Cherub

• 1. Introduction

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  The cherub appears 91 times in the Hebrew Bible, more often than any other heavenly creature. Yet no passage ever says plainly what a cherub is for. In the Abrahamic religions, the cherub is a supernatural being whose job changes from page to page. Sometimes it guards. Sometimes it carries. Sometimes it is a figure of gold set in a holy place. So how did one word come to cover so many roles? Where does the name come from, and what did these beings look like to the people who first described them? And how did Jewish, Christian and Islamic writers each fill the silence the Bible leaves behind? The first clue is the name itself, which seems to have a Mesopotamian past.

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• 2. A Name From Mesopotamia

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  In 1896, the scholar Delitzsch linked the Hebrew word keruv to the Assyrian kirubu, a name for the shedu or lamassu. He also tied it to karabu, which means great or mighty. A year later, Salomon Karppe read the Babylonian karâbu differently. He glossed it as propitious rather than mighty.

  Dhorme, writing in 1926, proposed a third path. He connected the Hebrew name to the Assyrian kāribu, whose diminutive is kurību. That term referred to intercessory beings, and to statues of them, that pleaded with the gods on behalf of humanity. Its literal meaning is blesser.

  The word also changed alphabets. Greek writers spelled it with a chi, and Latin carried that over as ch. In English, ch in words from Greek usually sounds like k, as in chemistry or chela. Cherub breaks that pattern and is pronounced like the start of church.

  The rabbis offered an explanation of their own. In the 3rd century, Abbahu tied the name to a Hebrew word for youthful. Scholars treat this as a folk etymology rather than real linguistics. Still, it stuck, and early Jewish tradition came to imagine cherubim with youthful, human features.

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• 3. Guardians and Thrones

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  Genesis 3:24 holds the first appearance of cherubim, placed to block the way to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. Israelite tradition clearly pictured them as guardians there. The text does not keep them in that single post, though. In the Book of Ezekiel, they carry the throne of Yahweh.

  The poem called the Song of David occurs twice, in 2 Samuel 22 and in Psalm 18. In it, a cherub joins a theophany, a divine appearance. It serves as the vehicle on which the deity descends from heaven to rescue the speaker, as 2 Samuel 22:11 and Psalm 18:10 describe.

  Exodus 25:18-22 shows God telling Moses to make images of cherubim at set points around the Ark of the Covenant. Many biblical mentions refer to the gold cherubim on the Ark's mercy seat. Others refer to images on the curtains of the Tabernacle and in Solomon's Temple. Two of the Temple figures measured ten cubits high.

  In Isaiah 37:16, King Hezekiah prays to God with a phrase that points to the mercy seat. The same phrase appears in 2 Kings 19. For many years, translators rendered it as "who sits upon the cherubim." Eichler instead renders it "who dwells among the cherubim."

  The difference carries weight. It bears on whether the Ark in Solomon's Temple was Yahweh's throne, or merely a sign that Yahweh was present. The fullest picture of the cherubim as bearers of a throne, however, comes from a prophet standing beside a river.

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• 4. Ezekiel's Living Creatures

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  By the Kebar, also spelled Chebar, near Tel Abib in Nippur, Ezekiel sees creatures that carry the throne of God. In Hebrew he calls them chayot, or living creatures. In Ezekiel 1, he does not yet call them cherubim. That word waits until Ezekiel 10.

  In Ezekiel 1:5-11, each creature has the likeness of a man and four faces. There is a man's face, a lion's on the right side, an ox's on the left side, and an eagle's. The four faces stand for four domains of God's rule. The man represents humanity, the lion wild animals, the ox domestic animals, and the eagle birds.

  The faces peer out from the center of four wings joined to one another. Two wings stretch upward, and two cover the body. Human hands sit under the wings. Ezekiel writes of the legs: "Their legs were straight, the soles of their feet like the hooves of a bull, gleaming like polished brass."

  Between the creatures, glowing coals move about. Their fire goes up and down, and lightning bursts from it. The creatures themselves dart like flashes of lightning.

