Hesitantly Adam took a step forward. A twig cracked beneath his foot and the Lord turned to the shadowy figure that slowly emerged from the gloom of the trees.
“I heard you in the garden,” he said. “I was afraid because I was naked and so I hid.”
“Who told you you’re naked?” asked the Lord. “Have you eaten from the tree I forbade you to eat from?”
Behind him the woman also came into view. In a clearing in the middle of the garden the human beings stood, the Lord and the people he’d created. It was evening. In the grove around them the shadows lengthened, and now and then the air was filled with the sighing of the leaves that rustled in the wind.
“The woman you made me for company gave me fruit from the tree,” Adam said, “and I ate it.”
The Lord turned to the woman.
“What’s this you’ve done!” he said.
“The serpent tempted me and I ate,” she said.
One after the other, the Lord cursed the serpent, the woman, and the man. When he’d done this, he made clothes for the two human beings and then banished them from the garden.
His shouts indicate that the Lord didn’t know where they were, his questioning that he didn’t know what they’d done, and the little detail of the clothes made out of skins, which he handed over between the cursing and the banishment, gives a little hint of the inconsistent and impulsive nature of his presence. Everything, in other words, that is written about the fall in scripture tends toward the Lord being ignorant of it in advance. And if he hadn’t foreseen the fall how could “Christ,” even before human beings were created, be a part of him?
And if he knew that “Christ” would one day appear on earth in flesh and blood to save humanity, why did he as good as exterminate all living things in the great flood? And if he’d always known that he would at some point send a great flood over the earth, how can it be that he regretted it afterward? Because as it says: And the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth: neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.
This element of improvisation is apparent in a great many of the Lord’s actions in the Old Testament. It can often seem as if he is borne along by his own emotions, and whether they have their basis in great rage or sudden kindness, it’s difficult to draw any conclusion other than that he doesn’t always see the consequences of his own actions.
Let us make man in our image and likeness. Who other than the angels could the Lord have been thinking about when he said this? He has created heaven and earth, sun and the moon, day and the night, plants and the animals, birds and the fishes. And he has done it alone. Now that he is about to create mankind he turns, for the first time, to others. They are not named, nor are they described, but their proximity is undeniable. Let us! says the Lord, and creates man in his own image and that of this enigmatic third party.
The next time he invokes them man has fallen. The man has become like one of us, to know good and evil, says the Lord, and immediately afterward the names of the mysterious ones are made known: he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubim.
So right from the beginning there was a link between the angels and the Lord on the one hand, and human beings on the other. God’s statements and man’s creation and fall, respectively, both say something about the nature of this connection, according to Bellori. Both are concerned with change (in the first, man is created from nothing, in the second, he moves from innocence to knowledge) and about similarity (in the first man is created like “us,” in “our” image, in the second, he changes to become even more like “us”). The fact that similarity wasn’t a stable quantity in the relations between the human and the divine but was, right from the start, subject to the laws of change is of prime importance in Bellori’s theory of angels as developed in On the Nature of Angels. Man was created in the image of the divine, the two resembled one another, at the same time each stood on their own side of a divide, that of creator and created. When man ate from the tree of knowledge, the similarity increased, whereupon banishment made it clear that there was a limit to this.
Until that time the divine had functioned as one and the same, manifested only in the Lord’s use of the word “us,” but with the transgression the divine became differentiated: out of the Lord’s all-powerful shadow stepped the cherubim. It’s no accident that they were first mentioned then. Prior to the fall the difference between the human and the divine was absolute, after the fall it became fluid; a wide area opened between the two and in order to demarcate the boundary zone, the Lord was obliged to peel off the cherubim from the divine entity. And thus, as simultaneous guardians and representatives of the divine outer limits, the cherubim made their entrance onto the world’s stage for the first time.
But who were they? Where did they come from? What did they look like? And how long were they here?
Apart from the cherubim necessarily being trusted and in possession of a certain bodily strength or power, it’s impossible to make any final comment on the nature of the cherubim from what is written in the story of the fall. It isn’t even possible to say anything definite about the duration of their task. But certain assumptions are more likely than others. We know that the great flood covered the whole world with water, and as the Garden of Eden isn’t listed as an exception, it’s probable that it was flooded, too. It’s inconceivable that the cherubim would have continued their watch then. It is also unthinkable that their duty could have ended earlier without scripture mentioning or giving reasons for it. One may, therefore, conclude that the cherubim guarded the tree of life in the time between the fall and the flood. The lack of any description of their outward appearance may be because their guardianship of the tree of life first began after the banishment from paradise and that as a result they hadn’t been seen by the first human beings. But this need not mean they were never seen. A fragment of the Apocryphal writings found outside the Mesopotamian town of Mari in 1954 concerns the existence of the first human beings after the fall, and it tells the story of how Abel made camp one evening on the edge of the forest surrounding the Garden of Eden, where, despite his father’s absolute injunction, he decided to search for the tree of life. No more than fifteen lines of the narrative remain, it stops dead as if on a precipice with the sentence, And Abel saw the light of the angels.