Cherubim: What Did the Bible's Guardians Really Look Like?

Not chubby babies: the Bible's cherubim guard Eden with a turning sword of fire and carry God's throne.

Biblical cherubim are guardians, not winged infants. They guard Eden with a flaming sword, stand in gold on the Ark of the Covenant, carry God in the Psalms, and appear with four faces in Ezekiel 10.

The cherubim of the Bible are nothing like the winged infants of Renaissance art. They first appear guarding Eden after Adam and Eve are expelled: God "placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24). They are sentries with a weapon, posted to stop humans from reaching immortality.

Two golden cherubim stood on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, their wings stretched toward each other. God says, "there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims." Solomon's Temple held two more, carved of olive wood and overlaid with gold, each ten cubits high. In the Psalms, God travels on them: "he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind."

Ezekiel 10 identifies the four-faced, wheeled living creatures of his great vision as cherubim. Each has the faces of a cherub (or ox), a man, a lion and an eagle, with wings, human hands, and bodies full of eyes. They carry the glory of God away from the Jerusalem Temple. Most scholars connect the word with the Akkadian karibu, an intercessor, and compare the cherubim with the winged human-headed bulls and lions that guarded palace gates in Assyria and Babylon. Ezekiel, writing in exile in Babylonia, would have seen such figures.