The Unicorns in Your Bible

 

Your Bible has unicorns in it.

Well, let me be more precise: If you regularly read the King James Version as your Bible of choice, you're going to run into references to unicorns nine times in five different books of the Bible.

King James isn't the only version of Scripture stabling unicorns.  You'll find the word "unicorn" in many early English translations (Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva, etc.), and even in later 19^th and 20^th century translations (Webster's, Smith's Literal Translation, and Lamsa's 1950s version).

 

WHERE'D THAT UNICORN COME FROM?

Before I continue, I should definitely point out which areas of Scripture I'm talking about.

Early English renderings of the Hebrew word re'ēm as "unicorn" can be found in:

• Deuteronomy 33:17, where Moses uses the term to describe the glory and strength of the house of Joseph;
  
  
• Numbers 23:22 and Numbers 24:8, from two of Balaam's prophecies about how strong the armies of Israel are;
  
  
• Job 39:9-10, in which God challenges Job, asking if he can domesticate the re'ēm by yoking it to plow fields;
  
  
• Psalm 22:21, where the supplicant pleads to be freed from the horns of multiple unicorns;
  
  
• Psalm 29:6, describing the voice of the Lord making Lebanon skip like a calf and Sirion like a young unicorn;
  
  
• Psalm 92:10, where the Psalmist uses the unicorn's horn as a symbol of victory and exaltation over enemies;
  
  
• Isaiah 34:7, in which the Lord sacrifices unicorns as the wildest and most powerful of beasts to fall in his vengeance upon Edom.

 

We've got a pretty good description of the re'ēm's qualities in this rundown.  A re'ēm is wild, horned, strong, glorious to behold, and able to plow fields if you could only tame him.

This beast is definitely not Princess Celestia from My Little Pony.

 

THROWING DOWN FOR KING JAMES

Nearly every modern English translation of re'ēm renders it as "wild ox."  If you moused over the linked references above, that's the translation you saw.  But the fact that the King James Version and earlier English translations interpret it as "unicorn" has led to some interesting modern attempts to defend the King James translation.

Dr. Gene Kim, a pastor of Bible Baptist Church in the San Francisco Bay area, defends the KJV's use of "unicorn" by insisting that "unicorn" must have been the name of a real animal we've since forgotten.  Steve Waldron, a pastor in the Oneness Pentecostal tradition at New Hope of Albany Church, similarly insists the "unicorn" of the KJV refers to a real creature we've since forgotten, although he concedes it might have referred to a rhinoceros.

Writing for Answers in Genesis, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell asserts that unicorns were "real creatures familiar to the people living in those ancient times."  She offers the possibility of a rhinoceros, an animal with a single horn (well, sometimes).  She offers other possibilities as well, including the extinct aurochs, a bovine with two horns "so symmetrical that they could appear as one in profile."  She even offers up the possibility of additional, unknown one-horned creatures that have since gone extinct, but which could merit the term "unicorn."

Dr. Mitchell is not a zoologist, taxonomist, or wildlife forensic biologist.  She's a gynecologist.  I've noticed that a number of Answers in Genesis "doctors" are not specialists in the fields in which they're publishing commentary, but that's a side topic that might merit its own blog post.  For my part, I am neither a taxonomist nor a gynecologist, so I'll focus on linguistics and ancient classical literature, the fields where I've wrangled my own degrees.

This will be my point: These modern defenders of the "unicorn" term are not defending the Word of God or even the existence of ancient unicorns.  They are defending a KJV-only wording and, ironically, a non-KJV tradition supporting that wording.

But inserting unicorns into Scripture is, I'll argue, a tradition of men, not the Word of God.

 

NO SINGLE HORNS HERE

"Uni-corn" literally means "one horn" … "uni-" as in unicycle or universe, and "-corn" as in cornucopia, the horn of plenty, or tricorn hats.  The word unicorn's etymology certainly suggests a one-horned creature.  The Hebrew does not.

