Pesharim

Link. I shall be surprised at nothing after this. I tell you now, absolutely nothing. Idle reader, I speak of no less than this: Answers in Genesis has on their website a kindly little article about unicorns. Indeed, unicorns. As they have it, the Bible asserts the actual existence of an animal as per the unicorn, an equine with a single, large horn. The evidence for this derives from the use of the word re’em (found nine times in the OT, in Numbers 23:22; 24:8; Deuteronomy 33:17; Job 39:9,10; Psalms 22:21; 29:6; 92:10; and Isaiah 34:7) translated as “unicorn” in the King James (KJV/AV) and Vulgate (LXX). However, the word literally means “Raise up” implying a horn or horns of some kind. Why then should one even bother with the suggestion of a unicorn? ….The logic escapes me.

“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).”

Yes, but we have had stuffed remains of do-do birds as recent as 1755, while we have nothing but fairy tales to support the unicorn. And the Bible, my atheist friend, is not among those fairy tales. Aside from the formidable Invisible Pink Unicorn”, I’ve never heard the like to this.

“However, the linguistics of the text cannot conclusively prove how many horns the biblical unicorn had.”

A difficult question this, how many horns does a unicorn have? Wait, what? A unicorn with anything but a single horn would undoubtedly cease to be a unicorn. Surely we do not need a “semi-technical” article to prove that oxen exist. This is either sophistry or Poe; honestly, I know not which. And even then, saying “the linguistics of the text cannot conclusively prove how many horns the biblical unicorn had” accounts for very little when one actually considers the Bible passage in question, or, perhaps, did they forget to read that? Yet, Numbers (more correctly translated) renders as “God who brought them out of Egypt is like the lofty horns of the re’em [i.e. unicorn] to him.” Re’em is singular in Hebrew, so the plural horns can be taken but one way: that the animal was no unicorn at all, but conversely, a “wild ox” as it is translated in more modern versions.

I should note that this isn’t their first article on unicorns (see here). Previously (as in 1994), Carl Wieland had written for AiG saying that “The bible does not refer to fantasy animals” and that “the translation of the Hebrew re’em as ‘unicorn’ is incorrect.”. Isn’t that nice…. and also rather contradictory. In conclusion, this article is merely an anomaly among AiG’s material, of course, but one still cannot help but wonder at their editors for this.