Scripture never calls them angels, and they do none of the messenger work that the Hebrew word for angel, mal'akh, is named for. Later Jewish and Christian tradition counted them among the angels anyway: Pseudo-Dionysius ranks them second of the nine choirs, and Maimonides lists the keruvim among his ten ranks of angels.

How are cherubim different from seraphim?

Seraphim appear only in Isaiah 6. Each has six wings, they call "Holy, holy, holy," and one touches Isaiah's lips with a burning coal. Cherubim have two or four wings and stand at entrances or under God's throne. The Talmud (Hagigah 13b) reconciles Isaiah's six wings with Ezekiel's four by assigning one vision to the time the temple stood and the other to the time after it fell.

The idea comes from Ezekiel 28:14-16, a lament addressed to the king of Tyre (28:12). Translations differ: the KJV reads "Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth," the NRSVUE "You were a cherub," and the NABRE, following the Greek, "With a cherub I placed you." Tertullian, around 207, applied the passage to the devil, and that reading shaped later accounts of Lucifer; the chapter itself names only the king.

Who is the leader of the cherubim?

The Bible names none. The Hebrew mystical text 3 Enoch, chapter 22, describes Kerubiel as the prince "appointed over the chariot of the Kerubim," but no earlier source knows the name.

What Are Cherubim in the Bible, and What Do These Heavenly Beings Do?

Cherubim (singular cherub, Hebrew kerub) are winged beings that the Hebrew Bible places wherever God's presence needs guarding or carrying. Genesis posts them at the entrance to Eden, Exodus sets two of them in gold on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon's temple has two giant olivewood cherubim in its inner room, and Ezekiel sees them carry God's glory out of the temple on their wings.

Each of those passages describes them differently, and only Ezekiel gives them faces. Their rank among the angels, the meaning of their name, and the chubby winged children of Renaissance painting all come later, from theologians, rabbis and artists working with these same verses.

Quick Facts

First named: Genesis 3:24, guarding the way to the tree of life
Faces: Four in Ezekiel 1 and 10, two in Ezekiel 41's carvings, none described elsewhere
Wings: Two each on the temple pair (1 Kings 6:24), four in Ezekiel
Name: Probably from Akkadian karābu, "to pray" or "to bless"
Rank: Second of nine in Pseudo-Dionysius; ninth of ten in Maimonides
New Testament: Named once, in Hebrews 9:5

Which Bible passages mention cherubim, from Genesis 3:24 to Hebrews 9:5?

Cherubim are first named in Genesis 3:24 and last in Hebrews 9:5. Between those verses they appear in three kinds of place: at the edge of Eden, inside Israel's sanctuary, and in visions of God's throne.

Genesis gives the shortest account. After the man and woman are expelled, God "placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life" at the east of the garden of Eden. The verse gives no number, no appearance and no words, only a post at an entrance.

A closed iron lattice gate set in a weathered stone archway — A barred iron gate closing a stone archway. Genesis 3:24 names no gate at Eden, only the cherubim and a turning, flaming sword.

Inside Israel's sanctuary the cherubim are made objects. Exodus 25:18-22 orders two cherubim hammered from the same gold as the Ark's cover, and Exodus 26 has cherubim worked into the tabernacle curtains and into the veil that closed off the most holy place. Solomon's temple repeats the design on a larger scale, with two olivewood cherubim overlaid with gold in the inner sanctuary and carved cherubim, palm trees and open flowers on every wall (1 Kings 6:23-29).

A third group of verses treats the cherubim as God's seat or mount. "The Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim" is a title of God in 1 Samuel 4:4 and 2 Samuel 6:2, Hezekiah prays to the God "enthroned above the cherubim" in 2 Kings 19:15, and Psalm 18:10 says God "rode on a cherub and flew."

Cherubim passage by passage
Passage	Where the cherubim are	What the text says about them
Genesis 3:24	East of Eden, beside a flaming, turning sword	They guard the way to the tree of life; no appearance given
Exodus 25:18-22; 37:7-9	At both ends of the Ark's gold cover	Wings spread over the cover, faces turned toward each other and down to the cover
Exodus 26:1, 31	Woven into the tabernacle curtains and veil	Figures worked in blue, purple and crimson yarn
1 Kings 6:23-29; 8:6-7	Solomon's inner sanctuary and its walls	Two olivewood figures ten cubits high whose wings reach wall to wall over the Ark
Psalm 18:10	A storm in which God comes to rescue the psalmist	God rides a cherub on "the wings of the wind"
Ezekiel 10	Beneath God's throne as the glory leaves the temple	Four faces, four wings and human hands; named as the living creatures of chapter 1
Ezekiel 28:14-16	A lament over the king of Tyre	The king is called, or placed beside, a guardian cherub in Eden
Ezekiel 41:18-20	Carvings in the visionary temple	Two faces, human and young lion, between palm trees
Hebrews 9:5	A description of the tabernacle	"The cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat"

Hebrews 9:5 is the only New Testament verse that uses the word. The four living creatures around the throne in Revelation 4 share Ezekiel's faces, but John never calls them cherubim.