If you're in a hurry, here's the spoiler – the Hebrew term re'ēm has nothing to do with "one horn."  In fact, the Bible's first mention of horns connected to re'ēm, Deuteronomy 33:17, makes those horns plural, not singular: literally, "and the horns of a re'ēm are his [Joseph's] horns."  Horns aplenty, and nary a uni- in sight.

Hebrew is part of a language family called "Semitic," and other languages in that family group have animal terms similar to the Hebrew word re'ēm.  All of them are two-horned animals:

Syriac: raymā, a large antelope or wild ox

Akkadian: rīmu, wild bull or aurochs

Classical Arabic: r'im, white antelope or oryx

Ugaritic: rī'm, wild bull or buffalo

 

This tiny bit of linguistic information starts to make clear why nearly all modern translations of Scripture lean toward "wild ox" for the Hebrew word re'ēm.  Scriptural context shows it's a wild animal; linguistic context shows it's likely some kind of ox or antelope.

But none of that explains why the King James and so many other early English versions of the Bible say "unicorn."  To learn that, we're going to have to do a bit of time travel.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ALEXANDRIA

Roughly three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a group of Jewish scholars living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria said to one another, "Hey, we should start translating our Hebrew Scriptures into Greek so more people can read them.  Everybody's Greeking it up these days!"

That's probably not a direct quote, but stick with me.

Legend says there were seventy (or seventy-two) of these third-century BCE scholars, and that they worked alone in seventy(-two) separately locked rooms (or thirty-six separately locked rooms with the scholars working in pairs … come on, you know how dicey legends get over time).  When they'd finished their translations into Greek, they discovered that all of them had produced exactly the same translations of the first five books of Scripture, word for word.

That's a pretty suspect tale.  But we do know that these scholars started a project that continued over decades and resulted in what's known as the "Septuagint," the "Seventy."  It was, as far as we know, the first extensive Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and its wording became an important source for many Old Testament quotations used in the New Testament.

When these scholars got to Deuteronomy and Numbers, they had a decision to make about the word re'ēm.  We don't know why they made the decision they did, but for a reason lost to time, they opted to translate that word as monokeros in Greek.  Monokeros was already a term in Greek zoology.  It literally means "one-horned," and it was a term applied to a beast that early writers like Ctesias and Aristotle described as "the Indian ass," accounts probably influenced, at least in part, by reports of the Indian rhinoceros.  Descriptions of monokeros's strength and wild nature abounded among the learned in the third century BCE, and the Septuagint translators seem to have adopted the monokeros term as a workable translation capturing the strength and wildness inherent in the re'ēm concept.

Little did they know, their translation choice would have an impact lasting thousands of years.

Several centuries later, Latin biblical tradition complicated matters further.  Jerome's Vulgate was not simply a Latin translation of the Septuagint. For most of the Old Testament, Jerome worked directly from Hebrew, although he also knew and consulted Greek and earlier Latin versions.  Nevertheless, the Latin Bible rendered re'ēm inconsistently with words such as unicornis ("one-horned") and rhinoceros ("nose-horned").  Thus, the Greek association between the Hebrew animal and a supposedly one-horned beast passed – somewhat unevenly – into the dominant Latin biblical tradition.

 

A HABIT OF UNICORNS

Now two major biblical traditions, the Septuagint and the Vulgate, had associated the Hebrew word re'ēm with one-horned creatures.  Over the centuries, when clergy repeatedly encountered "one-horned" language in Scripture, they got an image that stuck with them.

Fantastical images evolve. Some medieval bestiaries described monokeros as "the size of a full-grown horse," and that description led to a view of the creature as an actual horse, one with a single horn protruding from its forehead.  We have dozens of pre-KJV images depicting fantasy unicorns taking their place in tapestries, carvings, illustrated versions of the Bible and books of Psalms.  And so, something like our modern view of "unicorns" was born.

Monoceros slowly started to differ from unicornis in many bestiaries.  Monoceros stayed monstrous; the unicorn became gentler, smaller, a goat- or deer- or (finally) horse-like animal fascinated with innocent maidens.

