Why does Michelangelo’s Moses have horns? (or Something gained in the translation!)

Michelangelo, Moses, 1513-1515, Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Italy. Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0). Detail.
Why does Michelangelo’s Moses have horns? Come to that, why do Nativity scenes show an ox and a donkey when they are not mentioned in the Bible by any of the four evangelists? These are among the intriguing questions answered in a fascinating article in the online arts magazine DailyArt this week.
The answer is that somewhere, somehow, something has been lost (or in the statue of Moses, gained) in translation. You can read the whole article, by Arianna Richetti, here. Along with Moses’ horns and those Nativity animals, it features the un-black Black Death, monkeys in the Chamber of the Giants and the dubious creation of Eve from Adam’s rib.

Michelangelo, Moses, 1513-1515, Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Italy. Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0).
But what of the statue of Moses, the principal figure of the monument of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome? The leader of the Children of Israel has a beatific smile on his face, hardly surprising, as he has been talking with God and been given the Ten Commandments. Why the horns? They stem from St. Jerome’s Vulgate, the 4th Century Latin translation of Hebrew scriptures (Exodus 34)
Arianna Richetti takes up the story: “The Douay-Rheims Bible translates Jerome’s Vulgate as: And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tablets of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord…
“The Hebrew script transcribes the consonants only, while it transcribes vocals as small symbols near consonants. That is why it is believed that Jerome made a vocalization mistake: instead of translating the Hebrew term קָרַ֛ן, qāran, meaning ‘shining’ or ‘emitting rays’ he translated it as qeren, meaning ‘horn.’ ”
A simple mistake perpetuated by Michelangelo more than a thousand years later!
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