Cherubim in the Hebrew Bible are considerably stranger and more formidable than the plump winged infants later art calls by the same name. Genesis places a cherub with a flaming, turning sword at the gate of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, guarding the way back to the tree of life. Exodus has two golden cherubim, wings outstretched, facing each other atop the Ark of the Covenant's mercy seat, marking the place where God's presence was said to meet Israel. Ezekiel's famous vision goes furthest: four living creatures, each with four faces, human, lion, ox and eagle, and wheels within wheels, bear up the throne-chariot, the merkabah, of God itself, a vision later Jewish mysticism took as the founding text of an entire tradition of chariot mysticism.
None of this early material resembles the chubby-faced winged child of Renaissance and Baroque religious art, an image that developed centuries later from classical putti and largely displaced the older, far more alien biblical cherub in popular imagination. The gap between Ezekiel's composite guardian-beasts bearing up the divine throne and the decorative infant face on a modern greeting card is one of the largest distances between an original scriptural image and its later popular reception anywhere in Western religious art.