This is actually an extension of a conversation on another forum regarding Job and the Dinosaurs.
Quite frankly, I have no idea what Behemoth was, if it actually existed, and I am fully aware of the controversy over which parts of Job were Wisdom Literature and which parts were written after the Babylonian exile and the Behemoth and Unicorn stuff seems to fall into the latter category.
King James Bible and Unicorns -- 7 min 6 sec
What kind of rekindled my interest in the subject was my encounter with the (clearly saterical) www.unicornmuseum.org upon a visit to my friends at www.skepticalmonkey.com (they're not really my friends but since I don't have any real freinds the skeptical anthropomorphic animals is good enough for me).
I very much understand that scholars and apologists will disagree with me but, as someone of Scottish extraction, I was told a very different story as to how unicorns made their way into the King James Version of the Bible than any of those floating about the intertoobz at present and I feel it deserves a presence here in cyberspace. And, yes, this is one of those occasions where I tend to reject these arguments from authority and trust my Grandmother (not that that is an argument from authority at all).
So this is the story as it was told to me at about the age of six. In the words of Blind Harry
"historians from England will say I am a liar but history is written by those who have hanged heroes ..."
James VI of Scotland became James I of England upon the death of Elizabeth I (the virgin queen) in 1603. He wanted to unite his two monarchies into a single nation. This actually happened under Queen Anne Stuart (the last legitimate ruler of England) about a century later but that's another story. At any rate, one of the problems facing James at this time was the religious issue. The Kirk in Scotland, which would become the Presbyterian church we know today, and the Anglican/Episcopal church of England were using two different versions of the Bible. The polite English Episcopalians found some of the caustic Calvinist commentary in the Geneva Bible a bit too ill-tempered for their liking and the Scottish Presbyterians found the Cranmer Bible just a little bit too milquetoast to suit their needs so James ordered a new Authorized English Translation to be commissioned which would sort of find a middle path between:"popish persons on the one hand and the self-conceited brethren on the other" ...
Yes, he actually said that.
At any rate, the translators ran into some words which were not in the Strong Concordance and all that they knew was that they were animals of some sort and that they had horns. Of course the unicorn had been part of the national mythology of Scotland going back to the days of Eochaid and Giric and part of the legend was that Unicorns could only be tamed by a virgin. The Virgin Queen managed to tame the Scots by dieing childless thus it seemed like a good fit for animals which may very well have been mythological to begin with and it would make the King happy which was a big deal in those days ... And so it was that the: rockiest, orneriest and most fashion illiterate nation in Western Europe wedged her royal family's coat of arms into the best selling English Language book of all time ...
I'm actually quite proud that the national symbol of the land of my ancestors made it into something as enduring as the Holy Bible even if it was in kind of an underhanded way.
Whatever the truth is, my grandmother's tale makes at least as much sense as saying that unicorns actually walked the earth at some point or that the people actually mistook wild ox (which look nothing like unicorns) for them. And it is kind of interesting that no other version of the Bible contains that phrase aside from the one which was commissioned by a Scotsman. From what I understand most Scottish lads and lassies are taught this story when they are young but I do understand why an apologist or scholar might be leary to ask a Scot as we are known to stretch the truth now and again when we have been drinking (which is more often than most would imagine but less often than I would ever admit to).
And yet, I would argue that Occam's Razor favors my Grandmother's story over the tale that unicorns actually existed or the Village Atheist's conspiracy theory that there was some sort of plot to cover up that Christians belived in such things. And, frankly, the latter seems particularly unlikely to me in consideration of all the bull-crap which remains in the Bible to this day. I'm not unbiased on this, however, because no one calls my Grandmother a liar!
Oh and, yes, for the satirically impaired, the Unicorn Museum site is, in fact, satire, hosted by This Week in Science which is a pro-science/rational podcast not at all sympathetic to unicorn-apologetics ...
Charlie the Unicorn 2 -- 6 min 1 sec
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