Philo allegorizes the cherubim and fiery sword guarding Eden as symbols of God's creative and ruling powers, then reflects on virtue, exile, and the soul as God's temple.
On the Cherubim is one of Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentaries on Genesis, taking as its starting point Genesis 3:24 - God's expulsion of Adam and the posting of cherubim with a fiery, revolving sword to guard the way to the tree of life. Philo, a Jewish philosopher writing in Greek in the early first century CE, treats the biblical narrative not as history to be read literally but as a coded text whose figures point to truths about the soul, the cosmos, and God's powers.
Philo opens by distinguishing Adam's permanent exile from Hagar's temporary departures from Sarah, using the contrast to develop a moral psychology: souls not yet firmly rooted in vice can repent and return to virtue, but a soul that has become habituated to evil is cast out for good. He then turns to the cherubim themselves, proposing that they symbolize the two chief powers of God - his creative goodness and his ruling authority - while the turning fiery sword represents the swift, all-pervading motion of reason, or of the heavens themselves, mediating between those powers. Along the way he digresses into an argument that the soul, not any physical structure, is the true house and temple of the invisible God, and into a meditation on Abraham's willingness at the sacrifice of Isaac as an image of cutting away the mortal from oneself.
The work matters because it shows Philo's method in miniature: close, almost obsessive attention to individual words and repetitions in the Greek Septuagint text (why does God say 'cast out' here but 'sent forth' there?), pressed into service for a synthesis of biblical narrative with Platonic and Stoic philosophical categories. This fusion - reading Moses as already agreeing with Greek philosophy, encoded in symbol - profoundly shaped later Jewish and Christian allegorical exegesis, from Origen through the Church Fathers.
“The one who is sent forth is not barred from finding his way back; but the one cast out by God endures exile forever.”
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“Then too the fiery sword and the Cherubim take up their dwelling opposite the garden.”
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“Perhaps, then, he introduces, through veiled meanings, the motion of the whole heaven; for the spheres in heaven have been allotted”
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“But a fitting and adequate house is the soul.”
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“God alone is, in the proper sense, a citizen, and that everything that has come into being is a sojourner and a newcomer”
— On the Cherubim · read this chapter →
It is Philo of Alexandria's allegorical treatise on Genesis 3:24, where God posts cherubim and a fiery revolving sword to guard Eden after expelling Adam. Philo reads these figures symbolically - the cherubim as God's creative and ruling powers, the sword as reason or cosmic motion - rather than as literal guardians.
Philo contrasts the wording of Genesis: Adam is 'cast out' while others, like Hagar, are merely 'sent forth' and can return. He uses this distinction to argue that a soul not yet fixed in vice can repent and come back to virtue, but one hardened in evil, like Adam's in his reading, is exiled forever.
Philo proposes the two cherubim represent God's two chief powers - his goodness in creating the world and his authority in ruling it - with the fiery sword between them symbolizing the reason or motion that mediates and holds these powers together.
Yes. In this treatise Philo argues that the invisible soul, not any physical building, is the fitting house of the invisible God, redirecting temple imagery toward inner moral and spiritual life.
He treats Hagar as a figure for sense-perception and general education, and Sarah as virtue, reading Hagar's departures and returns as stages in the soul's philosophical development before it is ready to embrace virtue fully.
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