The Unicorn In The Bible Was An Oryx – Ancient Translation Mistake

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - The unicorn is a legendary animal that has fascinated people for ages. Depictions of this magical and beautiful animal have been found on ancient seals, and early Greek writers believed the unicorn originated from India.

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, people were incredibly interested in this mysterious creature no one had seen. As discussed in our previous article on Ancient Pages, Vikings used the opportunity and started selling faked unicorn horns and fooled Europeans with their bluff for hundreds of years.

Being in possession of a unicorn horn was everyone’s desire, but hardly possible due to the high price. It was believed that the alicorn, the horn itself, and the substance it was made of held magical and medicinal properties. Even the great painter Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by the unicorn and wrote about it in his notebooks.

The Holy Bible. Credit: Kevin Probst - Public Domain - Unicorn by Maerten de Vos (1532–1603). Credit: Public Domain

Knowledge of the unicorn came from ancient Greek authors and the Bible, but no one knew the magical animal had been misidentified.

The Bible mentions the unicorn seven times, but only by mistake.

The mistake happened long before the birth of Christianity. The Old Testament was originally composed in Hebrew.

In 250 B.C., Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the second King of Egypt's Greek period, ordered 72 elders to translate the sacred Hebrew texts into Greek. That Greek translation is called the Septuagint. During the translation, the Jews encountered a problem. Their texts contained several references to an animal called "Re'em".

Re’em is the Hebrew name for oryx leucoryx or oryx, but the Jewish ancient scholars were confused by the descriptions in the Old Testament.

Left: Virgin Mary holding the unicorn (c. 1480), detail of the Annunciation with the Unicorn Polyptych, National Museum, Warsaw. Credit: Public Domain - Right: Maiden with Unicorn, tapestry, 15th century (Musée de Cluny, Paris). Credit: Public Domain

Modern Bible scholars believe that the Jewish texts are likely to refer to the two-horned oryx. Oryx leucoryx was once a lord of the entire Middle East. Its domain embraced most of the Land of Israel, but during the reign of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, it had already been extinct in North Africa and the Middle East.

The original Jewish texts mention nothing about the animal having a horn, but the King's scribe chose, despite this, to call the animal monoceros, which can be translated into "a horn". The translation was continued when the Jewish texts became the Old Testament.

Unicorns still captivate modern people, and scientists have tried to find proof of their existence. Some years ago, a unicorn fossil was discovered in Siberia. The discovery caused a sensation. Scientists said unicorns were in fact real, but they looked slightly different from what we imagine today.

Written by  Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com

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