Did the Statue of David really have horns at some point? Anyone ever hear about this?
And I think it was covered in an earlier thread a couple of years ago in GQ.
Short answer (IIRC): bad translation.
I think you’re confusing Michaelangelo’s statue of David with his statue of Moses. There was apparently a belief that Moses had horns when he came down from Mt. Sinai because of a mistranslation which turned something like “rays of light came from his head” to “horns came from his head”. Don’t know if that’s true – it’s been a while since I checked my Bible commentaries. But I’ve heard it often enough. I encountered it juast this past weekend when I saw Cecil B. deMille’s 1956 trailer for The Ten Commandments, where he says it, too. In any case, it’s been claimed that that mistranslation is responsible for all sorts of misbeliefs about Moses or Jews in general having horns. And, for whatever reason, Michaelangelo’s statue of Moses has hair piled up in two structures that do kinda look like horns. But there’s nothing like that on his statue of David.
I think you’re getting David mixed up with Moses. Michelangelo painted Moses with horns because of an ambiguous Hebrew word that can mean either “be radiant” or “be horned” (or maybe it was two different words that shared phonetic roots, I forget). As far as I know the Statue of David was never horned.
I seem to remember Cecil mentioning this, but I can’t find it right now.
I never heard that before. It sounds like a version of the old “Jews have horns” thing. I guess it’s possible Michaelangelo believed that old anti-semetic slur, but I doubt it.
I never made the connection until now, but is it possible that the “Jews have horns” thing originated with the Moses mis-translation?
And a previous thread, with a link to an earlier thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=54195&highlight=horns
Revtim-- exactly. Lightbulb goes on (the coin falls?). The word for ‘shining’ and the word for ‘horned’ were similar, or somesuch. Someone shrugged, and carried on.
The question of Moses (and Jews) with horns was brought up in this previous thread, Moses with horns. As mentioned above, it was likely a translation error by St. Jerome.
Okay, nevermind, Mjollnir beat me to the link.
The sad part is I knew of both the Moses mistranslation and the Jews-have-horns myth for a long time before I connected the two.
K-R-N = shining (see “Koran”)
K-R-N = horn (see “Capricorn”)
Hebrew vowels (true also of related languages) are mostly indicated by dots. Get the dots wrong and you get another word.
Another example:
G-M-L = camel
G-M-L = rope
Now that businress about getting a camel through the eye of a needle makes a lot more sense, right? He said “rope,” not “camel.”
IIRC, it’s even worse than getting the dots wrong. The dots are called Masoretic points, and are commonly used only in places like schoolbooks. In most texts, they don’t appear, and one supplies the appropriate vowels and related meanings from context.
For the most part, that’s correct. If you open up a Torah scroll today, you will not see any of these vowels. If you open up a Talmud today, you will not see these vowels. You can even open up a modern Israeli newspaper and not see the vowels printed there.
Zev Steinhardt
That’s an interesting one Shoshana, could you point me towards a paper, book etc that discusses this. (Not doubting you, just interested to know more)
Shoshana, the Hebrew word qeren could mean either ‘horn’ or ‘beam of light’. Basically, it means ‘horn’, and ‘ray of light’ is a metaphorical use of the same word (in the sense of ‘something projecting’). The Arabic word for horn, qarn, is also used metaphorically to mean ‘mountain peak; the first visible part of the rising sun’.
Qur’an is not from this q-r-n root, but from the root q-r-’ ‘to read’ (the -an is a suffix, not part of the root). Compare the Hebrew verb qara’ which also means ‘to read’. The Karaites got that name, I think, from their “reading” the Torah (only the Torah, not the Mishnah).
As for qeren being related to the Latin word for ‘horn’, cornu, there may be something to that. It may be a very early Semitic loanword to Proto-Indo-European. There are several of these. Taurus (< PIE *tauro- < Arabic thawr ‘bull’), seven (<PIE *septm < Arabic sab‘at- ‘7’), goat (< PIE *ghaido- < Hebrew gedi ‘goat’) are some more examples. Because PIE *k- changed to h- in Germanic, the English word horn is also related to cornu and qarn/qeren.
Is this a very ancient Biblical word? Because I just looked up rope in my Hebrew dictionary, and I do not see a word with that shoresh (root) at all. I see chevel, machorezet, and tliah.
I’m not sure how two words with the same shoresh could have such wildly different meanings anyway. Usually they are closely connected words.