Then someone said, "Hey, we need Bibles in English."

Again, that's probably not a direct quote.

In the 1580s, an English Catholic priest began translating Jerome's Latin Vulgate, working with his team to produce an English text.  Their work solidified into the Douay-Rheims Version, a Catholic staple for centuries to come.

Meanwhile, in King James I's England, the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 led to the commissioning of a project to make an English Bible with the king's name attached.  It relied on accepted Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the time, but the translators also report consulting earlier English translations (primarily the Bishops' Bible), the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and numerous other manuscripts as references.

Earlier English translations.

The ones I mentioned above … the ones already in a "unicorn" habit, right there with the Septuagint's monokeros and the Vulgate's unicornis.  The one-horn traditions.

 

DID THEY BELIEVE IN UNICORNS?

Let's revisit those modern KJV-only apologists who argued that the translators may have meant "rhinoceros" when they wrote "unicorn."  Frankly, that's unlikely.  By the 1600s, English had already had the word "rhinoceros" in it for a couple centuries.  Our apologist friends also suggested that KJV translators may have meant the aurochs.  But English was already referring to that creature as the "urus ox," the term that eventually developed into "aurochs."  With the Hebrew term re'ēm right before them, and despite their knowledge that the term "unicorn" was transforming fully into a fantasy equine mythology in their own era, they still chose to translate the term as "unicorn."

I don't think they believed in fantasy unicorns, any more than they believed in the mythological rooster-serpent "cockatrice" of the KJV's Jeremiah 8:17 or the goatmen "satyrs" of the KJV's Isaiah 13:21.  I think they believed in human tradition.  There was no moment when the KJV translation team declared, "Unicorns are real!"  But there was a moment they chose to adhere to a few longstanding traditions of men, ossified in existing translations.

The Douay-Rheims translators fared no better.  In Psalm 29:6, they spotted the Latin word rinocerotis and said, "Hey!  For giggles, let's make that one 'unicorn,' too!"

Not a direct quote.

 

WHY IT ALL MATTERS

Obviously, my point this month isn't about whether unicorns exist.  It isn't even about whether KJV-only apologists are being disingenuous when they try to protect English mistranslations against accuracy.

Am I going to hell if I accidentally believe in ancient unicorns?  Absolutely not.  But am I growing in wisdom if I just accept unicorns without deeper thought?  Again, absolutely not.

My takeaway: Human tradition seeps into every aspect of our faith.  As I study the Word to grow and learn and employ it as a tool meant to thoroughly furnish me "unto all good works," I have to keep an eye open for where human traditions have seeped in – even in the translations of the Bible I most enjoy using.

So, here are some things I need to consider in my daily walk of faith:

• Do I keep an eye out for other human traditions that creep into my faith?
  
  
• Should I consider all traditions to be bad, or are some a worthwhile part of faith?
  
  
• Have I read the Bible closely enough to appreciate what it's really saying?
  
  
• Is that cool, new Christian song I like biblical?  Is that moving, traditional Christian hymn I adore aligned with the Word?
  
  
• Can I discern when an established organization or movement claims to be rooted in Christianity but behaves in unbiblical ways?
  
  
• Do I absorb platitudes, sayings, and internet memes that sound Christian without discernment by the Spirit within me?
  
  
• Do I test new ideas expressed by fellow believers and preachers?
  
  
• Do I ponder, pray about, and challenge old ideas to ensure they're really founded in the Word of God?

 

May truth always be our first choice.

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez

 

 

 

Slo-Mo Reflections: The Lord’s Prayer

Confession: My mind’s natural setting is overdrive.  I have to work to slow down the torrent of thoughts gushing through my prefrontal cortex.  In teaching, I do that by forcing myself to make the same point three different ways.  In business meetings, I do it by listening to the English but taking notes in Spanish using only Greek characters (not kidding).  And in Bible study, I do it by remembering: Exeraunao.

