The Cherubim East of Eden Who Never Hold One Shape

The garden was already shut. Adam and his wife were somewhere out in the thorn-country to the east, and behind them the gate stood closed against the path back to the tree of life. And there, planted at that gate, something began to take shape that had never stood anywhere before.

The sages who read this verse close noticed the wording. It does not only say that the cherubim were placed east of Eden. Read with the right ear, it says the angels were made there, that this strip of ground at the seam of the garden was the first place such beings ever came into being. Heaven had its hosts, but here, at the edge of the lost garden, the guardians were quarried out of the air for the first time.

The First Guardians Quarried at the Gate

They did not look like the painted creatures of later imagination. The prophet Ezekiel, centuries downstream, would stand by the river Chebar and stare at four living creatures and only afterward understand what he had seen. "This is the living creature that I saw," he said, "and I knew that they were cherubim." The same kind of being that guarded Eden was the same kind that bore the chariot of glory. Whatever stood at the gate, Ezekiel met its cousins flying.

And the strangest thing about them was that they would not hold still inside a single body. Watch one long enough and it was a man. Look again and it was a woman. Look a third time and it was no human shape at all, a spirit with no edges, then a burning angel, then back to the form of a man. They turned through their natures the way the sword beside them turned through the air.

The Sword of Living Fire That Turned Both Ways

For there was a sword. The verse calls it a flaming sword that turns itself, and the sages heard in that flame an old line of praise, that God makes His ministers a flaming fire. So the blade was not iron with fire on it. The blade was a minister, a servant of fire given an edge, the same substance as the shape-shifting guardians who stood on either side of it.

It turned. Not the lazy turn of a weathervane. It spun on its own will, cutting every direction at once so that no angle of approach was left open, sometimes a sword, sometimes a tongue of flame with no metal in it at all, sometimes a man holding the hilt and then only the hilt and then only the burning. The way back to the tree of life ran straight through a thing that would not keep one face long enough to be passed.

Above the Gate, the Throne High and Lifted Up

The guardians faced two directions at once. Behind them lay the ruined garden and the long road of exile. Above them, far up past the turning fire, stood the throne.

The ancient Aramaic teachers, when they retold the words spoken at Sinai, would not let anyone picture a body up there. Israel heard the voice of the Word, they said, but saw no likeness, only a voice speaking. While the nations carried their gods on their shoulders so the things would seem close, idols that could not hear with their own ears, the Word of the Lord sat on a throne high and lifted up and heard the prayer of those who prayed before Him from across infinite distance. The gods that had to be carried, and the God who carried everything. The same throne the cherubim faced.

The Sapphire Cut from Beneath the Throne

And the floor of that throne was sapphire. When the covenant was written, the same teachers said, it was not cut into common stone. The tablets were quarried from sapphire, the very pavement the elders of Israel had glimpsed beneath the feet of God, blue as the clear body of heaven. The law that would govern the world below was hewn from the floor of the world above.

So the picture stood complete, top to bottom. At the height, the fiery throne and its sapphire pavement, from which the tablets of the covenant were cut. At the gate of Eden, the shifting guardians born out of the air, men and women and spirits by turns, and the living sword spinning between them. Between the throne above and the gate below ran the whole seam of the world, and at every joint of it stood fire that would not keep one shape.

The path to the tree of life was not locked with a bolt. It was locked with beings who could be anything, and a blade that could be everything, set there the day the gate swung shut.