  Ezekiel 10 gives a second description with small differences. Man, lion and eagle stay the same. Where chapter 1 has an ox, Ezekiel 10:14 reads "face of a cherub." Ezekiel treats the two sets of beings as one. He recalls the creatures he had seen by the Chebar Canal and declares, "so now I knew that they were cherubs."

  A third passage changes the count again. In Ezekiel 41:18-20, the cherubim have only two faces, probably because they are shown in profile.

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• 5. Searching for the Shape

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  Apart from Ezekiel, no detailed account of the cherubim survives. Even his four-faced being, the tetramorph, may not match the cherubim of the historic Israelites. What can be pieced together comes from the cultures that surrounded them.

  Hybrid creatures were common in the art of the Ancient Near East. The Babylonian lamassu or shedu was a protective spirit with a sphinx-like form. It had an eagle's wings, the body of a lion or bull, and the head of a king. Phoenicia adopted it widely.

  The wings, admired for their beauty and used as a mark of heavenly creatures, soon became the most prominent feature. Animals of many kinds were given wings, and then human figures were too. That path led to the stereotypical image of an angel.

  In 1938, William F. Albright argued that "the winged lion with human head" of Phoenicia and Canaan, from the Late Bronze Age, was "much more common than any other winged creature, so much so that its identification with the cherub is certain."

  Another candidate is the human-bodied Hittite griffin. Unlike other griffins, it almost always appears seated in calm dignity, like an irresistible guardian of holy things. Some have proposed that the Greek word for griffin, grups, is cognate with kruv. The change from ox to cherub in Ezekiel 10 has led some readers to suppose that cherubim had the head of a bovine.

  Art from Phoenicia, Ancient Egypt, and Tel Megiddo in northern Israel shows kings or deities carried on thrones by winged hybrid creatures. That fits the idea of cherubim as living thrones.

  Yet the animal form raises more problems than it solves. The cherubim of the Ark were meant to face each other with their wings meeting, while staying on the edges of the cover they were beaten from. That is hard to picture with four-legged bodies and backward-facing wings. These figures also barely resemble Ezekiel's.

  A humanlike form fails too. It would not match Ezekiel, and it clashes with the animal-shaped counterparts in neighboring cultures. The Israelite picture of the cherub may simply never have been consistent. Later Jewish writers would answer the question of shape in very different ways.

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• 6. Rabbis, Mystics, Philosophers

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  Rabbinic literature describes the two cherubim as winged, human-like figures, one a boy and the other a girl. They stood at opposite ends of the Mercy seat in the inner sanctum of God's house. According to 1 Kings 6, Solomon's Temple was decorated with cherubim. Aḥa bar Ya'akov claimed the Second Temple was as well.

  Ranks varied between thinkers. In Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, from the 12th century, cherubim hold the ninth rank, the second-lowest. In Kabbalistic works such as the 14th-century Berit Menuchah, they hold the third. Belief in angels is generally accepted in traditional rabbinic Judaism, though ideas about what angels really are, and how literally to read the Bible's passages on them, range widely.

  Kabbalah holds a strong belief in cherubim, which it treats along with other angels as having mystical roles. The Zohar, a major collection of Jewish mystical books, says the cherubim were led by one of their number named Kerubiel.

  Maimonides stood at the other end of the philosophical spectrum. His reading of the Bible was neo-Aristotelian. For him, the angels of the Bible and Talmud hint at the laws of nature, the principles by which the physical universe operates. In The Guide for the Perplexed II:6, he writes: "Thus the Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel; and the mind is called a cherub."

  Maimonides also explained the figures in the sanctuary. They were placed there only to keep alive the belief in angels. There were two so that the people would not mistake them for an image of God.

  The midrash tells other stories. The two cherubim posted at the entrance of paradise were angels made on the third day, so they had no fixed shape. They could appear as men or women, or as spirits. Another tradition says cherubim were the first objects created in the universe. One midrash traces a night-time report. The body tells the soul what it did that day, the soul tells the spirit, the spirit the angel, the angel the cherub, and the cherub the seraph, who brings it before God.

  About the shape of the cherubim, the first-century writer Josephus said: "No one can tell, or even conjecture, what was the shape of these cherubim." Some early midrash likewise imagined them as non-corporeal.

