In the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, there is a marble Moses carved by Michelangelo around 1513 that possesses two small horns upon its forehead. Almost everyone has seen them, whether in photographs or in person, and almost no one questions why they are there. The answer is one of the clearest stories I know regarding what a translation decision can achieve when sufficient time has passed.

The origin lies in Exodus. Moses descends from Mount Sinai after speaking with God, and the Hebrew text states he did not know that the skin of his face had qāran. The verb appears three times in the same passage, applied consistently to his face, and biblical Hebrew dictionaries translate it as emitting rays: His face was radiant. This is why the Israelites were afraid to look at him and why he eventually covered himself with a veil when speaking to them.

Now, the detail that complicates everything. That verb, qāran, shares its three consonants with the noun qeren, which signifies horn and also strength or power. In ancient Hebrew, written without vowels, both forms appear identical on the page: q-r-n. They are not the same word: one is a verb and the other a noun, and their vocalisation differs. Yet they are related, and the underlying image is likely that of rays protruding from the head just as the horns of an animal protrude.

The Greek translators, centuries before Christ, resolved the matter on the side of light: they stated that the appearance of his face had been glorified. And when Jerome of Stridon translated the Bible into Latin at the end of the fourth century, he chose the opposite. He wrote that Moses did not know quod cornuta esset facies sua: that his face was horned. He did not do so once, nor by oversight; he maintained the word in all three verses, consistently, wherever the Hebrew repeated the verb.

The popular version maintains that Jerome erred, that he lacked sufficient Hebrew and confused horns with light. However, this does not hold: Jerome worked with Hebrew, was aware of the Greek translation that stated “glorified”, and was also familiar with an earlier version, attributed to Aquila, which had already opted for the horn. He had both possible readings before him and he made a choice. Philologists debate the reason, and there is no proven answer; the prudent hypothesis is that he preferred the more material and etymological translation, and that the horn served him as an image of strength and authority, which is what it signified in the biblical world, long before later Christianity associated it with the demonic.

Thus, it was not an error; it was a decision. And that decision, disseminated by the Latin Bible that the West read for over a thousand years, provided artists with a textual basis to paint and sculpt a horned Moses. The tradition consolidated around the eleventh century and reached, among many others, Michelangelo’s marble.

There was no universal horned Moses, nor did Jerome impose horns upon the entire history of art. Throughout those same centuries, Moses was depicted with nothing upon his head, with a halo, with rays of light, and with intermediate solutions where the rays thickened until they resembled two solid protuberances, as ambiguous as the Hebrew verb from which they originated. When modern philology established the luminous reading, many artists returned to the rays. The horned tradition was influential, not mandatory.

As for Michelangelo himself, we do not know his thoughts. He left no record of why he carved those two points. He inherited an established visual convention; thus, he may have been following the recognisable attribute of a character, or resolving in stone the problem of representing rays that cannot be rendered otherwise in marble, or seeking the sign of power that the horn carried. He was likely doing all three simultaneously, with none excluding the others. To claim that he naively copied a translation error is as simplistic as claiming that Jerome did not know Hebrew.

This is the complete trajectory of a choice: a Hebrew verb that combined light and horn in the same root; a translator who, knowing what he was doing, chose the corporeal word; a language, Latin, which disseminated that word for a millennium; and artists who, in transitioning from text to image, had to decide something the text did not state: how many horns, of what size, and in what position upon the head. For the Vulgate does not say two; it only says horned. The two horns, the exact shape, the position upon the forehead—all of that was provided by reception, not by translation.

A decision regarding a word became a decision regarding a form, and that form remains in San Pietro in Vincoli, in marble, in full view of all, waiting for someone to ask where it originated.

On the open conversation

This text follows the path of a translation decision: the Hebrew verb qāran in Exodus 34, which dictionaries translate as 'to emit rays' and which shares a consonantal root with qeren, 'horn'; Jerome's choice in the Vulgate (cornuta esset facies sua), as opposed to the luminous option of the Septuagint; and the iconography of the horned Moses leading up to Michelangelo's sculpture. I maintain that it was not a translation error, as Jerome was aware of both readings, and I avoid two common simplifications: that in Hebrew 'the same word' signifies both horn and light (they are related forms, not equivalents), and that the horned iconography was universal, when it in fact coexisted with halos and rays. If anyone wishes to contribute from the fields of biblical philology, translation studies, or the history of iconography, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Masoretic Text, Exodus 34:29, 30 and 35: the verb קָרַן (qāran) applied to 'the skin of his face'. Brown-Driver-Briggs defines its usage in these passages as 'send out rays'.

Vulgate: 'ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua' (34:29); 'cornutam Moysi faciem' (34:30); 'faciem egredientis Moysi esse cornutam' (34:35). The 20th-century Nova Vulgata replaced the expression with 'resplenderet cutis faciei suae'.

Septuagint, Exodus 34:29: 'δεδόξασται ἡ ὄψις', the appearance 'had been glorified'.

Regarding Jerome's choice and the earlier reading attributed to Aquila, and regarding the history of iconography: Thomas Römer, 'The Horns of Moses. Setting the Bible in its Historical Context' (Collège de France, 5 February 2009).

Michelangelo, Moses, marble, carved primarily between 1513 and 1515 for the tomb of Julius II (commission initiated in 1505; monument installed between 1542 and 1545), San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. No statement from the artist regarding the protuberances has been preserved.