Did Moses Have Horns?

030

Michelangelo’s monumental Moses immediately captures the attention of visitors to the church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome. The sculptor has created a vision not merely of the lawgiver, but of Israel’s God as conceived by pre-modern Christendom. The unforgiving stare and the taut, sinewy arms leave no doubt that the subject is prepared to enforce the harsh strictures of the law still unmitigated, as it were, by Christian love. One further feature contributes to the sculpture’s faintly sinister aspect: the artist has placed a pair of irregular, knobby horns atop Moses’ head.

The knowledgeable tourist is not particularly surprised by these growths. He is aware that, even to the present day, Jews have been widely believed to be horned; he may therefore see Moses’ horns as a reflection of Michelangelo’s, or Christendom’s, anti-Semitism.

Frequently, however, the student of art is told that Moses’ horns originate not in European bigotry, but in an old misunderstanding of a biblical passage whose meaning is now known. The artistic motif of Moses’ horns is the result of no mere “misunderstanding,” however; it arises out of an ancient debate, still unsettled, over the meaning of a single Hebrew word.

The verb qaµran occurs in only one passage in the Hebrew Bible, in Exodus 34:29–35, which describes the aftermath of Moses’ vision of God’s glory:

“When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, he did not know that the skin of his face qaµran from his conversing with him [God]. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw that the skin of Moses’ face qaµran, they were too afraid to approach him. But Moses called them, so Aaron and all the heads of the community returned to him, and Moses addressed them. Afterwards, all the Israelites approached, and he instructed them concerning all that Yahweh¹ had told him on Mount Sinai. When Moses finished speaking with them, he put a veil² over his face.

“Whenever Moses would enter before Yahweh to speak with him, he would remove the veil until he left. Then he would leave and tell the Israelites what he had been instructed. When the Israelites would see that the skin of Moses’ face qaµran, Moses would put back the veil over his face until he next entered to speak with him.”

The context gives us some indication of the meaning of qaµran—it is a frightening condition of 032the skin caused by speaking to God. To define it more precisely, we must look to the word’s etymology and then to Jewish and Christian renderings proposed throughout the millennia.

Interpreters have always agreed that the verb qaµran is derived from the noun qeren, “horn.” The verbal form maqriÆn is found in Psalm 69:32 (31 in English), where it means “to grow horns.” Many exegetes have understandably sought the same meaning—to be horned—in the passage from Exodus 34. As early as the second century A.D., Aquila, a Jew who made a hyperliteral translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek, translated Exodus 34:29 as “the skin of his face grew horns.” Jerome (346–420 A.D.) adapted Aquila’s interpretation in his authoritative Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) by dropping the word “skin”; evidently Jerome was bothered by the incongruity of skin growing horns. Hence, medieval and Renaissance artists read in the Catholic Bible that Moses’ “face was horned.”

The earliest known depiction of a horned Moses is in an illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the 11th century, the Aelfric Paraphrase of the Pentateuch and Joshua. This image of Moses has continued in use until our time.³

A Jewish poet of 13th-century Castile, Yishaq ben-Shelomoh ibn-Sahula, even used this interpretation of qaµran jestingly in “The Pious Man and his Adulterous Wife.” In this poem, the sage of the title returns one day from the synagogue to an empty house. He deduces that his house is bereft of its contents because “my pure wife has lent the best of our property to an orphan bride in order to do a good deed on her wedding day.” In fact, his wife has fled with her lover and taken all her husband’s wealth. The poetic narrator wryly comments: “the humble saint did not realize that the skin of his face qaµran [had horns].”⁴

A few modern scholars have argued that the “horn” interpretation of Exodus is correct, that Moses indeed had horns. Though to us horns are a sign at best of cuckoldry and at worst of the demonic, these scholars point out that horns, in the ancient Near East, betokened divinity and were analagous to the Christian halo. Kings who claimed godhood might accordingly be shown horned. The most famous example is Naram-Sin of Akkad (c. 2250 B.C.), grandson of Sargon the Great. Naram-Sin was remembered in Mesopotamian literature for both his might and his impiety—he was later said to have sacked the temple of Enlil in Nippur, the holiest city in Sumer. In his own inscriptions, he describes himself as a god, and hence is depicted wearing the horned aguÆ, the crown of the gods. Perhaps, it has been suggested, a kind of divinity was conferred upon Moses at Sinai, and it was this that frightened the Israelites.

The principal flaw, however, in interpreting the passage from Exodus to mean that Moses came down from the mountain with horns is the wording of the text itself: the Hebrew says that it is the skin of Moses’ face that qaµran. If he actually had horns, would not the author have said that Moses’ head or forehead was horned? For this reason, I believe it is most unlikely that in the passage from Exodus the author was telling us that Moses had horns on his head.

