The Ark of the Covenant stood in the Holy of Holies, where the glory of God was said to reside; for this reason God is referred to in the Tanakh as "God who dwells between the cherubim". These were probably hybrid winged figures of a type common in the symbolism of the region, e.g. those depicted in the Megiddo Ivories carrying the throne of a nameless Canaanite king (Wright, 1957).
Ezekiel documents a different version of cherubim, probably of popular origin (according to the compilers of the Jewish Encyclopedia). The cherubim in this tradition had each four faces— that of a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man— and combined features of these four creatures, the stature and hands of a man, the hooved feet of a calf (compare the image of Satan), and the two pairs of wings that identified deities, e.g. in contemporary Assyria. Christians will recognize these as the symbols of the four Evangelists. Two of the wings extended upward, meeting above and sustaining the throne of God; while the other two stretched downward and covered the creatures themselves. They never turned, but went "straight forward" as the wheels of the cherubic chariot, and they were full of eyes "like burning coals of fire" (Ezekiel i:5 - 28; ix:3, x; xi:22).
智天使
基督教的形象
The conception of angels derived from Biblical descriptions is difficult to present as a visual image, and furthermore composite beings are largely alien to the central Greco-Roman tradition. (Contrast archaic and exotic beings like Harpy, Typhon, Centaur Gryphon etc.) Some art historians believe Christians adopted the image of the lovely winged dawn goddess Aurora (or Eos) to represent angels.
In Eastern Christianity, the most frequently encountered descriptor applied to Cherubim is "many-eyed". They are often represented in iconography as a face peering out from the center of an array of either four or six wings, sometimes visually indistinguishable from Seraphim. Often the wings are depicted covered with many eyes.
In Western Christian art Cherubim are frequently represented as infants (Italianputti) as can be seen in innumerable church frescoes and in the work of Renaissance painters such as Raphael. Even in instances where they are represented with just the head and wings, the head is usually that of an infant and no more than two wings are shown [1] [2] [3].
Christian novelist Madeline L\'Engle depicted a cherubim (who referred to itself as such, in the singular) as one of the principal characters in her children's fantasy novel A Wind in the Door.
伊斯蘭的形象
Muslim traditions narrated in the Hadith literature describe how Muhammad ascended to heaven on the back of Buraq, a human-headed winged horse. This sounds very like a cherub; however, the Qur\'an neither mentions any such beings, nor describes angels in this way.
