THUS THE HORNS ON MOSES

Michelangelo Buonarroti - Moses - San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

A good many years ago, during my visit to San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, I remember how stunned I was when I came upon the magnificent, enormous (over seven and a half feet tall, and he is sitting down!) sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo. I was taken by surprise either because I did not know the statue was in the church or because I did not know of its size. And then, Moses with horns? I recall my puzzlement over the horns. I believe I was alone, with no one to ask about the horns, and I never sought more information. Now I know, thanks to Diarmaid MacCulloch in his excellent tour de force, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

Medieval Western Christianity knew the Bible almost exclusively through the Vulgate, the fourth-century Latin translation made by Jerome. Humanist excavations now went behind the Vulgate text to the Tanakh and its principal Greek translation, the Septuagint. Jerome had done his considerable best to re-examine the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint, nevertheless, faults remained. Some of the mistranslations in the Old Testament were more comic than important. One of the most curious was at Exodus 34, where the Hebrew describes Moses' face as shining when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Jerome, mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns - and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in Christian art, long after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus. They are sported by Michelangelo's great sculptured Moese now in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli ('Saint Peter in Chains')....

MacCullough breaks his very serious history with anecdotes such as the quote above, which keep the story moving along at a good pace. Here's another snippet from the author's account of the humanist scholar, Erasmus, which I found quite amusing:

Erasmus would never travel very far east of the Rhine, although he was frequently prepared to risk the English Channel. Instead, people came to Erasmus as devotees. He constructed a salon of the imagination, embracing the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, some of whom he never met face to face. Erasmus should be declared the patron saint of networkers, as well as of freelance writers.

A 'salon of the imagination'. Is that not wonderful writing? And think of it! Bloggers now have a patron saint.

Oh, read the book! It's long, and it's taking me a while, but it's well worth the time and effort.

Image from Wikipedia.