When did the "Moses had horns" mistranslation get corrected?
When Michelangelo sculpted Moses, he carved the statue with two small horns on the top of Moses's head because in one of the translations at the time there was a verse that was mistranslated as "Moses had horns".
When did that mistranslation get fixed?
1 answer
The horns are based on Jerome's translation of the Hebrew word קָרַן (qaran) in Exodus 34:29 which means to send out rays or shine, and is related to the root word for horn (compare e.g. Genesis 22:13 where Abraham's ram for sacrifice is caught by its בְּקַרְנָיו (qeren)). Jerome used a similarly flexible word (cornuta), but the ambiguity lead to some interesting artistic interpretations.
English doesn't exactly have a linguistic relationship between radiant and horns, so it is "fixed" in every translation except the Douay-Rheims which is a direct Vulgate translation rather than referencing the Hebrew text.
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