Why is Moses commonly depicted with Horns?
‘And behold his face had horns’ — Exodus 34:29
After receiving the 10 commandments from God atop Mount Sinai, Moses returned to the Israelites with ‘keren’ or, when rendered into English ‘horns’. To a modern audience this can seem seen startling, even offensive, which is why almost all modern translations of the Bible exclude it, rendering the above line ‘and behold the skin on his face shone’.
But why would he be shown with horns at all, given all the connotations attached to them? Is it, as many suggest, a mistranslation, or did Moses have horns, as Michelangelo depicts in his famous ‘Moses’, which today adorns the tomb of Pope Julius II in St Peter’s Basilica?
Theory 1 — Mistranslation
The idea of a horned Moses enters the Christian landscape in the Vulgate Bible, a Latin translation of the Bible, written by St Jerome in the late 4th century AD that would go on to be the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church and remained so until 1979.
It’s suspected that early Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament which St Jerome was translating, did…
