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Thanks @MountainMom for creating this discussion and that's a lovely badge by @Lola_Pop š„°
Also thanks @Diamond Lim for the tag š
Here you go 10 fun facts about winged unicorns
Great contest @MountainMom and such a lovely badge @Lola_Pop
And here comes my cutie little Unicorn!!!!!!!!!!
Help Misty meet more unicornsĀ š¦
Fun fact:
Where did the wordĀ unicornĀ come from?
Speaking of āone-horned,ā thatās whatĀ unicornĀ literally means. Borrowed into English by the early 1200s from French,Ā unicornĀ comes from the LatinĀ unicornis, āhaving one horn.ā This root joinsĀ uni-, meaning āone,ā andĀ cornu, āhorn.ā (The Latin is a loan translation of the GreekĀ monokeros, its equivalent of āone hornā and passing into English asĀ monoceros.)Ā SourceĀ
@MountainMom š I like this one.
Why is everyone so quick? I barely got the tag.š
Hi @MountainMom @Diamond Lim @Yosca @Nix66 @Pitty_Kitty thx on tag & badge,
byĀ Dr. Elizabeth MitchellĀ onĀ August 18, 2008; last featuredĀ February 6, 2015
Featured inĀ The New Answers Book 3
Also available inĀ EspaƱol
Free PDF Download
To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean Godās Word, which is true in every detail.
Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the unicorns in the bible were real animals, not imaginary creatures. The Bible refers to the unicorn in the context of familiar animals, such as peacocks, lambs, lions, bullocks, goats, donkeys, horses, dogs, eagles, and calves (Job 39:9ā12).1Ā InĀ Job 38ā41, God reminded Job of the characteristics of a variety of impressive animals He had created, showing Job that God was far above man in power and strength.2
Job had to be familiar with the animals on Godās list for the illustration to be effective. God points out inĀ Job 39:9ā12Ā that the unicorn, āwhose strength is great,ā is useless for agricultural work, refusing to serve man or āharrow (plow) the valley.ā This visual aid gave Job a glimpse ofĀ Godās greatness. An imaginary fantasy animal would have defeated the purpose ofĀ Godās illustration.
Modern readers have trouble with the unicorns in the Bible because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on Godās menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.
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.) Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes āa single horn, directly in front, about as long as oneās arm, and at the base about as thick.Ā .Ā .Ā . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.ā3
TheĀ elasmotherium, an extinct giant rhinoceros, provides another possibility for the unicornās identity. TheĀ elasmotheriumāsĀ 33-inch-long skull has a huge bony protuberance on the frontal bone consistent with the support structure for a massive horn.4Ā In fact, archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, in his 1849 bookĀ Nineveh and Its Remains, sketched a single-horned creature from an obelisk in company with two-horned bovine animals; he identified the single-horned animal as an Indian rhinoceros.5Ā The unicorns in the Bible could have been theĀ elasmotherium.6
Assyrian archaeology provides one other possible solution to the unicorn identity crisis. The biblical unicorn could have been an aurochs (a kind of wild ox known to the Assyrians as rimu).7Ā The aurochsās horns were symmetrical and often appeared as one in profile, as can be seen on Ashurnasirpal IIās palace relief and Esarhaddonās stone prism.8Ā Fighting rimu was a popular sport for Assyrian kings. On a broken obelisk, for instance, Tiglath-Pileser I boasted of slaying them in the Lebanese mountains.9
Extinct since about 1627, aurochs,Ā Bos primigenius, were huge bovine creatures.10Ā Julius Caesar described them in hisĀ Gallic WarsĀ as,
The aurochsās highly prized horns would have been a symbol of great strength to the ancientĀ BibleĀ reader.
One scholarly urge to identify the unicorns in the Bible with the Assyrian aurochs springs from a similarity between the Assyrian wordĀ rimuĀ and the Hebrew wordĀ reāem. We must be very careful when dealing with anglicized transliterated words from languages that do not share the English alphabet and phonetic structure.12Ā However, similar words in Ugaritic and Akkadian (other languages of the ancient Middle East) as well as Aramaic mean āwild bullā or ābuffalo,ā and an Arabic cognate means āwhite antelope.ā
However, the linguistics of the text cannot conclusively prove how many horns the biblical unicorn had. While modern translations typically translateĀ reāemĀ as āwild ox,ā the King James Version (1611), Lutherās German Bible (1534), the Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate translated this Hebrew word with words meaning āone-horned animal.ā13
The importance of the unicorns in theĀ BibleĀ is not so much their specific identityāmuch as we would like to knowābut their reality. TheĀ BibleĀ is clearly describing a real animal. The unicorn mentioned in theĀ BibleĀ was a powerful animal possessing one or two strong hornsānot the fantasy animal that has been popularized in movies and books. Whatever it was, it is now likely extinct like many other animals. To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demeanĀ Godās Word, which is true in every detail.
Editorās note: Originally published inĀ Answers in DepthĀ 2 (2007),Ā https://answersingenesis.org/answers/in-depth/v2/.
Nice badge.
Thx Origins7 Dale, š
12/14/2021