Exeraunao is a Greek word found in 1 Peter 1:10.  It means “to search out,” “to investigate carefully,” to pursue a matter until it has been examined deeply.  That’s often what my brain needs.  By slowing down and experiencing Scripture less as an act of speedreading, more as an act of exeraunao, I hear the voice of God better in my daily meditations on his word.

I’ll show you what I mean.  Let’s take a deep-dive, slo-mo walk through the best-known of all Scripture passages, the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew 6:9-13.  Along the way, my mind will flit and flutter among ideas – but safely within the guardrails established by the Savior’s words.

And throughout, I’m going to keep in mind that the Lord's Prayer isn’t just a collection of words meant for once-a-day recital.  Christ had just told the disciples to avoid empty phrases and vain repetitions (Matthew 6:7).  This was a guide to their life of prayer – how they should pray, and the specific elements of praying without ceasing.  That’s the approach my longtime friend Rev. Brett Bailey (who inspired this post) emphasizes for his own prayer life.

It should guide my prayer life, too.

 

PATER HEMON

~ “Father of us”

I’ve heard multiple sermons focused on the fatherhood metaphor for God.  Many of those sermons emphasized how uniquely Christian it is to view the Creator as our own father (although references to God as the father of believers can be found scattered throughout Hebrew Scriptures as well, as early as Deuteronomy 32:6 and as late as Malachi 2:10).

Since I’ve heard less emphasis on the word “our,” that’s where my mind goes today.  That’s the hemon word in the Greek up above – “of us” when translated with the literal word order preserved.

"Our."  We live in a Western culture and era of individualism.  In our individualist society, the “I” comes first and the “us” and “you” are secondary.  I speak of accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.  I sing that Jesus loves me, and that this I know because the Bible tells me so.

Jesus is those things.  But Scripture was written in cultures and eras of collectivism.  In such cultures, the group, the household, the nation, and the plural “you” carry far more weight.  In a culture like that, I’d be far less likely to see every “you” in the Bible as meaning “me.”

Example: When I read Jeremiah 29, my Western brain immediately assumes it offers a promise to me, Yolanda Ramírez:

I know the plans I have for you,

Says the Lord,

Plans for peace and not for evil,

To give you a future and a hope. (v. 11)

It doesn’t matter (I presume) that the passage is actually about the entire nation of Israel... and, more poignant still, that it is addressed to a people already in exile in Babylon, many of whom would not live to see that promise fulfilled.  No, I am more than preprogrammed to rip that verse from its original context and craft a personalized theology that declares, “God has a plan of peace and a future of hope for me, and that’s what this verse is all about!”

Jesus urged me to go into a room, close the door, and pray this prayer alone (Matthew 6:6).  In the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer, however, he reminds me: It’s not my Father.  It’s our Father.  I have a family.  I pray as part of a larger group, a body, a community of siblings to Christ who are freely adopted into God’s clan of grace.  Despite my focus on myself, I can never forget you, the plural you.  Y’all, if you’re in the southern U.S.  Y’uns in Appalachia.  You lot in Britain.

But... brain flitter.  I digress.

 

HO EN TOIS OURANOIS

~ “The [One] in the Heavens”

When I learned the Lord’s Prayer in English, I was surprised that it made heaven singular.  “The heavens,” as a plural, was how the Spanish version I first learned phrased it, los cielos.  It turns out “heavens” is plural in French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, and the original Greek of the Lord’s Prayer as well.  German and English change it to singular.

The Greek ouranois doesn’t separately distinguish (1) the “heaven” we think of as God's realm, (2) the celestial “heavens” of the stars and planets, and (3) the sky itself.  It heartens me to think of God as present throughout all of those heavens.  Not one drop of moisture in Earth’s cloudy skies, not one pebble in the rings around Neptune, not a single plasma burst on the star Arcturus, and not one massless gluon particle at the farthest reaches of galaxy MoM-z14 is beyond the reach of God.  In fact, he put them where they are.  They are the heavens of the God, and he is present through all his heavens.

 

HAGIASTHETO TO ONOMA SOU

~ “Set apart be the name of you.”