  Another midrash says that when Pharaoh pursued Israel at the Red Sea, God took a cherub from the wheels of His throne and flew to the spot. God inspects the heavenly worlds while sitting on a cherub. Yet the cherub is "something not material," carried by God rather than carrying Him.

  The Talmud's passages on the heavens name the seraphim, ofanim and living creatures, but not the cherubim. The ancient liturgy names only those same three classes. One Talmudic voice, Jose the Galilean, holds that when ten thousand people recite the grace after meals at one table, an extra blessing is added: "Blessed is Ha-Shem our God, the God of Israel, who dwells between the cherubim."

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• 7. Christian Ranks and Images

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  The Book of Chronicles describes priests carrying the Ark into the most holy place. 2 Chronicles 5:7-8 says the cherubims "spread forth their wings over the place of the ark, and the cherubims covered the ark and the staves thereof above." Christian tradition inherited these scenes from the Old Testament and then arranged the beings into a hierarchy.

  Medieval theology, following the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, places the cherubim second in the ninefold celestial order, after the seraphim and before the Thrones. The work De Coelesti Hierarchia, from around the 5th century, lists them alongside Seraphim and Thrones. Thomas Aquinas distinguished the two top ranks by character. The cherubim are marked by knowledge, while the seraphim have "burning love to God."

  A 3rd-century Gnostic writing, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, also mentions cherubim. Outside such texts, the image that most people know came from art.

  In the West, cherubim became linked with the putto and with the Greco-Roman god Cupid or Eros. Artists drew them as small, plump, winged boys. Early Christian and Byzantine art sometimes departed from scripture in its own way. Some Christian icons give the cherub two pairs of wings and four faces, drawing on Ezekiel.

  The earliest known picture of the four-faced cherubim is an apse mosaic of the 5th-6th century in the Thessalonian Church of Hosios David. It merges Ezekiel's visions with Isaiah's seraphim and the six-winged creatures of Revelation.

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• 8. Angels of the Close

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  In Islam, the cherubim are called al-karubiyyin, and they belong to a class known as al-muqarrabin, "the Close." These are the highest angels, who stay near God, in contrast to the messenger angels. The Quran mentions the Muqarrabin in An-Nisa verse 172 as angels who worship God and are not proud.

  Their duties are praise and intercession for humans. Identifications differ. They may be a class apart, or they may include the angels absorbed in God's presence. These include the four canonical Islamic archangels, Jibra'il, Mika'il, Azra'el and Israfil, the cherubim themselves, and the Bearers of the Throne. Cherubim appear often in the version of Muhammad's Night Journey that goes back to ibn Abbas, and in Miraj literature and the Qisas al-Anbiya.

  The cherubim around the throne praise God without pause with the tasbih, "Glory to God!" They shine so brightly that none of the lower angels can bear to look at them. Unlike the messenger angels, they and the seraphim never leave God's presence. If they stop praising, they fall.

  Scholars drew finer lines. Ibn Kathir separated the angels of the throne from the cherubim. A work from the 13th or 14th century, the Book of the Wonders of Creation and the peculiarities of Existing Things, puts the cherubim in an order below the Bearers of the Throne, whom it calls seraphim. Abu Ishaq al-Tha'labi ranks the cherubim as the highest angels after the Bearers. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi likewise sets the throne-carrying angels, the seraphim, apart from those around the throne, the cherubim. In Isma'ilism, seven archangels are called cherubim.

  The angels of mercy who serve under Michael are also called cherubim. They are made from the tears of Michael and rank lower than the angels in God's presence. They too ask God to pardon humans.

  The Twelver Shi'a scholar Mohammad-Baqer Majlesi tells of a cherub who fell. Muhammad meets him in the form of a snake. The snake explains that he failed to perform dhikr, remembrance of God, for a single moment, and God cast him down to earth. Muhammad went to Hasan and Husayn, and together they interceded. God restored the angel to his angelic form.

  A similar story appears in Tabari's Bishara. An angel named Futrus, called an "angel-cherub," was sent on a task but did not finish it in time. God broke one of his wings. After Muhammad interceded, God forgave him, and Futrus became the guardian of Hussain's grave.

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