The issue at hand is the description of the Cherubim’s physiognomy in Ezekiel chaps 1 and 10, both of which describe Cherubim having four faces.
Chap 1 has them as being of ‘adam which means man or human (Strong’s H120), ‘ariy which is a lion (Strong’s H738), showr which is a bull or ox (Strong’s H7794) and nesher which is an eagle, vulture or, more specifically, a griffon-vulture (Strong’s H5404).
Chap 10 has them as being ‘adam, ‘ariy, nesher and not a showr but a keruwb which is Cherub.
Daniel I. Block noted the following in his book The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24 (The New International Commentary on the Old Testament; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997 AD, pp. 324–325) with regards to the discrepancy in the description of the Cherubim’s faces in Ezekiel chaps 1 and 10, “the plain reading of the Hebrew here points to four identical faces for each cherub, with each cherub having a different set.”
He focuses on two issues:
“Why was the bull face displaced” to which he responds by citing a “speculative” answer to the effect that “A Babylonian talmudic tradition theorizes that since the bull was associated with the golden calf incident at Sinai (Exod. 32), hence a symbol of Israelite sin, Ezekiel implored Yahweh for mercy, to which God responded by changing the bull into a cherub.”
The other is “how is the cherubic face to be perceived?” about which he points out that “The rabbis resolved this problem by assuming that cherubim had human faces, and explaining the apparent redundancy their first answer created by proposing that the difference between a cherubic and human face was a matter of size. The former was the small faces of a boy, the latter the large face of a man. While we cannot be sure how the ancients perceived true cherubic faces, some evidence suggests that they were not human.”
Ultimately, he concludes that “the contradiction at least in the order of faces is more apparent than real.” This, so he notes, is because:
…the inaugural vision came to the prophet from the north, the frontal view (south) would have had a human face, with the other three being arranged as follows:
If the faces in 10:14 are also listed in clockwise order, the sequence is identical, and the cherub’s is identified with the bull. Why the present enumeration commences with the cherub instead of the human face is unclear, but it may reflect the vantage from which the prophet observed the chariot.
In order to witness the kabod [reference to God’s glory: Strong’s H3519] lifting from cherubim inside the temple, he must have been standing at the front of the building, perhaps at the eastern gate of the inner court. From this viewpoint, he naturally began with the creature facing him.
Leslie C. Allen, Ezekiel 1–19 (vol. 28; Word Biblical Commentary; Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1998 AD):
The content of v 14…envisions four faces for each cherub, in line with the cue words, yet v 14bα strangely speaks in terms of each of the four cherubim having one, unique face…It is feasible to take the first פני “the face of” in the MT as the uncorrected result of a copyist’s eye jumping from לאחד “to each” to האחד “the first.”
MT refers to the Masoretic Text about which Allen had previously written:
The MT adds v 14, “‘Each had four faces’: the face of the first was a cherub’s face, and the face of the second a human face, and the third a lion’s face and the fourth an eagle’s face.”
Also, as Daniel I. Block had done, Allen references directionality:
Whereas 1:10 lists the faces directionally, this annotation takes its cue from the “four” of 10:21 (and 1:6) and lists them numerically. In contrast to the southern orientation of 1:10, the numbering of the faces seems to represent a westerly orientation.
Much of this seems to be much ado about not very much and I take a form of Allen’s “result of a copyist’s eye jumping” view.
The scribe/copyist may have committed what is academically known as a parablepsis owing to homoioteleuton or homoiarkton. This technical term refers to a copying error that occurs when one reads a word in the original text, looks away to write it down and then looks back but accidentally ends up in a slightly different place in the manuscript.
In Ezekiel 10 the word keruwb appears 21 times and so a scribe/copyist could have simply written down the word keruwb whilst missing the word showr.
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