cherub: a winged heavenly being, part animal and part human, that guards holy ground and holds up God's throne
The Bible never tells us what a cherub looked like. It gives the gold and carved cherubim of the worship space in exact detail, their metal, their measurements, the direction they face, and then says nothing about their shape, apparently because the first readers already knew. What the text does make clear is the job. Wherever God's holiness is, cherubim are what stands at the edge of it.
They turn up doing three connected things:
- They guard: God posts them east of Eden with a whirling flaming sword so that no one can reach the tree of life.
- They hold up the throne: two gold cherubim spread their wings over the cover of the ark, and God is repeatedly titled the one enthroned on the cherubim.
- They carry him through the sky: a psalm pictures God riding a cherub and flying, alongside the wings of the wind.
Those three roles shade into one another, and scholars disagree about whether they are one very old idea or several traditions that grew together. Either way one Hebrew word covers all of them, which is why they are gathered here as senses of a single meaning rather than split into separate words.
Ezekiel is the strange case. In his vision of God's glory he first calls the four beings under the throne by an ordinary word for a living creature (חַי), and only from chapter 10 onward names them cherubim. These have four faces, four wings, and wheels beside them, and they look nothing like the single-faced figures of the tabernacle and the temple. Many scholars read that identification as a later development in the tradition rather than the standard picture of a cherub.
Nuances
Whether Ezekiel 28:14 calls the king of Tyre a cherub or places him beside one, and what that implies about the figure.
- majorityThe Hebrew text as transmitted addresses the king himself as the anointed guardian cherub, so the cherub imagery is applied directly to him.; A. Wood, Of Wings and Wheels (BZAW 385, 2008)
- minorityThe ancient Greek version, supported by the Syriac, reads "with the cherub," implying a Hebrew text in which the king stands beside a cherub who later drives him out.; Septuagint Ezekiel 28:14
- minorityThe consonantal Hebrew text may present the Tyrian king not as a cherub but as a god, which would raise a challenge to the sole divinity of the God of Israel.; H. Patmore, "You Were the (Divine) Cherub": A Potential Challenge to YHWH's Sole Divinity in Ezekiel 28:14, JSOT 41/1 (2016): 99-116
What the divine title behind "enthroned on the cherubim" actually asserts, and therefore whether the ark and its cherubim formed a throne.
- majorityThe title means the God of Israel is the invisible king seated above the cherubim, on the model of the sphinx thrones of the ancient Near East, with the ark serving as his footstool.; T. N. D. Mettinger, "YHWH Sabaoth: The Heavenly King on the Cherubim Throne", in Studies in the Period of David and Solomon (1982), 109-138; M. Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (1978), 256-257
- minorityThe title means "who dwells among the cherubim" rather than "who sits upon the cherubim," so the phrase marks the divine presence within the cherubim rather than seating a deity on them.; R. Eichler, "The Meaning of yoshev ha-keruvim", ZAW 126 (2014): 358-371
Whether the cherub in this storm scene is a distinct being that God rides or a poetic equivalent of the wind itself.
- minorityThe cherub and the wind stand so close in the parallel lines that they function as near-equivalents in the storm imagery.; M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Anchor Bible, 1983), 54
- majorityThe parallel is poetic and does not make the two identical; the cherub remains a being that appears together with the wind in a storm appearance of God.; A. Wood, Of Wings and Wheels (BZAW 385, 2008)
Disputed
Whether the cherubim throne of the first temple implies that an image of God once stood on it, or was always deliberately empty.
- majorityIsrael before the exile worshipped in effect without divine images: the cherubim throne stood empty, and that empty throne is the key to the absence of a statue of God.; T. N. D. Mettinger, The Dethronement of Sabaoth (ConBOT 18, 1982); T. N. D. Mettinger, "JHWH-Statue oder Anikonismus im ersten Tempel?", ZAW 117 (2006): 485-508
- minorityA cult statue of the God of Israel may well have stood in the first temple, so the cherubim throne need not have been empty.; H. Niehr, "In Search of YHWH's Cult Statue in the First Temple", in The Image and the Book, ed. K. van der Toorn (1997), 73-95
- minorityNeither a throne with a statue nor an empty throne: the ark and its cherubim formed an empty frame whose purpose was to prevent any human-shaped conception of God, the wings surrounding rather than seating him.; R. Eichler, The Ark and the Cherubim (Mohr Siebeck, 2021)