Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Cherubim
Winged composite creatures that guard and carry God's throne, nothing like the babies in later art.
Genesis 3:24, in every translation this tool compares.
Forget the babies on greeting cards. Cherubim are composite animals, nearer to the winged bulls with human faces that guarded Assyrian palace doors. They hold the way back into Eden with a flaming sword, and inside the temple they form the seat God is described as sitting on.
Throne guardians and throne bearers, composite creatures with four faces in Ezekiel, stationed at the entrance to sacred space with a flaming sword. Mettinger, who wrote the DDD entry, separates two iconographic programs the Bible keeps apart: the Solomonic cherubim, ten cubits high, standing side by side with their wings joined to form the throne seat itself (1 Kings 6:23-27), and the Priestly tabernacle cherubim, small, facing each other, and hammered out of one piece with the ark's lid (Exodus 25:19-20). The epithet "he who is enthroned on the cherubim" (yoshev ha-keruvim) is already attached to Yahweh at Shiloh (1 Samuel 4:4) and recurs at 2 Samuel 6:2 and Isaiah 37:16. Ezekiel's cherubim turn the static throne into a mobile throne-chariot, and Psalm 18:10's Yahweh "riding on a cherub" comes from the same tradition, which Mettinger ties to an exilic need for a God whose presence could travel with a displaced people.
H3742 (כְּרוּב), 91 occ
The lamassu and the sphinx-throne of Syro-Palestinian kings are the direct visual parallel, a king enthroned on winged composite beasts. The sphinx-throne is itself a Syrian development out of Egypt's Nineteenth Dynasty and was used for gods and kings alike, unlike Egypt's own lion-paw throne, which never carried a deity. A Late Bronze Age ivory plaque from Megiddo shows a king on a throne of winged sphinxes, and so does the tenth-century relief on the Ahiram sarcophagus. The empty cherubim throne of the Solomonic temple, standing over the ark as an invisible deity's footstool (1 Kings 8:6-8), belongs to Israelite aniconism: it combines two aniconic traditions, the empty throne and the ark, where Phoenician and Punic art seats Baal Hammon and Astarte on comparable sphinx thrones in plain view.
The Renaissance putto. There is no biblical basis for the baby.
- Genesis 3:24
- Exodus 25:18-22
- 1 Samuel 4:4
- Ezekiel 1:5-14
- Ezekiel 10:1-22
- 1 Kings 6:23-29
- 1 Kings 8:6-8
- 2 Chronicles 3:12-13
- Ezekiel 28:14,16
- Psalm 18:10
- Psalm 104:3
- 2 Samuel 6:2
- Isaiah 37:16
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- T. N. D. Mettinger, "Cherubim," DDD, 190-191
- Walton, *Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: 1 & 2 Kings…*, 192
- Walton, *Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament*, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2018)
