Kerubim

The cherubim of the Hebrew Bible do two things, and almost everything said of them falls under one heading or the other. They guard a threshold, and they carry or flank a throne.

The guarding comes first. At the close of the third chapter of Genesis, after the expulsion, cherubim are stationed east of the garden with a flaming sword turning every way, to keep the way to the tree of life. The verb is one of watch and of prevention, and the scene is a closed door with something formidable standing in front of it.

The throne function is the larger one. Exodus gives two cherubim of beaten gold at the two ends of the mercy seat, wings spread upward and faces turned toward each other, and names the space between them as the place where God will speak. Solomon's inner sanctuary holds a far larger pair, and a phrase describing God as enthroned upon the cherubim recurs through the historical books and the Psalms. Ezekiel's tenth chapter brings the two functions together, identifying the cherubim there with the living creatures who bear the chariot of the opening vision.

Both functions have close parallels in the art of the surrounding cultures, where winged composite beasts flank gateways and support seats in exactly these two situations. The rank the Kabbalistic lists call kerubim inherits all of it, and inherits none of the later decorative infant, which belongs to a quite separate history.

Maimonides ranks the kerubim ninth of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, second from the bottom, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Yesod, the ninth sephirah, the foundation, immediately above the world of Malkuth. In the Dionysian hierarchy the Cherubim are second of nine, immediately below the Seraphim and near the very top.

That is a long distance for one name to cover, and it is not the only placement in circulation. Agrippa's table of the Hebrew orders, printed in 1533, puts the same name at Chokmah, the second sephirah, matching the Dionysian height rather than the Maimonidean one. Three arrangements therefore place the cherubim at three different levels, and a reader consulting three reference works can be handed a high rank, a middle rank and a low one without any of the three mentioning that the others exist.

The divergence is real transmission history rather than error. The Greek list and the Hebrew list were assembled separately from different materials, and the sephirotic table is a later pairing of one of them with a scheme of emanation that had its own ten-part structure long before either angelic list was mapped onto it. Nothing forces one name to occupy the same height in all three, and that it does not is the clearest single demonstration that no unified Western angelology stands behind the tables.