The oldest and by far most popular interpretation of this passage from Exodus is that Moses’ face “was glorified” or “shone.” When Michelangelo’s supposed “misunderstanding” of the Exodus text is explained to tourists, they are told 033that Jerome “mistranslated” qaµran as horns, when in truth Moses’ skin simply shone.

This is indeed the understanding of the Septuagint, the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible—from Hebrew into Greek (third century B.C.). This is also the understanding of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, in which he reports that “the Israelites could not look at Moses’ face because of its glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7). That this understanding was widespread during the early Christian centuries is further reflected in the Biblical Antiquities of so-called Pseudo-Philo (first century A.D.) and in the various Jewish translations of the Bible into Aramaic, known as Targums. like horns, glorious radiance in the ancient Near East was an attribute of the gods and of godlike kings. In the Mesopotamian language known as Akkadian (thousands of old tablets written in cuneiform and dating from the 24th to 2nd centuries B.C. have been found), this glorious, godlike radiance is known as melammu. And in Sumerian (spoken in 034Mesopotamia in the third millennium) the word SI, “horn,” betokens “radiance” as well.

Can the root qrn refer to this glorious radiance, to Moses’ splendor and light?

It is true that “horn” in the Bible often represents power or prosperity. For example, in the prayer of Hannah before the temple of God at Shiloh, the future mother of the prophet Samuel prays:

“My heart exults by Yahweh

035

My horn is high by Yahweh …

He gives might to his king

And raises the horn of his anointed.”

1 Samuel 2:1, 10

The use of “horn” to indicate power and prosperity is also found in various psalms: “He [God] has exalted the horn of his people” (Psalm 148:14). And again: “My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him [David]; his horn shall be exalted through my name” (Psalm 89:25; 24 in English).

When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., the poet lamented: “He [God] has cut off in fierce anger every horn of Israel” (Lamentations 2:3).

In these and similar verses, however, “horn” is simply a metaphor; it is not a word literally meaning “power”; it does not refer to an actual horn. It seems unlikely that the “glorification” of Moses’ skin, whatever that might mean, can be attributed to this idiom.

Nevertheless it remains possible, as most modern commentators believe, that qaµran means specifically “shone”—although I believe there is a still more likely explanation, as I shall explain later.

A number of artists have depicted Moses’ face as shining. Still others have fudged the issue. For example, Marc Chagall, the great 20th-century Russian-Jewish painter, has given us numerous portraits of Moses with projections from his head that can be interpreted variously as horns or as rays, as if the artist could not decide which interpretation of the biblical passage was correct.

Interestingly enough, the Bible itself sometimes connects “horns” with “light,” which tends to support the contention that qaµran here means “shone.” In Habakkuk 3:3–4 we read:

“God comes from Teman,

The Holy One from the mountains of Paran.

His splendor covers the heavens,

And his glory fills the earth.

Radiance is like light [?].

He has horns from his hands [?],

And there is the hiding place [?] of his might.”

The last sentence, unfortunately, is extremely obscure, and the translation is therefore most uncertain. So this hardly proves, as is often claimed, that “horns” refers to “rays.”

A better argument might be made on the basis of Psalm 132:17: “There I will cause a horn to shine for David; I will set a flame for my anointed.” But this passage, too, is of uncertain meaning.⁵

We might also note that Moses’ face qaµran after seeing God. Two passages in the Bible refer to shining after seeing God, though neither uses qaµran or refers to skin. The first is from the Book of Isaiah:

“Rise, shine, for your light has come,

And the glory of Yahweh shines upon you.

Though darkness cover the earth

And thick cloud the nations,

Yet upon you will Yahweh shine,

And his glory will appear to you [or ‘upon you’].

Then peoples will come to your light

And kings to your shining radiance.

Lift your eyes and look around.

All assembled they come to you;

Your sons come from afar,

And your daughters are supported on the hip.

Then you will behold and shine.”

Isaiah 60:1–5

The second passage is from Psalm 34: “They look to him [God] and shine, let not their faces blanch” (Psalm 34:6). Based on these texts, we could expect that Moses’ face likewise shone when he saw God.

Yet there are objections to this view, too. Though God, like other Near Eastern deities, is surrounded with various radiant phenomena, the idiom “to have a shining face” means approximately the same thing as English “to beam,” namely, “to smile or look favorably disposed.” This meaning is reflected in many passages in the Bible. Perhaps the best-known example is the Priestly blessing in Numbers: “May Yahweh cause his face to shine upon you and may he show you favor” (Numbers 6:25).

Here God’s shining face is a blessing, indicating his beneficent disposition. This is a positive, reassuring shining, not a frightening one—it hardly explains why the Israelites were frightened at Moses’ face when he returned from seeing God.

