Комментарий к Шмот 25:18

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

כרובים. Birds. (shapes of) We base this on Ezekiel 28,14 את כרוב ממשח הסוכך, “as a cherub with protective outstretched wings.” (compare Rashi) It is a large bird. Our sages (Sukkah 5) understand the word to mean “having the faces of young children, toddlers.”

They had the likeness of a child’s face. [Rashi knows this] since it is written , כרובים we [could] read it as כרביא , i.e., “like a youth.” Onkelos [elsewhere] translates “child” as רביא , and the כ of כרובים means “like.”

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 Torahin 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)

מקשה תעשה OF BEATEN WORK SHALT THOU MAKE [THEM] — i. e. thou shalt not make them separately (apart from the actual lid) and join them to the ends of the lid after they have been made, like goldsmith’s work which is called in old French souder (English solder) — but lay down a large mass of gold (lit., much gold) when thou beginnest to make the lid and beat upon the middle part of it (the gold) with a hammer or with a mallet, so that its ends will project upward (stand out in relief), and then shape the cherubim out of the projecting edges.

מקשה, hammered out of the thickness of the lid, i.e. the whole was a single chunk

The extreme ends of the cover. These are the ends of the ark’s length, not its width. [Rashi knows this] because otherwise, one cherub’s back would be to the Tent of Meeting, which is improper. Furthermore, it is written (v. 22): “I will set My meetings with you there, and I will speak with you from above the cover.” If the back of one cherub was toward the Tent of Meeting, its body would be an obstruction between the Tent of Meeting and the place from where Hashem’s voice emanated.

מקשה batediz (beaten work) in old French Similarly we have (Daniel 5:6) “and his knees knocked (נקשן) one against another”.

קצות הכפרת means THE EXTREMITIES OF THE COVER.