East placed related hybrid guardians such as the lamassu and the shedu at the entrances of palaces and temples.

Related Entries

Angels, Guardian angel, Grigori, Nephilim, Adam, Eve, Yahweh, Leviathan, Behemoth, Ziz, Lamassu, Shedu, Apkallu, Sphinx, Griffin (or Gryphon)