The Cherubim

I've always been fascinated by the biblical accounts of the Ark of the Covenant and the gold "Cherubim" that guarded it. It's popularly believed that the Ark, along with all the other Treasures of Solomon's Temple were taken by the Babylonians in 586 BCE when Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Some of the Temple "implements" were restored to the Jews when the were sent back to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem by - I believe it was Darius - in about 537 BCE, but there was no mention of the Ark of the Covenant and/or the Cherubim being among those Temple implements. Graham Hancock has theorized that the Ark was removed from the Temple a long time before its destruction, perhaps due to the apostasy of the Jewish kings, and that the Ark could be hidden in a church in Axum, Ethiopia. Now, Dr. Sean Kingsley has a new theory about the Cherubim that used to guard the Ark of the Covenant. According to the Catholic Encylopedia, "the Jews at the time of Christ had completely forgotten the appearance of the Temple cherubim. Josephus (Antiq., VIII, 3) says that no one knows or even can guess what form they had." This obviously means that there were no Cherubim present in the reconstructed Temple at the time of Jesus or at the time of the Temple's destruction in 70 CE by the Romans. The latest issue of Minerva magazine features new research by archaeologist and explorer Dr Sean Kingsley, who believes he has found evidence not only for the survival of replicas of the cherubim in Jerusalem in the Roman period, but also what they originally looked like... According to Dr. Kingsley, in the sixth century AD the ancient historian John Malalas was sifting through the municipal archives in the city of Antioch in southern Turkey for material for his book, the Chronicle, when he chanced upon a centuries-old wrinkled report about the fate of Jerusalem's Cherubim. Malalas tells us that after pulling down a local synagogue in AD 70 and replacing it with a new theatre inscribed Ex Praeda Iudaea, 'From the Spoils of Judaea', the emperor Vespasian "built in Antioch the Great, outside the city gate, what are known as the Cherubim, for he fixed there the bronze Cherubim, which Titus his son had found fixed to the temple of Solomon. When he destroyed the temple, he removed them from there and brought them to Antioch with the Seraphim, celebrating a triumph for the victory of the Jews that had taken place during his reign." "This was no tall story invented by John Malalas to spice up his Chronicle", confirms Dr Kingsley. "In fact, the area where the Cherubim were set up over the gates became so famous that the Temple statues lent their name to the entire city district. And there they stayed for over five hundred years. So the Life of St Simeon Stylites, who died in AD 597, describes how the saint saw a vision of Jesus Christ 'at the old wall called that of the Cherubim' and during a later visitation by the devil 'there arose from the so-called Cherubim. a great cry, and weeping and much lamentation'. The co-existence of references to the Cherubim district in different sources proves John Malalas was reporting fact not fiction." Based on the prophet Ezekiel's biblical description of the 'divine presence', accompanied by hybrid guardians incorporating calf's feet, wings, and composite faces of a human, lion, ox and eagle, Dr Kingsley visualises the cherubim as sphinx-like winged creatures with a human head: "Sculpted ivories of the First Temple period excavated at Samaria in Palestine and Arslan Tash in Syria capture the exact confused form described by the prophet Ezekiel. The lion's body is inspired by the sphinx and the human head also wears an Egyptian headdress. However, the graceful wings are purely Near Eastern in inspiration, drawing on the tradition of winged animals like the demon Pazuzu and the Akkadian lion-demoness Lamashtu, which were so popular from Iraq to Palestine in the second and first millennium BC." ...Dr. Kingsley has identified two images which most closely resemble the physical form of the Temple Cherubim in the first century AD: a statue of a rearing woman with outstretched wings and sphinx-like lion body excavated in a bath-house at Ephesus in Turkey in 1896, and a sphinx-like cherub sculpted on to a basalt disc dug up in a house at Antioch itself and now in the Hatay Archaeological Museum. From the Daily Grail (posted June 28, 2007) So - was Josephus full of baloney about no Cherubim being in the Second Temple?