NOTES

A POSSIBLE EARLY OCCURRENCE OF MOSES WITH HORNS IN THE BENEDICTIONAL OF ST. .ETHELWOLD

Ruth Mellinkoff's The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (1) is clearly a specialist book on a narrowly- defined theme. With over 200 pages and 130 plates at her disposal, the authoress deals with her subject at length, in depth and with authority. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I read in her account the clear statement that Moses with horns did not appear in medieval art until the eleventh century. My surprise arose from the fact that I had always taken it for granted that a horned figure in the tenth-century Benedictional of St. Mthel- wold was intended to represent Moses — an opinion which I had assumed was widely current. Upon investigation I find that the horned man of the has never formally in print been associated with Moses, an omission which I wish to remedy in this note. If my theory proves acceptable, it will not only provide a possible occurrence of Moses with horns which antedates by almost a century that which is usually accepted as being his first appearance, but also suggest an origin for this iconographie convention which was prevalent in medieval art throughout western Europe.

The horns of Moses are usually as the result of a mistake made by St. Jerome in his translation of the Old Testament account of Moses's from Mount Sinai with the tables of the testament (Exodus XXXIV, 29). Faced with the problem of translating the Hebrew word qeren, which can mean

"horn" or "ray of light", Jerome chose to use the Latin word cornuta, "horned".

Cumque descenderet Moyses de monte Sinai, tenebat duas tabulas testimonii, et ignorabat quod cornuta esset faciès sua ex consortio sermonis Domini.

The choice of the word cornuta by Jerome is, in fact, not so much a mistake on his part as a deliberate metaphorical rendering of the Hebrew text. Familiar with both the Septuagint translation, "glorified", and the Aquila version, "horned", he chose the latter, perhaps in his scholarly search for what he to be the sense of his original. His awareness of the non-literal meaning is made clear by a remark in his on Ezekiel, an awareness which seems also to have been shared by others, among them the sixth-century British monk Gildas (2). It is all the more strange, therefore, that Jerome's Vulgate translation was subsequently misinterpreted and taken to signify that Moses had real horns. Nevertheless, this is obviously what happened, as is evidenced by the recurrent theme of the horned Moses in medieval art.

Miss Mellinkoff states (p. 13) that "the earliest artistic representation thus far found of horns on Moses is in England, in the ^Elfric Paraphrase of the Pentateuch and Joshua, British Museum Cotton Claudius B. IV.". This is acceptable as the first well attested pictorial occurrence of Moses either horned or in horned but I feel she is at fault in failing to consider specific horned figures of

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