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 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, ancient Christian hymn I adore aligned with the Word?
  
  
• Can I discern when an organization, group, 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