A Flaming Sword and The Cherubim

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
-- Genesis 3: 22-24 (KJV)

After Yahweh banishes Adam and Eve from Eden, he places guards called "Cherubims" at the border and somehow or other suspends in the air a "flaming sword which turned every way."

Nothing more is heard of this sword in the Bible; nonetheless it would become famous. (The phrase "flaming sword" seemed the readiest English name for those ceremonial weapons with wavy edges.) For all its obscurity, the sword -- perhaps a poetic figure for lightning -- remains a powerful and intriguing image, one perhaps ultimately derived from Mesopotamian myths.

More directly linked to ancient Semitic mythology are the cherubim (now a plural form -- the singular is "cherub"; see the OED for an entire column on the issue). Their name stems from the Akkadian (karibu) for minor Babylonian gods who guarded threshholds and mediated between the major gods and mankind.

The cherubim have not been mentioned previously in Genesis, but perhaps they are included among the "us" in such of God's statements as "let us make man in our image." If the cherubim at all resemble their Babylonian ancestors, they are creatures like the Greek centaurs, half-human and half-beast. (They are not to be confused with the seraphim, flamelike, winged ministers of God mentioned only in Isaiah, chapter 6.)

Being largely ignorant of Babylonian mythology, Christian artists have tended to represent cherubim as darling little infant creatures with wings -- hardly the kind of beings, one would think, fit to guard Eden for an angry God. Whatever, under the influence of such art and its literary equivalent, "cherub" has come to pass as a synonym for "a childlike innocent" and "cherubic" as a metaphor for "angelic."

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!