Replies

"At least I’m not obligated to pretend an Old Testament Patriarch had horns." I'm not obligated nor do I pretend: His face had horns of light - just like the Hebrew text and the Latin text say. The text in question, in the Vulgate, doesn't say "head". It says "face": "et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies". To paraphrase an online article: The issue is with the Hebrew original. The Hebrew verb in question is qāran. The noun form of qāran, qeren, has as its primary meaning, 'horn,' just like you would find on an animals head. The problem is that the word can refer to horns or horn like objects or rays of light. Compare 1 Kings 1:50 and Habakkuk 3:4. It's easy to see why St. Jerome made the choice he did. His choice was no worse than that of the KJV translators in getting Luke 2:14 wrong. http://www.gracesacramento.org/sermon-resources/pastors-blog/111-bible-translation-and-art Now, the fact that Jerome said "face" and not "head" leads me to believe Jerome was actually getting it right - that he was trying to express rays of light and not horns. As the Protestant editor of Jerome wrote in a footnote: 5236 Cornuta fronte. Literally, “with horned brow.” The allusion is to the rays of light which beamed from the face of Moses, the Hebrew word bearing both meanings, ray and horn. Hence the portraiture of him with horns. and that was in regard to this passage from Jerome: "And yet, perhaps, with your customary humility, you make your boast that the Lord Himself, Who teaches all knowledge, was your master, and that, like Moses in the cloud and darkness, face to face, you hear the words of God, and so, with the 5236 halo round your head, take the lead of us." So, a "halo" was a "horned brow". Get it? http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf There's also this: That Jerome did not mean anything that we would call "horns" is usually demonstrated by a passage from his Commentary on Ezechial: "denique post quadraginta dies, vultum Moysi vulgus ignobile caliganttibus oculis non videbat, quia 'glorificata erat,' sive, ut in hebraico continetur, 'cornuta', facies Moysi". See Mellinkoff, pp. 77-87, for a discussion of the horns from the perspective of translators and commentators. Süring (page 428) points out the improbability of Moses' being ignorant of horns, which, as she also remarks, are said to come not from the forehead, but from the face.] http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo59.html Maybe you don't know as much as you think you know.