How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

the scholars translating this Hebrew didn’t know the specific animal the Hebrew word re’em was referring to, so they looked at an older translation for help. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (an older translation called the Septuagint) sometime in the second or third century BC, those translators chose the Greek word monokeros, which, when translated to English literally means “one horn.” When the King James translators encountered this unfamiliar word, they looked to the Greek translation for help and chose the English word “unicorn” (meaning one horn) to represent what they felt the original word meant, an animal with a prominent horn.