What do cherubim do at Eden, the Ark and God's throne?

They do two things: they guard the approach to God's presence, and they hold that presence up. The guarding job does not end at Eden. The veil of Exodus 26:31, woven with cherubim, hangs at the one entrance to the most holy place, so the figures that barred the way back to the tree of life also stand across the way into the room where the Ark was kept.

The Ark shows the second job. God tells Moses, "from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will tell you all that I am commanding you" (Exodus 25:22), and Numbers 7:89 has Moses hearing the voice from that exact spot. The title "enthroned on the cherubim" treats the pair as the base of a throne no one can see, and 1 Chronicles 28:18 calls the same figures "the golden chariot of the cherubim."

Psalm 18 and Ezekiel's vision put that throne in motion. In Ezekiel 10:18-19 the glory of the Lord leaves the temple doorway, stops above the cherubim, and the cherubim lift their wings and carry it to the east gate.

What no cherub does is speak. None of them announces a birth, explains a vision or delivers a warning; those tasks belong to the mal'akh, the Hebrew word for messenger that English Bibles translate as "angel." The nearest a cherub comes to acting on its own is Ezekiel 10:7, where one reaches into the fire among the cherubim and hands burning coals to the man clothed in linen, who then scatters them over Jerusalem.

What do cherubim look like?

Only Ezekiel describes a living cherub in detail, and even Ezekiel changes the description between chapters. In Ezekiel 1 the four creatures have human form, four faces (human, lion on the right, ox on the left, and eagle), four wings, straight legs ending in calves' feet, and human hands under their wings. Two wings touch the next creature's wings and two cover the body.

Chapter 10 says, "I knew that they were cherubim" (10:20), yet its list of faces in 10:14 reads "the face of the cherub" where chapter 1 had the ox. The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud noticed the swap. In Hagigah 13b Reish Lakish says Ezekiel asked for the ox face to be changed because it recalled the golden calf, asking, "Shall an accuser become a defender?"

Set side by side, the passages that describe a cherub at all do not agree on its faces or wings:

How each text describes a cherub
Text	Faces	Wings	Body and material
Ezekiel 1 and 10	Four: human, lion, ox ("cherub" in 10:14), eagle	Four	Human form, human hands, calves' feet
Ezekiel 41:18-20	Two: human and young lion	Not mentioned	Carved on the temple walls between palm trees
1 Kings 6:23-28	Not described	Two, each five cubits long	Ten cubits high, olivewood overlaid with gold
Exodus 25:18-20	Turned toward each other and toward the cover	Spread upward over the cover	Hammered gold, one piece with the cover

Scholars reconstruct the sanctuary cherubim from the art of Israel's neighbours, and they disagree about the result. "The prevailing opinion in current scholarship is that the cherub is a winged sphinx," Raanan Eichler of Bar-Ilan University wrote in 2016, meaning a human-headed winged lion like those carved on the sarcophagus of the Phoenician king Ahiram.

Eichler argues for winged humans instead. 1 Kings gives each temple cherub a height of ten cubits and a wingspan of ten cubits, the proportions of an upright figure rather than a four-legged animal, so the author of Kings "could only have had winged humans in mind." The debate concerns the gold and olivewood figures; Ezekiel's creatures are a vision with features of their own.

What does the word cherub mean?

Nobody knows for certain. Cherub is the Hebrew kerub, and cherubim is its Hebrew plural. Britannica traces the word most likely to the Akkadian kāribu or kūribu, from the verb karābu, "to pray" or "to bless," which would make a cherub an intercessor.

Britannica adds that the Hebrew Bible's descriptions stress the cherubim's movement and their role as bearers of God's throne rather than any work of intercession. Older reference works offered other roots. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) took the same verb to mean "to be near," giving "near ones" such as bodyguards and courtiers, and the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) lists proposals ranging from "great, mighty" to a link with the Greek gryps, the griffin.

