The use of these terms goes back to the translation choices made by the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, producing the Septuagint, in about the second century B.C.. The translators of the Septuagint were faced with a problem of how to render obscure Hebrew words for animals into Greek with no exact equivalent. When they thought that the use of the term was literal, they used Greek words for ordinary animals. But when they thought the Hebrew was allegorical, they used Greek words for mythical creatures. So, for example, in Isaiah 13:21, where the NRSV today uses the word goat-demons to render the Hebrew, the translators of the Septuagint used the Greek word “
saturos,” or satyr. (I’m relying on the scholarship of others – I don’t read Hebrew myself – but I’m told the underlying Hebrew term means something like, “wild or chaotic animals,” with nuances of evil and uncleanness). Other similar terms used in the Septuagint were the Greek words for sirens and donkey-centaurs.
Unicorns in particular are used to translate the Hebrew
re’em, which modern scholars think most likely referred to the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle,
Bos primigenius. This species is thought to have become extinct at about the time of King David, so would have been known but already semi-mythical to the later writers and editors of Biblical text. It was bigger and heavier than domestic cattle, and regarded as untameable and dangerous. The Greeks believed that there was a real animal which they called a unicorn (“
monokeros“). Although it was one-horned, and therefore not an exact match for the mental image of a
re’em, it was big, bovine (they thought of it more as a massive goat-like thing than our modern conception of a horse with a horn), and exotic, and I guess close enough for the translators of the Septuagint to agree that it was a reasonably close term when they were scratching their heads for the Greek equivalent of
re’em.
Then, centuries later, when the translators of the King James Version sought to produce the best possible English translation of the Bible, they used the Septuagint as a reference point for some of these obscure terms. Relying on the allegorical interpretation of the scholars who had produced the Septuagint, they echoed their use of both satyrs and unicorns, preserving the use of these terms in English.
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Unicorns, satyrs and centaurs, oh my! )