How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards?
It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and wings spread out, shielding the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where the very glory of the Lord, the shekinah, descended with dangerous power.
For Philo of Alexandria, a Platonist interpreter of Jewish belief, they were the same cherubim that guarded the gates of Paradise (from which mankind had been banished). Valery Rees does not neglect to mention the popular interpretation of God’s powerful presence in the Temple in electro-magnetic terms, as posited in Raiders of the Lost Ark, although, when she refers to the Ark as a ‘thunder-box’, she must be innocently unaware of Apthorpe in Men at Arms.
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