A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Jerome had done his considerable best to re-examine the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint; nevertheless, faults remained. Some of his mistranslations in the Old Testament were more comic than important. One of the most curious was at Exodus 34, where the Hebrew describes Moses’s face as shining when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns – and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo’s great sculpted Moses now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli (‘Saint Peter in Chains’), yet another commission for Pope Julius II. One finds them frequently in the paintings of Moses and Aaron flanking the Commandment boards in English parish churches, dating as late as the nineteenth century.