Reflections on the onoma, the Name, could fill an entire library.  For today, I’ll focus on hagiastheto, what we often translate as “hallowed be.”  As you probably know, “hallowed” means “holy.”

Cool enough, but here’s my thought: “holy” doesn’t mean “holy.”  Not in our modern sense of “morally pure” or “religiously inclined.”  In Greek, this word is saying that God’s name needs to be proclaimed as unique, one of a kind, set apart, seen as not just “different,” but as “one of one and the only one.”  Think of Isaiah 40:25, where God himself asks:

“To whom, then, shall you compare me,

That I should be like him?”

The implied answer is: nobody.  We can’t make God’s name any holier, any more one-of-a-kind.  But we can and must spread the word about just how holy it is.  We need to openly venerate his name as the Incomparable Name.  That’s what we’re asking in this prayer – that the Name be held up as All That, and that more and more of humanity see it as the Only Name it is.

 

ELTHETO HE BASILEIA SOU

~ “Let come the kingdom of you”

Ah, the human basileus, “king.”  We’re hero worshippers, we Homo sapiens.  Whether it’s top athletes, movie stars, corporate executives, or favorite megachurch preachers, we’re ready to esteem anyone outstanding in their field.

But nothing tops a human king, a basileus.  When Israel got tired of its hero-judges, the people clamored for human royalty to lord it over them.  When fans of Lord of the Rings read the books or view the films, they root for the return of the absolutist monarch.  When a political party gets their guy into executive office, they insist he have more power than anyone before him.  That’s kingship.  And we’re dying to be subjects.

The truth is, we do need a king.  There’s a purpose for that natural longing.  We’re tempted to direct it toward human heroes, but deep down we know whose kingdom ought to have first claim on our hearts.  We’re created to be subjects of the universe’s one Benevolent Monarch.  Those lesser kings and heroes?  One day, with us, they’ll bend the knee and joyfully proclaim the true Lord (Philippians 2:10-11).

 

GENETHETO TO THELEMA SOU

~ “Be accomplished the intention of you”

“Thy will be done,” I pray as I work my way through this model of prayer.  His thelema, his will, desire, plan, intention.  But I have to pause here to notice something… something about this prayer; something about his will.

I'm praying, and I haven’t asked for anything yet.

To say that better: I haven’t asked for anything… for me.

Instead, I’ve asked that God get three things he deserves.  I asked that his name be venerated, that his kingdom arrive, and that his will be fulfilled.  I will be asking for things for myself, and very soon.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But this model of prayer Jesus demonstrates is starting to convict me.  So, seeing this, I ask myself: Do I start my daily prayer time with a list of requests and grievances, or do I follow Jesus’ lead to “pray, then, like this” (Matthew 6:9)?

Does my prayer life always, always, put God’s intentions first and foremost?

• Does it glorify his unmatched Name, upfront?
• Does it long aloud for his kingship?
• Does it recognize the superiority of his eternal will over my passing wants?

Not enough in my prayer life.  Not yet.  So, I am learning.  “Pray, then, like this.”

 

HOS EN OURANO KAI EPI GES

~ “As in heaven, also upon the land”

Culture time!

Heaven gets its second mention in Christ’s prayer model, but this time it needs no final -s in English.  Jesus has switched the term from plural to singular in Greek.

A close look at that word, ourano, might trigger in your brain its Latin rendering: Uranus.  In Jesus’ time, this didn’t refer to the distant planet where the gaseous skies rain diamonds (not kidding, fun planet fact).  Jesus’ culture had, for three hundred years, been "Hellenized", an adjective that means “made really, really Greek-ish.”  It was a multilingual world that was well aware of Greek culture.  Ouranos, in Greek mythology, was a primordial being, “the heavens” themselves.  He and his goddess-wife Gaia, “Earth” (in the Lord’s Prayer, we see a form of her name in ges, “Earth” or “land”), had monstrous children that brought chaos and violence to the universe.  This mythology was part of the worldview of the Greek cities Christianity was reaching.