Two later readings of the name shaped how cherubim were pictured. Rabbi Abbahu, in Hagigah 13b, explained kerub as keravya, "like a baby," "for in Babylonia they call a baby ravya," a wordplay that gave rabbinic tradition a child-faced cherub. Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500, read the name as "a fulness of knowledge or stream of wisdom" (Celestial Hierarchy 7), which gave Christian theology a cherub defined by what it knows.

Why are cherubs drawn as winged babies?

The winged baby is a Renaissance putto. Britannica describes putti as "derived from personifications of love, or Eros figures, in Greek and Roman art," and says they "came to be used to portray cherubim in Italian paintings of the 15th century, especially those of the Madonna and Child."

When painters revived classical myths later in that century, Cupid was drawn as a putto too. The same chubby winged child could therefore be Cupid in one painting and a cherub in the next. English now keeps the two senses apart by the plural: Merriam-Webster gives cherubim for the order of angels and, usually, cherubs for "a beautiful usually winged child in painting and sculpture."

A separate child-faced cherub already existed in Jewish interpretation. Besides Rabbi Abbahu's wordplay, Bava Batra 99a reports Onkelos the Convert saying the Ark's cherubim "were of the form of children," citing 2 Chronicles 3:10, a phrase the NRSVUE translates "carved cherubim." Rashi, commenting on Exodus 25:18 in the eleventh century, sums up the tradition: "They had the form of a child's face."

Eichler suggests that the rabbinic image was itself influenced by the Greco-Roman erotes. If he is right, the rabbinic child and the Renaissance putto descend from the same classical figure. Neither goes back to the biblical descriptions, where the only faces a cherub is given are Ezekiel's human, lion, ox or cherub, and eagle.

Where do cherubim rank in Christian and Jewish angel hierarchies?

Scripture never ranks them. The Christian ranking comes from Pseudo-Dionysius, whose Celestial Hierarchy places cherubim second of nine choirs, in the triad closest to God, with the seraphim above them. The thrones complete that triad below them. Dionysius grounds the rank in the name: cherubim have "the power of contemplating the super-Divine comeliness" and pass their wisdom freely to the orders beneath them.

Gregory the Great also glossed cherubim as "fulness of knowledge," and Thomas Aquinas kept both the rank and the reason. In Summa Theologiae I, q.108, a.6 the cherubim hold the middle of the first hierarchy because they "know the Divine secrets supereminently," but they sit below the seraphim because union with God through love ranks above knowledge.

Jewish lists can put the same name near the bottom. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah (Foundations of the Torah 2:7), names ten ranks of angels and places the keruvim ninth, just above the ishim who speak with prophets. His highest rank is the holy chayyot, the "living creatures" of Ezekiel 1, even though Ezekiel 10:20 identifies those creatures as cherubim.

A cherub's rank therefore depends on whose list is in use. The nine choirs are a Christian arrangement, and Maimonides' ten ranks are built from Hebrew names that do not follow them.

How did Jewish and Christian worship use the cherubim?

Jewish tradition read the Ark's two cherubim as a picture of God's relationship with Israel. In the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma 54a), Rav Ketina says that at the pilgrimage festivals the priests rolled back the curtain and showed the crowds cherubim "clinging to one another," telling them, "See how you are beloved before God, like the love of a male and female."

The Talmud questions its own story, since the Second Temple had no Ark and so no Ark cherubim, and answers that cherubim were also carved on the walls, as 1 Kings 6:29 describes. A related tradition in Bava Batra 99a reconciles Exodus 25:20, where the cherubim face each other, with 2 Chronicles 3:13, where they face the hall: they faced each other when Israel did the will of God and turned away when it did not.

Christian writers turned Ezekiel's four faces into the symbols of the four Gospels. Irenaeus, around 180, wrote that "the cherubim, too, were four-faced" and matched the lion to John, the calf to Luke, the man to Matthew and the eagle to Mark (Against Heresies 3.11.8).

Other writers paired them differently, and the scheme that became standard in the Latin church was Jerome's: man for Matthew, lion for Mark, ox for Luke and eagle for John.

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy gives the congregation the cherubim's place. As the bread and wine are carried to the altar in the Great Entrance, the choir sings the Cherubic Hymn: "Let us who mystically represent the cherubim and sing the Thrice-holy Hymn to the life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly cares."