“An anointed guardian cherub”
You were in Eden, the garden of God.… You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for I had ordained you. You were on the holy mountain of God; you walked among the fiery stones. (Ezekiel 28:13–14 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A direct description of Satan, his beauty and his fall from heaven.
The cultural key
This passage, like Isaiah 14's 'day star,' is often read as a portrait of Satan's fall, but its stated subject is 'the ruler of Tyre' (28:2, 12), a fabulously rich, arrogant human king of a great trading city who 'said, I am a god; I sit in the seat of gods.' To puncture that pride, Ezekiel drapes him in the grandest imagery available: he is set in Eden, the garden of God, decked with every precious stone, made an 'anointed guardian cherub' on the holy mountain, flawless and dazzling, until pride and dishonest trade corrupt him and he is cast down and destroyed. The Eden-and-cherub language likely draws on ancient royal ideology (kings styled as god-appointed guardian figures) to say: you were given glory beyond measure, and you ruined it by imagining you were divine. Later Christian tradition heard in this overreaching, fallen figure an echo of the devil, but the plain sense is a taunt against a doomed human tyrant. Reading only 'Satan' misses that the target is Tyre's proud king.
Recovered meaning
The Eden-and-cherub splendor is heaped on the proud human king of Tyre to expose and mock his god-pretensions, much like Isaiah's 'Lucifer' taunt of Babylon's king. The later Satan-reading is an overlay; in context it topples an arrogant ruler.