Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 7/9/06, Shoshanna Walker wrote:
> The Stone edition English translation, doesn't translate the word, it
> just says Re'em in English.  It is an animal - Rashi says it's an
> animal that is noted for the beauty of its horns.  I don't know how
> anyone decided it's a unicorn.

Well, the Radak was quoted here earlier through some oddball
website (that uses this and other claims to show that unicorns existed).
owever, the quote itself is accurate.  My copy of the Book of Roots of
Radak says exactly so.  Also, the website mentions the
Septuagint on Num 23:22, and you can see from the following:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/religion/biblical/parallel/04.Num.par
That the Septuagint does seem to translate R)em as "unicorn" (under 23:22):
R)M     MONOKE/RWTOS
So apparently late Second Temple period Jews already thought that the Re)em
was a unicorn.  There are only a handful of references to a R)em in the Bible.
Perhaps the significant one, on which the Re)em = unicorn interpretation is
based is Ps 92:11, "wattarem kir)em qarni".  Interestingly, the spelling of 
R)M
in this verse ("R)YM") seems to indicate post-exilic spelling as well, using 
the
Y as a vowel letter for a tsere whereas a defective spelling is used in other
places (Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and even another reference in
Psalms).  This appears to me to be again indirect evidence that R)M was
thought to be a unicorn in post-exilic times.  Joshua Fox provides
various cognates from Akkadian, Arabic (where it means "gazelle"), Syriac,
and Ugaritic, reconstructing *ri)m in Semitic as the word for "wild-ox".

While the use of the dual may not have been exact in Biblical times, to the
point that it is not possible to ascertain whether "qarney re)em" means "two
horns of a re)em" or "pairs of horns of several re)emim" (using re)em as a
collective), it is clear from the use of the dual "qarney" that a two-horned
beast is intended.  After all, it could have read "qeren re)em" or "qarnot
re)em" (compare with "qarnot hamizzbeax", "horns of the altar").  Just like
Jer 38:4 uses "ydey )n$ey hammilxamah" in the sense that each person
has two hands.  The construct "ydey" appears from a quick review of the
concordance to be used only where a human (with two hands) is intended.
For example, in the case of 1 Kings 7:32, it says "wydot ha)opannim
bammkonah".

This little nuance of language -- qarney = dual, qarnot = plural -- coupled 
with
the apparent conclusion that at least during Greek times, r)em was
believed to be a unicorn, using the Septuagint evidence and the indirect
evidence from Psalms, seems to suggest that those verses which use
a phrase such as "qarney r)em" (Deut 33:17 and Ps 22:22) predate the
Greek period.  In the case of Deuterononmy, this is a significant conclusion
although still a weak one.

Incidentally, linguists consider it possible that the word "qeren" and
the "corn"
in unicorn are linguistically related.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com