This is one of the most widely-followed mistranslation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin by St Jerome.
I mention ‘the horned Moses’ , to illustrate how a single word, misunderstood, can rewrite history. It’s merely a matter of legend. Yes, legend. But do you know why he has horns?
The scrupulous Moses by Michelangelo had horns due to a mistranslation of the book of Exodus. The original Hebrew text described Moses as having “karan ’ohr panav”—“facial skin that glowed with rays of light”—but when the Roman Catholic Church created the official Latin translation of the Bible, the translator bungled Moses’s description, rendering it as “ cornuta esset facies sua” meaning “his face was horned” From that moment on, artists and sculptors, fearing reprisals if they were not true to the Gospels, began depicting Moses with horns.
It was a simple mistake. A mistranslation by Saint Jerome around four hundred A.D. Exactly. A mistranslation. And the result is . . . poor Moses is now misshapen for all history. “Misshapen” was a nice way to put it.
I repeat, to illustrate how a single word, misunderstood, can rewrite history. Same thing, I’m forced to admit happen in the case of Masonic pyramid, SanGreal: Holy Grail. SangReal: Royal Blood, among other Christianity symbolism.
Even Some Jews Once Believed Moses Had Horns.
Language can be very adept at hiding the truth.
Someone wrote, “It is often said that this is a simple matter of mistranslation, but Vulgate author Saint Jerome would not have made such a crude mistake.
“Famously, Michelangelo’s Moses has two horns protruding from his head. Clearly, the Renaissance genius, whose Moses is depicted holding the two Tablets of the Law, had in mind the account of Moses descending
from Mount Sinai as recounted in Exodus 34:29. There, it says, at least according to the Latin translation, that Moses “et ignorabat
quod cornuta esset facies sua,” that is,“did not know his face had become horned.”
“It is often said that this is a simple matter of mistranslation, resulting from the fact that the Hebrew word for “horn,” “keren,”happens to be also the Hebrew word for a “ray of light.” But Saint Jerome, who made the translation called the Vulgate at the end of the 4th century, would not have made such a crude mistake. In fact we know he was aware that “karan,” the verb which he translated as “had become horned,” could also mean “had become radiant”; he makes this clear in his commentary on the Book of Amos, written a few years later.
“This means that Jerome knew that the verse was understood as meaning Moses’ face glowed and was rendered as such in nearly all the ancient Greek and Aramaic translations. Only one Greek translation available to Jerome – that by the Jewish convert Aquila – understood “karan” to mean “had become horned,” but nonetheless, that is the definition the Christian scholar chose to go with.
“Hence, Jerome must truly have believed that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with horns, and not radiant. Since Jerome was living in the Holy Land at the time and consulted with Jews when working on his translation, he must have been informed by them that Moses indeed had horns. This may be a bit hard to believe, but we in fact know that
some Jews did believe that Moses was literally horned.
“The belief in Moses’ literal horns was preserved in a number of poems written at roughly the same time that Jerome was at work on his translation. One example is a poem in Aramaic called, “The Lord
Lowered the Sky to Sinai,” which has found its way into a number of Eastern European Jewish prayer books from the 16th and 17th centuries.”
Edited by Jimson Jaat Taofik
Dan Brown Notes
