Wyjścia 25:18 Komentarz: Rashi, Chizkuni, Ibn Ezra & Rashbam

כרבים CHERUBIM — They had the form of a child’s face (Sukkah 5b).

שנים כרובים, “two cherubs.” Compare Ezekiel28,14, את כרוב ממשח הסוכך, “like a cherub with outstretched wings;” they are a certain type of bird. Seeing that birds are both clean animals and move in a clean atmosphere most of the time; even though the Torah in the second of the Ten Commandments had expressly forbidden us to make anything that is like creatures on earth or in the sky, the reason why the making of the cherubs is exempt from this was that it was not made to be worshipped, but to remain hidden inside the most inaccessible part of the Temple. We have a parallel of this in Isaiah 6,12 where the prophet described having had a vision of the Lord seated on His throne surrounded by such creatures each having six wings. Even in the Torah we find exceptions to overriding commands, such as “anyone who performs forbidden work on the Sabbath being guilty of legal execution,” (Exodus 35,2) while the priests performed such work in the Temple every Sabbath when offering the daily communal sacrifices. Not only that, even individuals, when becoming fathers of a boy baby born on the Sabbath circumcised him on the following Sabbath. (Leviticus 18,16) The Torah strictly forbade marrying the wife of a brother, but made an exception if said brother had died without children, and encouraged a surviving brother to marry the widow who had been his brother’s wife in order to provide him with issue. Similar exceptions are in place for wearing wool garments with tzitzit, ritual fringes, including wool and linen. There is a positive commandment to this effect (Compare Deuteronomy 22,12)

And you shall make: Our predecessors said that the form of the keruvim were like two youths, and that its meaning is "like a baby (keravya)" in Aramaic, and that the [letter] kaf is [a prefix]. Yet they spoke correctly, that they have the form of children - if they have a tradition, and they made the word a mnemonic, like chanukah [is used]. For the kaf [in] keruv is [part of the] root. And the testimony ([is in] verse 20 of this chapter), "and hakeruvim were" - since the [letter] hay [at the beginning of the word (ha)] is a definitive hay and not one of questioning, like the hay (in Isaiah 27:7), "Was he beaten as his beater has been?" (Had the hay been used as a questioning hay, the kaf could have been part of the root.)