Similarly, in one of Job’s laments, we read both of Godly and human faces shining:

“O, that I were as in months gone by,

In the days when God watched over me,

When His lamp shone over my head,

When I walked in the dark by its light.

…

Men would listen to me expectantly,

And wait for my counsel.

…

When I smiled at them …

They did not cast down the light of my face.”

Job 29:2–3, 21, 24

Verses like these show that the shining of a face is not frightening, but rather reassuring. If qaµran does mean “shone,” perhaps the author of the Exodus passage chose this rare word precisely to 036avoid the usual positive connotations of “his face shone.”

This suggests that we should look for another interpretation of qaµran, one in which this rare word is used to avoid the positive, reassuring connotations of a shining face.

Another indication that the conventional interpretation of Moses’ face bathed in splendor is incorrect comes from the Targums, Aramaic translations and paraphrases of the Bible dating back, perhaps, to the second century A.D. The Targums substitute the Hebrew word for light in place of the word for skin, for in Hebrew, the words for skin (‘oÆr) and light (’oÆr) sound almost exactly alike.⁶ The Targums were not making a mistake in their spelling of the word. They were making a deliberate pun, exemplifying a common rabbinical method of explaining a text.⁷ This targumic effort at finding an acceptable meaning in this passage by changing the ‘oÆr (skin) to ’oÆr (light) suggests that the “shining” interpretation derives from speculation—that it was not in the original text.

Thus there are weaknesses in interpreting qaµran either as “shone” or “was horned.” Neither accounts adequately for the reference to Moses’ skin.

I believe there is a better interpretation. It was first proposed in the ninth century A.D. by a Jewish heretic named “Hiwi” al-Balkhi (that is, Hayyawayh of Balkh, Afghanistan). “Hiwi” wrote 200 criticisms of the Bible, which have survived only in the sparse citations of his refuters, principally Saadiah Gaon (882–942) and Abraham ibn-Ezra (1089–1164).⁸ According to “Hiwi,” as a result of 40 days’ fasting (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 9:9, 18), Moses’ skin dried up until it was as hard as horn; the Israelites feared to approach him because he was hideous. This understanding of qaµran is eminently reasonable. Indeed, many languages use derivatives of “horn” to denote skin deformities.⁹ In English we use “horny” in this sense (at least before it took on the colloquial meaning of libidinous), as in “horny skin” or “horny hands,” meaning rough and hardened skin. I would disagree with “Hiwi,” however, as to the cause of the horniness of Moses’ skin; it was not his 40-day fast that led to Moses’ horny skin, for famine does not ordinarily cause the skin to toughen.

In 1939 a scholar named Bernardus D. Eerdmans came a little closer to the reason for Moses’ horny skin.¹⁰ Eerdmans believed biblical miracles were eyewitness accounts of misunderstood natural (as opposed to supernatural) phenomena. This school of interpretation still periodically surfaces in attempts to account “rationally” for the ten plagues.¹¹ Eerdmans explained the miraculous events at Sinai in this way: The people who lived in the vicinity 037of the mountain were known as Midianites, but also as Kenites. The latter name may indicate that its owners were smiths, as qayn (the root of Kenite) in Arabic and Aramaic means “metalworker.” Since Moses married the daughter of a Midianite priest, the Midianites or Kenites wanted to give their new relative authority over the Israelites, so they set up a forge on Sinai. With their help at the forge, Moses simulated thunder, lightning and cloud, with hammering, fire and smoke. According to Eerdmans, Moses came too near the fires and as a consequence his skin toughened like a crocodile’s (i.e., became horny), and the people fled from him in his disfigurement. We may laugh at this kind of exegesis today, but Eerdmans did go on to make a valid point. Eerdmans cited the following description of a smith found in the Egyptian Satire on the Trades, a humorous work, probably from the early second millennium B.C., that unfavorably compares various professions to that of the scribe. In the Satire on the Trades, the narrator-scribe declares, “I have seen the metalworker at his work at the mouth of his furnace. His fingers were somewhat like crocodiles; he stank more than fish-roe.”¹²

Heat does cause the skin to toughen like horn or to form little horns, in other words, blisters and callouses. And that may be the key to what the Bible is telling us happened to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It was not, however, the forge of the Kenites that toughened or disfigured Moses’ face, but heat from another source.

A skin condition contracted from prolonged exposure to radiation such as sunlight is called keratosis, caused by a thickening of the layer of skin called keratin. Interestingly, the words “keratosis” and “keratin” derive from the Greek word keras, meaning “horn.” Since exposure to radiation causes horny skin, we are nearing a correct interpretation of the Exodus passage.

The Bible describes in detail the pyrotechnic display that accompanied the lawgiving on Sinai:

“On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning and thunderheads on the mountain …. And all Mount Sinai smoked because Yahweh had descended upon it in fire. Its smoke rose like that of a furnace …. All the people perceived the thunder and lightning and the blast of the horn and that the mountain was smoking” (Exodus 19:16, 18, 20:18 [verse 15 in some texts]).

Similarly in Deuteronomy, we read:

“You [God] approached and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire up to the sky with darkness, cloud and thunderheads”

(Deuteronomy 4:11).

Modern text critics attribute these passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy to different strands of biblical authorship¹³ than the passage in Exodus containing the word qaµran (Exodus 35:29–35). The latter is from the so-called Priestly source. However, the Priestly source also contains a similar description in the following text:

“The glory of Yahweh settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day he summoned Moses from the midst of the cloud (the appearance of the glory of Yahweh to the Israelites was like a consuming fire on top of the mountain), and Moses, ascending the mountain, entered the cloud”

(Exodus 24:16–18).

Unlike Eerdmans, we do not need a “natural” explanation as to why Moses’ face became toughened and horny. Those who believe that such things actually occurred need not imagine that there was a Kenite smithy on Sinai. Other readers may regard the story as having a logic of its own, regardless of what actually happened. The Bible amply testifies to the belief that contact with the divine can be harmful. When Jacob wrestles with the angel (Genesis 32:25–33; 24–32 in English), he is injured and is thereafter lame. In Exodus 19:21, the people are commanded to stay back from Sinai lest they behold God and perish. When Samson’s father Manoah realizes he and his then childless wife have seen an angel of God, Manoah cries out, “We will surely die, for we have seen a god!” (Judges 13:22). In this same vein, Isaiah exclaims, “Woe is me! I am finished! Though I am a man of impure lips, and I dwell among a people of impure lips, my eyes have seen Yahweh” (Isaiah 6:5).

The story of Moses’ face comes immediately after the most famous vision of God in the Bible: Moses says to God, “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God replies:

“You will not be able to see my face, for a human cannot see me and live …. There is a certain place by me. Stand on the mountain, and when my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the mountain and cover you with my hand until I pass. Then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back, but my face will be invisible”

(Exodus 33:20–23).

Then the Lord instructs Moses to prepare two tablets on which will be inscribed the Ten Commandments. Moses does so and proceeds to climb the mountain, taking the uninscribed tablets with him. Then, as he had promised, God showed his presence: God stood with Moses and spoke with him and made a covenant with him. For 40 days and 40 nights, Moses was there with God, and the tablets were inscribed (Exodus 34:1–28). Then Moses came down from the mountain, and the skin of his face qaµran (Exodus 34:29–35).

The passage from Exodus 33 quoted above and the first part of Exodus 34 referred to above are attributed to a different source than Exodus 34:29–35, which says that Moses’ face qaµran. But the biblical editor has beautifully combined his sources so they flow almost seamlessly in the composite text.

According to the common interpretation of qaµran, Moses’ face shone with the reflected, but still awesome, glory of God. But if, as I believe, qaµran denotes a skin deformity, then the text implies that a full vision of God would have killed Moses, but a partial exposure merely disfigured him.¹⁴

This interpretation—that God’s presence turned Moses’ skin horny, that is, toughened it—is consistent with the last part of the story. The skin condition persisted, which is why Moses would thereafter wear a veil over his face except when he spoke with God.

But Moses put on the veil only after telling the people of his encounter with God. Moses addressed the Israelites with bare face so they could witness his mysterious transformation into a hideous being. In other words, since a human cannot approach God, Moses must sacrifice a measure of his humanity to attain full enlightenment.

World literature contains numerous examples of heroes with unnaturally toughened skin. The best known are Achilles and Siegfried; their horny skins served them as a defense in war. Moses’ horny skin allowed him to deal intimately with God; the scarring of his skin protected him. In short, Moses’ horny skin explains how he could see God and live.

Those who interpret qaµran as “shone” argue that Moses would remove his veil whenever he spoke to God (Exodus 34:34) in order to renew his radiance, and that the people, seeing the light, would revere God’s representative. By my reading, the author stresses that Moses would commune with God with an uncovered face because his skin condition allowed him to achieve a unique intimacy with God.

I realize that my explanation of qaµran is unlikely to put the argument to rest. But it will, I believe, enrich the debate.¹⁵

Michelangelo’s monumental Moses immediately captures the attention of visitors to the church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome. The sculptor has created a vision not merely of the lawgiver, but of Israel’s God as conceived by pre-modern Christendom. The unforgiving stare and the taut, sinewy arms leave no doubt that the subject is prepared to enforce the harsh strictures of the law still unmitigated, as it were, by Christian love. One further feature contributes to the sculpture’s faintly sinister aspect: the artist has placed a pair of irregular, knobby horns atop Moses’ head. The knowledgeable tourist is not […]