ציטירנדיקער פּירוש אויף מלכים א 7:36

Behold the house of Judah is like all the nations The love of the Holy One, blessed be He, has been annulled from them, and they are rejected, to be given into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar like the other nations. The Midrash Aggadah (see Lam. Rabbah, Proem 9) [says] that they entered the Temple and peeled off the pictures of the cherubim that Solomon had painted on the wall of the Temple (I Kings 7:36): “according to the attachment of a man and the joining, etc.” They took them outside and said, “Look at what these [Jews], who were showing themselves as decent people, were occupied with.”

An approach based on the plain meaning of the text. The words שנים כרובים are necessary to teach that the two cherubs were male and female. The Torah wanted to teach that the Children of Israel are as beloved of Him as the love that exists between man and woman. This corresponds to what the sages said in Yuma 54: “Rabbi Ketina said that at the time when the Israelites are in the habit of appearing at the Temple on the three festivals requiring them to do so, they used to roll back the dividing curtain so as to show the pilgrims the cherubs on top of the Ark which were embracing one another and they would say to them: ‘see how beloved you are in the eyes of the Lord, just like the love that exists between man and wife.’” There is a verse in Kings I 7,36 which expresses the words of Rabbi Ketina where we read: כמער איש וליות סביב, “joined in an embrace (of their arms) like man and woman.”