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Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.

Psalm 22:21 (Authorised Version of King James)

What is that doing there? That was certainly the question of someone writing to me who wanted to argue that the Bible is full of mythology.

Fortunately it is an issue that is well descrobed in a number of works, including Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. ISBN-13: 978-0517345825.

Asimov tells us that there is
a certain animal, known to the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures as the ראם (”re’em”)
and to modern zoologists as the aurochs (Bos primigenius) or wild ox, that is often portrayed in Mesopotamian murals and bas-reliefs as well as the famous Lascaux (Cro-magnon) cave paintings.

The aurochs is nearly always shown in profile, so that
one horn is completely hidden behind the other. It thus appears to have only
one horn, and apparently it was sometimes nicknamed “the one-horned.” It is
completely extinct today (despite being an ancestor of the modern domesticated cow), and even in the time of the scholars who translated
the Psalms from Hebrew into Greek for the Septuagint (LXX), it was seldom seen, certainly
in Egypt.

Thus those scholars, who knew it only from the bas-reliefs and had
never seen an actual specimen, and who had no word in Greek for an aurochs,
called it “monokeros,” meaning one-horned. (By the same token Rhinoceros, means
nose-horned, and triceratops means three horned face).

This is what autrochs was called in the LXX, and the Latin translation
of the Psalms, being made fromthe LXX, reads “unicorn” (”corn” is Latin for
“horn” as in “cornucopia” meaning “horn of plenty”)

Now there are certain changes in words that follow regular patterns, as speakers of the language seek for easier and quicker ways to pronounce words. Certain letter changes can be followed from language to language. For some reason, it happens that in the course of a generation, one letter sound can be almost completely replaced with another. Early in the history of the Anglo Saxon languages, all words starting with “p” had the sound replaced with an “f” (thus “pisg” became “fisg” – fish and so on.)

Another of these letter changes is c, which often becomes “ch” as in “loch” or “bach”, and then becomes just an “h” (before dropping out of the language altogether).

In Latin, the “c” sounds are often replaced with “h” sounds in English. Hence Latin citra becomes English hither, caput becomes head and so on. Corn thus becomes horn. Unicorn is the one horned. Modern translations however, often call this animal the wild ox. That is, after all, what it was.

Did the ancient Hebrews suppose that the re’em actually had only one
horn? Apparently not, for in Deut 33:17, we read: “His glory is like the
firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of an aurochs.”
Here the word “re’em” is used in the singular, indicating that the single re’em had
more than one horn.

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