Biblical Unicorns May Have Just Been Aurochs
If you’ve committed to reading through the Bible, you may have noticed that unicorns pop up a number of times. That’s a bit of a curious thing to notice since, regardless of your position on religion, mythical beasts typically aren’t the sorts of things that are involved in it. And the mentions of unicorns are never really done in a way that makes them sound fantastical or metaphorical.
The most important point to remember is that while the Bible writers were inspired and infallible, translations are another thing again. The word used in the Hebrew is (re’em). This has been translated in various languages as monoceros, unicornis, unicorn, einhorn and eenhorn, all of which mean ‘one horn’. However, the word re’em is not known to have such a meaning. Many Jewish translations simply left it untranslated, because they were not sure which creature was being referred to.
Archaeology has in fact provided a powerful clue to the likely meaning of re’em. Mesopotamian reliefs have been excavated which show King Assurnasirpal hunting oxen with one horn. The associated texts show that this animal was called rimu. It is thus highly likely that this was the re’em of the Bible, a wild ox.
It appears that the reason it was shown in Assyrian (but not Egyptian) art as one-horned was as an artistic way of expressing the beauty of the fact that these horns on the rimu/re’em were very symmetrical, such that only one could be seen if the animal was viewed from one side. The first to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek probably knew that the rimu/re’em was depicted as one-horned, so they translated it as monoceros (one horn).
