No, unicorns are not in the Bible

People make many strange and bizarre attempts to discredit the Bible. One of these is claiming that “the Bible has unicorns in it.” Is this true?

No, of course not. However, this is an interesting misunderstanding. The problem comes from the Greek Septuagint (LXX) text of Job. You see, when the translators of the King James Version were trying to understand the Hebrew word for some wild creature, they saw that the LXX used a word literally translated as “single horn.” But what animal is a “single horn?”

The medieval translators from England did not know of a single-horned animal. After all, most horned animals have two horns, not one!

So, not knowing what animal a “single horn” could be, they simply called it a “unicorn” (uni = one) and left the readers to figure it out for themselves.

So Job 39:9 in the King James Version says:

“Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?”

English-speaking people then wondered what this foreign single-horned animal must look like. Some artists then imagined it being like a wild horse with a single horn between its eyes. This “animal” became quite popular, and later it became the national animal of Scotland!

Today, however, we know that there is really indeed a single-horned, large, strong animal that is exactly as described in Job!

The real “unicorn” is very likely to be the single-horned rhino!

In fact, because of its single horn, its name in Latin is Rhinoceros unicornis! While you don’t see rhinos in the middle east today, we know that back in Job’s time, its range was much greater. It is only present in India today, but archaeologists have found a mosaic artwork of the creature in Sicily, Italy (see below). Also, the two-horned variety is depicted in cave paintings in France. So rhinos were certainly much more widespread in the past.

So, in our translation of the LXX, the “single horn” is translated as a “rhinoceros.” While the Hebrew word is generally translated as ‘Wild Ox’ today, it must be noted that rhinos and oxen were classed together in the past. It’s only thanks to modern methods that we now count rhinos and oxen as two different species.

So while some will point and laugh at the “unicorns” in the King James Version, with just a little bit of knowledge, you can see that the Bible text was right all along.

If you’d like to learn more about this, please see our translator note at https://2001translation.org/notes/rhino

Kind regards,

The 2001 Translation