Unicorns in the Bible: A Case Study of Biblical Interpretation: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

Unicorns in the Bible: A Case Study of Biblical Interpretation

“You don’t believe the Bible!”

The accusation came from an irate reader who had discovered, apparently to his considerable distress, that my friend had referred to unicorns as fictional creatures. For the irate reader, however, the matter was quite simple. The Bible speaks of unicorns. My friend had said that unicorns did not exist. Therefore, my friend did not believe the Bible.

One has to admit, there is a certain admirable economy to the argument.

There is also a problem.

The Bible does indeed speak of unicorns—or, more precisely, an English translation of the Bible speaks of unicorns. That distinction is rather important.

The Authorized Version of 1611, commonly called the King James Version, contains the word “unicorn” several times. The book of Numbers asks whether God has the strength of a unicorn. Job asks whether the unicorn can be domesticated and made to plough a field. The Psalms speak of the strength and horns of unicorns. Isaiah includes the unicorn among the animals caught up in divine judgment.

The irate reader, therefore, had a point. If the King James Version is opened and the appropriate passages consulted, there they are: unicorns.

The difficulty begins when we ask what ought to be a fairly obvious question.

What word is actually in the Hebrew text?

It is not “unicorn.”

The Hebrew word is reʾēm (רְאֵם), the precise zoological identification of which has occasioned considerable discussion. Modern translators generally understand it to refer to a powerful wild bovine, most usually identified with the wild ox or aurochs. Whatever uncertainty may remain about the exact species intended by an ancient Hebrew writer, nothing in the Hebrew word requires us to imagine the creature that eventually inhabited medieval bestiaries, heraldry, children’s stories, and the modern imagination: a gleaming white horse with a single spiraling horn growing from its forehead.

So just how did the unicorn get into the Bible?

That is where the story becomes interesting.

Beginning in the third century before the birth of Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The translation we call the Septuagint rendered reʾēm with the Greek monokerōs—a word meaning “one-horned.” The Latin biblical tradition, exemplified in the fourth century Vulgate, inherited the identification, using unicornis and related terminology. English translators of the 16th and 17th century, working within that long tradition, eventually gave us “unicorn.”

The unicorn, therefore, did not gallop directly out of the Hebrew text and into the pages of the King James Bible. It arrived by way of a long and complicated history of translation and interpretation.

Actually, that complicated history is far more interesting than the unicorn itself.

It also raises a serious question about what we mean when we say that we “believe the Bible.”

My friend’s irritated correspondent believed that the matter was straightforward. The Bible says “unicorn.” A Christian believes the Bible. Consequently, a Christian must believe in unicorns. Yet which Bible are we talking about?

The Hebrew text says reʾēm. The Greek translators gave us monokerōs. The Latin tradition gave us unicornis. The King James translators gave us “unicorn.” Most contemporary English translations give us “wild ox.” At what point in that sequence does divine inspiration attach itself to a particular zoological identification?

We often speak of “the Bible” as though a leather-bound English volume descended intact from heaven. It did not. Scripture comes to us through history. Its books were written at different times, by different authors, in different circumstances, employing different literary forms, principally in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Those texts were copied, transmitted, collected, translated, interpreted, preached, and translated again.

None of this diminishes Scripture. It is, rather, how Scripture actually exists. Indeed, taking the Bible seriously requires us to take this history seriously. Biblical faith cannot depend upon pretending that the history of the biblical text does not exist.

The unicorn is useful precisely because the example is so amusing. Few theological controversies are likely to erupt today over the existence of Monoceros. Yet the method of interpretation that produces our “unicorn controversy” is anything but harmless. The same method appears whenever an English word is removed from its linguistic, historical, literary, and cultural setting and treated as though God himself had dictated that particular English word. That is not a high doctrine of Scripture. It is a high doctrine of translation. There is a profound difference between the two.

The translators of the King James Version themselves understood that difference rather better than some of their later defenders. They were scholars working with Hebrew and Greek texts and with earlier English translations. They made judgments. Sometimes those judgments were brilliant. Sometimes subsequent discoveries have allowed later scholars to make better ones. Translation necessarily involves interpretation because words in one language rarely correspond perfectly to words in another.

To acknowledge this is not to surrender biblical authority. It is to recognize what biblical authority actually asks of us.

The serious reader of Scripture must continually ask: What did these words mean in their original linguistic setting? What kind of literature am I reading? What historical circumstances stand behind the text? How did ancient readers understand it? How has the Church received it? What assumptions has my translation introduced? What assumptions am I bringing to it myself?

Those questions do not stand between us and the Bible. They are part of the means by which we learn to hear it.

The reʾēm is an especially useful reminder because somewhere along its journey from ancient Israel through Alexandria, Rome, medieval Europe, and early modern England, an animal became another animal. A word became an image. The image acquired a history of its own. Eventually readers could encounter “unicorn” in an English Bible and quite naturally imagine that the biblical writers knew of the same fabulous creature they knew.

That is how interpretation works, often without our noticing it.

We bring worlds with us when we read.

The task of biblical interpretation is not to pretend that we do not. It is to become sufficiently aware of those worlds that we can distinguish, as far as possible, between what the text says and what we have assumed that it says.

This is why biblical scholarship matters. Philology matters. History matters. Archaeology matters. Textual criticism matters. The history of interpretation matters. None of these disciplines exists to explain the Bible away. At their best, they prevent us from mistaking our explanations for the Bible itself.

There is also a theological principle involved.

Christians do not confess that God inspired the assumptions of twenty-first-century readers. Neither have Christians historically confessed the inspiration of one particular translation. The doctrine of inspiration concerns Scripture, and Scripture stubbornly insists upon being something God has given through human language, human authors, human history, and human communities. The Incarnation ought to have prepared us for this.

Scripture is not the Incarnation, of course, and the two must not be confused. Yet there is an analogy worth pondering. If we imagine that acknowledging the human history of Scripture somehow threatens its divine character, we may have misunderstood both revelation and humanity.

Which, of course, brings us back to our unicorn.

Do I believe in unicorns?

No.

Do I believe the Bible?

Yes.

Indeed, it is because I take the Bible seriously that I am unwilling to make an English translation from 1611 say more than the Hebrew text itself says. I have no desire to rescue the Bible from history, because the Bible does not need rescuing. What needs rescuing, at least occasionally, is our interpretation of it.

Perhaps, then, the irate correspondent asked the wrong question.

The question is not whether we believe in the unicorn because the word occurs in the King James Bible.

The more unsettling question is whether any of us are prepared to allow Scripture to correct what we thought Scripture said.

That requires something considerably more difficult than believing in unicorns.

It requires humility.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD