The Biblical Unicorn - Believe In It Or Burn

I've never really studied the bible outside of comparative religions classes a little bit of fruitless reading on my own which left me tired and confused, so some of the more subtle nuances of the book have escaped me. The more I learn about all of the claims the bible makes, the more I wonder how anyone with any amount of self respecting intelligence could possibly literally follow it as if it is their god's unfiltered word.

For instance, did you know that the bible mentions unicorns? AIG (the people who brought you that bastion of absurdity, the creation museum) spells it all out for us -

Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature. The Bible refers to the unicorn in the context of familiar animals, such as peacocks, lambs, lions, bullocks, goats, donkeys, horses, dogs, eagles, and calves (Job 39:9–12.) In Job 38–41, God reminded Job of the characteristics of a variety of impressive animals He had created, showing Job that God was far above man in power and strength.

Job had to be familiar with the animals on God’s list for the illustration to be effective. God points out in Job 39:9–12 that the unicorn, “whose strength is great,” is useless for agricultural work, refusing to serve man or “harrow (plow) the valley.” This visual aid gave Job a glimpse of God’s greatness. An imaginary fantasy animal would have defeated the purpose of God’s illustration.

Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.

The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”

The elasmotherium, an extinct giant rhinoceros, provides another possibility for the unicorn’s identity. The elasmotherium’s 33-inch-long skull has a huge bony protuberance on the frontal bone consistent with the support structure for a massive horn. In fact, archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, in his 1849 book Nineveh and Its Remains, sketched a single-horned creature from an obelisk in company with two-horned bovine animals; he identified the single-horned animal as an Indian rhinoceros. The biblical unicorn could have been the elasmotherium.

Assyrian archaeology provides one other possible solution to the unicorn identity crisis. The biblical unicorn could have been an aurochs (a kind of wild ox known to the Assyrians as rimu). The aurochs’s horns were very symmetrical and often appeared as one in profile, as can be seen on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and Esarhaddon’s stone prism. Fighting rimu was a popular sport for Assyrian kings. On a broken obelisk, for instance, Tiglath-Pileser I boasted of slaying them in the Lebanon mountains.

Extinct since about 1627, aurochs, Bos primigenius, were huge bovine creatures. Julius Caesar described them in his Gallic Wars as:

“a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied . . . . Not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.”

The aurochs’ highly prized horns would have been a symbol of great strength to the ancient Bible reader.

One scholarly urge to identify the biblical unicorn with the Assyrian aurochs springs from a similarity between the Assyrian word rimu and the Hebrew word re’em. We must be very careful when dealing with anglicized transliterated words from languages that do not share the English alphabet and phonetic structure. However, similar words in Ugaritic and Akkadian (other languages of the ancient Middle East) as well as Aramaic mean “wild bull” or “buffalo,” and an Arabic cognate means “white antelope.”

However, the linguistics of the text cannot conclusively prove how many horns the biblical unicorn had. While modern translations typically translate re’em as “wild ox,” the King James Version (1611), Luther’s German Bible (1534), the Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate translated this Hebrew word with words meaning “one-horned animal.”

The importance of the biblical unicorn is not so much its specific identity—much as we would like to know—but its reality. The Bible is clearly describing a real animal. The unicorn mentioned in the Bible was a powerful animal possessing one or two strong horns—not the fantasy animal that has been popularized in movies and books. Whatever it was, it is now likely extinct like many other animals. To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.

...I just. I don't really know what to say. All I can think of is how Lisa Frank much have had some divine inspiration when she was designing my trapper keeper in 7th grade.

A Word From Ken Ham - RE: Creation Museum Visit

So I wandered over to the Answers In Genesis website (I know, gross, but I was curious) to see what creepy ol' Ken Ham had to say about the impending (and by now completed without incident) visit of about 285 atheists/humanists to his abomination unto mighty Atheismo, the Creation Museum.

I wasn't shocked to find his quote mining of prominent atheist and university professor PZ Myer's blog as definitive proof that all atheists are mean and snarky. The fact is, the creation museum is as much a joke among atheists as I don't know...valued and accredited scientific research is among creationists so lets not claim innocence on that front. However, this quote from Ham was a bit much:

Most people (even most of the non-Christians) who come to the museum do so to learn, to be challenged, to search out information, to be equipped, and so on.

I guarantee you, Mr. Ham, what you're doing at the creation museum has nothing to do with information unless you count misinformation as a kind of information. People may go there to learn the latest in christian apologetics, but as for learning history, science, or anything of value, the creation museum is not on the top of anyone's list. I will agree that there is a challenge here - the challenge to not burst out laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of the 'museum' and it's content.

Yeah, I'm snarky when it comes to the application of pseudoscience when trying to give creationism scientific validity because creationism is an idea based on a myth. There are no observations in nature which support creationism unless you refuse to observe nature in its entirety. Once you start trying to lie to people by telling them that their mythological belief system has any amount of validity in the field of science, you are essentially throwing down the gauntlet for the discussion and the scientifically minded community isn't going to pull any punches in it's response. You can call us mean for it, but to relate to you on a level you'll understand - you started it.

Ham goes on to quote a post PZ made about the recent Iowa bus ad controversy where the DART pulled atheist bus ads after having initially approved them, published them, and collected the money for them. At first the DART claimed the bus ads were pulled because of a negative community reaction, but then changed their story to say that they were never approved in the first place. When confronted with proof that they were in fact approved, the DART has once again changed it's story to say that they were supposed to be approved AGAIN and weren't.

What confuses me is that Ham quotes PZ's entire post and then comes to this conclusion:

You see, regardless of the creation/evolution issue, these people oppose anyone who believes in God, regardless of whether they accept Genesis as literal history.

What? A post about discrimination against atheists in reference to a bus ad is proof that we oppose anyone who believes in god? I suppose when you run an establishment that brazenly asserts that T-rex was a vegetarian regardless of the mountain of evidence to the contrary, you can come to any conclusion from any source without fear of being called out on your erroneous logic. Erroneous logic seems to be the name of the creationist game. Sometimes I just want to take creationists by the shoulders, give them a good shake and demand in my most authoritative voice that they make sense.