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Unicorns
Unicorns in the Bible?
By Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell
To think of
the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true
in every detail.
Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales
because it mentions unicorns.
However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an
imaginary creature.
The Bible refers to the unicorn in the context of familiar
animals, such as peacocks, lambs, lions, bullocks, goats, donkeys, horses,
dogs, eagles, and calves (Job 39:9–12).
In Job 38–41, God reminded Job of the characteristics
of a variety of impressive animals He had created, showing Job that God was far
above man in power and strength.
Job had to be familiar with the animals on God’s list for
the illustration to be effective.
God points out in Job 39:9-12 that
the unicorn, “
whose strength is great,” is useless for agricultural work, refusing to serve man or “
harrow (plow) the valley.”
This visual aid gave Job a glimpse of God’s greatness. An
imaginary fantasy animal would have defeated the purpose of God’s illustration.
Modern
readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a
single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design.
(Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.)
The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7).
The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful,
independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.
The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not
cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not
exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.)
Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described
rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like
animals.
One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as
long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick. . . . [It]
had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed
only in the skin.”
The elasmotherium, an
extinct giant rhinoceros, provides another possibility for the unicorn’s
identity.
The elasmotherium’s 33-inch-long skull has a huge bony
protuberance on the frontal bone consistent with the support structure for a
massive horn.
In fact, archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, in his 1849
book Nineveh and Its Remains,
sketched a single-horned creature from an obelisk in company with two-horned
bovine animals; he identified the single-horned animal as an Indian rhinoceros.
The biblical unicorn could have been the elasmotherium.
Assyrian
archaeology provides one other possible solution to the unicorn identity
crisis.
The biblical unicorn could have been an aurochs (a kind of
wild ox known to the Assyrians as rimu).
The aurochs’s horns were symmetrical and often appeared as
one in profile, as can be seen on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and
Esarhaddon’s stone prism.
Fighting rimu was a popular sport for Assyrian kings. On a
broken obelisk, for instance, Tiglath-Pileser I boasted of slaying them in the
Lebanese mountains.
Extinct
since about 1627, aurochs, Bos primigenius, were huge bovine creatures.
Julius Caesar described them in his Gallic Wars as,
“. . . a little below the
elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their
strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast
which they have espied. . . . Not even when taken very young can
they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of
their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek
after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most
sumptuous entertainments.”
The
aurochs’s highly prized horns would have been a symbol of great strength to the
ancient Bible reader.
One
scholarly urge to identify the biblical unicorn with the Assyrian aurochs
springs from a similarity between the Assyrian word rimu and the Hebrew word re’em.
We must be very careful when dealing with anglicized
transliterated words from languages that do not share the English alphabet and
phonetic structure.
However, similar words in Ugaritic and Akkadian (other
languages of the ancient Middle East) as well as Aramaic mean “wild bull” or
“buffalo,” and an Arabic cognate means “white antelope.”
However, the linguistics of the text cannot conclusively
prove how many horns the biblical unicorn had.
While modern translations typically translate re’em as “wild
ox,” the King James Version (1611), Luther’s German Bible (1534), the
Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate translated this Hebrew word with words
meaning “one-horned animal.”
The importance of the biblical unicorn is not so much its
specific identity - much as we would like to know - but its reality.
The Bible is clearly describing a real animal. The unicorn
mentioned in the Bible was a powerful animal possessing one or two strong horns
- not the fantasy animal that has been popularized in movies and books.
Whatever it was, it is now likely extinct like many other
animals.
To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to
demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.
Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell
Medical
Doctor, Speaker, Author
Dr. Elizabeth
Mitchell earned her MD from Vanderbilt University and currently writes
extensively for AiG.
Talented AiG researcher and writer
Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell received a bachelor of science in chemistry from Furman
University in 1980, graduating summa cum laude. She graduated from Vanderbilt
University School of Medicine in Nashville in 1984 and completed her residency
in obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University Affiliated Hospitals in
1988. She earned board certification and fellowship in the American College of
Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Dr. Mitchell enjoyed practicing
medicine in Gallatin, Tennessee (near Nashville), but in 1995 she retired from
private practice to devote herself more fully to the needs of her three
children. As a homeschooling parent for fifteen years, she particularly enjoyed
making history come alive. Whether in her medical office, church, or home, Dr.
Mitchell’s goal has always been to build knowledge and understanding by making
information clear and interesting. She pursues that goal today as a writer for
Answers in Genesis. Dr. Mitchell’s articles have covered topics ranging from
Egyptian and biblical history to embryonic development and childbirth, from
unicorns and aliens to science education and the Resurrection of Christ.
Dr. Mitchell is best known for
authoring AiG’s weekly web feature “News to Note” since April 2011. The wife of
popular AiG speaker Dr. Tommy Mitchell, Elizabeth operates under the conviction
that accurate history never violates biblical history, that correct scientific
understanding of our past will never contradict God’s eyewitness account in the
Bible, and that genuine understanding of God’s Word builds faith in Jesus
Christ.
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