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

where do you find references to unicorns? The word translated “unicorn” in the King James translation is the Hebrew word re’em. This word refers to an animal the original audience of the Bible would have been familiar with, and the best estimate of when that word was written is between 1400 and 700 BC. Scholars who study the Hebrew language and its usage at those times tell us it likely was referring to an animal of great strength that had a prominent horn. In 1611, when the King James Bible was translated, 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. To be clear, they did not choose it to represent the mythical, magical, one-horned horse we think of today. If you were to think of a “one-horned animal” or “an animal with a prominent horn” today, you would likely think of the rhinoceros