I'm not claiming that Matthew 6:10 is secretly "about" Ouranos and Gaia.  I'm saying that, in the Greek-speaking world into which Christianity spread, heaven and earth were not culturally neutral words.  Against mythologies in which Heaven and Earth could be treated as divine powers, the Lord's Prayer places both realms under the will of the Father.

In short: mythological Heaven and Earth passed away.  But the Savior, God’s Word, can’t be made to pass away.  His will overcomes ancient Greek worldviews, overcomes all.  Our human mythologies are interesting tales, but in the light of the Lord’s will, they dissolve as vain imaginings.

His will gets done.  His will stays done.

 

TON ARTON HEMON TON EPIOUSION DOS HEMIN SEMERON

~ “The bread of us, the needed, give us today”

Finally, we begin to mention the things we may need.  Of course, Jesus told us that our heavenly Father knows what we need even before we ask (Matthew 6:8).  In a sense, our request is simply punctuation to his omniscience.

I recently discussed this portion of the prayer at length (in this post), so visit there if you’re curious.

 

KAI APHES HEMIN TA OPHEILEMATA HEMON

~ And forgive us the owings of us

True, “owings” isn’t a proper English word.  My bad.  But sometimes we’re so accustomed to a common translation – “trespasses,” “debts” – that we need to freshen it up.  We need to make the commonplace “uncommon” once again, in the spirit of the Russian literary term ostranenie, a defamiliarization for the sake of seeing something anew.

Sorry.  Flitting brain.  I warned you.

Yes, the term opheilemata is usually translated “debts” or “trespasses.”  It’s a legal term in Greek meaning a financial or contractual obligation.  “Debts” gets close in English, and it wouldn’t be unthinkable to translate the term as “outstanding balances.”  But it’s stronger than that.  In the ancient world, defaulting on one’s opheilemata could result in imprisonment or enslavement.  Asking our Father to relieve us of our debts isn’t just a request like, “Could you pick up the check this time, Dad?”  It’s a plea for redemption from the chains we very much deserve.

We should say such words as “forgive us our debts” slowly.  Very slowly.  Knowing the eternal significance.

 

HOS KAI HEMEIS APHEKAMEN TOIS OPHEILETAIS HEMON

~ “As also we pardon the owers of us”

At first glance, this part of the Lord’s Prayer looks transactional: “Hey, God, I’ve forgiven others, so how’s about a little quid pro quo?”

That isn’t how grace works, of course.  The free gift of God’s salvation (Romans 6:23) doesn’t come as an upfront purchase on my part, and it isn’t maintained through upkeep fees.  Free is free, and we couldn’t afford it even if we tried (which we, of course, attempted throughout the age of the Law).

So, what’s this “cancel our debts as we cancel others’ debts” line all about?  At one level, it’s definitional.  It defines who we are now; being forgiven of the eternal debts we owe, we turn right around and become the kind of redeemed and sanctified human beings who naturally forgive others.

Let’s be honest, though.  We’re forgiven, but we’re not perfect yet.  We need reminders to stay true to who we are as new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17).  Scripture regularly reminds us to forgive as we’re forgiven – Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13, Mark 11:25, Matthew 18:35, and so many others.  I start to get the message: I am a forgiver, and I must walk that path daily.

My “enemies” belong in my prayer life.  Is there someone I dislike and can’t forgive?  Someone I find irritating and from whom I withhold love?  I need to make them part of my Lord’s Prayer practices.  After all, it’s really hard to continue disliking someone I’m praying for every single day.  The forgiveness flowed to me, so forgiveness flows from me.

 

AND SO ON

Alas, I’ve reached the maximum word count I allow myself for these blogs.  I still haven't discussed why I need to ask God not to lead me into temptation or why I think I still need to be delivered from evil!  But my self-imposed rules are what keep me from descending into chaotic rambling, so I have to draw a line for this month.

Perhaps someone will come along and do a full sermon series on this prayer so that I know how this ends!  That’s been done before, no doubt.  But each generation needs a fresh voice for an eternal message.

I want to hear that voice.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez