One of the highlights of the movie will be the nature scenes to be portrayed while God is speaking to Job. During this section, God mentions the unicorn. Of course, many skeptics scoff at this mention of a “fabled” beast in the Bible.
The current day, fairy tale, concept of a unicorn is a horse with a straight spiralled horn projecting from its forehead. Some variants may include:
1. a goatee
2. a tail like a lion’s
3. legs of a deer
The translators of the King James Holy Bible included a footnote for unicorn: rhinoceros. This is quite a contrast with what the modern reader would be thinking.
Noah Webster’s 1828 Definitions:
U’NICORN, n. [L. unicornis; unus, one, and cornu, horn.]
1. An animal with one horn; the monoceros. This name is often applied to the rhinoceros.
2. The sea unicorn is a fish of the whale kind, called narwal, remarkable for a horn growing out at his nose.
3. A fowl.
Fossil unicorn, or fossil unicorn’s horn, a substance used in medicine, a terrene crustaceous spar.
Notice that the above definitions make no mention of a horse. Unicorn was somewhat a general term for a creature with one horn, often the one-horned rhino. The below definition is even more interesting.
RHINOC’EROS, n. [L. rhinoceros; Gr. nose-horn.]
A genus of quadrupeds of two species, one of which, the unicorn, has a single horn growing almost erect from the nose. This animal when full grown, is said to be 12 feet in length. There is another species with two horns, the bicornis. They are natives of Asia and Africa.
The following article goes into more detail why unicorn is a good translation of the Hebrew word as used in the Holy Bible:
http://brandplucked.webs.com/unicorns.htm
But, the main point of our blog post is that the connotation of the word is different today than it was in the many earlier translations where unicorn was used. They were just referring to the one-horned rhinoceros. That is certainly not an excuse to scoff.
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