The church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome is the location of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses. The unusual thing about this sculpture is that Moses has two horns on his head. The reason for this odd depiction can be found in Jerome’s translation in the Latin Vulgate of Exodus 34:29, particularly the Hebrew word קָרַ֛ן (qaran). Most translations now render this word to mean that Moses’ face was “radiant,” but Jerome took the word asקֶרֶן (qeren) and translated it with the Latin word cornuta, the result rendering the verse as saying Moses’ face was “horned.”
One might think that translational point explains the horns on Moses’ head, but Michelangelo may have been onto something of far deeper significance. One must remember that it was not until after 600 CE that the Masoretes inserted the vowel markers into the Hebrew Bible. More recent work done by scholars like Francesca Stavrakopolou has suggested the Jewish scribes of the exilic and post-exilic period purposely skewed the earlier writings and traditions of ancient Israel to put forth their distinctly patriarchal, misogynistic, and monotheistic agenda. If that is indeed the case, it would not be a surprise to find that the later Masoretes engaged in the same type of activity.
In her most recent book, God: An Anatomy, Stavrakopoulou shows that in many Renaissance depictions of La Pieta that display the crucified Christ in the arms of his mother Mary, the dead Christ is sometimes depicted with an erection, symbolizing the vivifying power of God, even in death. She references Willem Key’s painting of La Pieta and writes, “A bearded, muscular Christ lies dead across his mother’s lap, his hand pierced with the gaping wound of a nail. A heavily veiled Mary lifts his head to her own as she bends to kiss his lips. Christ’s pelvic and thigh muscles are sharply defined, drawing the gaze to his loincloth, which barely covers his groin. Beneath it, his penis swells into an erection, lifting the folds of the fabric. Christ might be dead, but his penis promises his restoration to life” (145).
This erotic view of Christ, she claims, echoes the more hyper-masculine, highly phallic view of YHWH held in ancient Israel—the very view that the exilic and post-exilic scribes tried to cover up in their editorial work of the Hebrew Scriptures. As Stavrakopoulou shows this to be the case with Renaissance depictions of La Pieta, we must also consider the possibility that the same dynamic is at play in Michelangelo’s Moses. Perhaps Michelangelo’s horned Moses was not based on a mistranslation after all. Perhaps, it sought to unveil a shocking truth regarding YHWH worship in ancient Israel and about how the post-exilic scribes used their fictional figure of Moses to impose their hyper-masculine, monotheistic agenda onto the post-exilic community.
Exodus: The Golden Calf and YHWH (the Jealous, Misogynistic Lover)
Throughout the ancient Near East (ANE), horns were often understood as phallic symbols that represented the virility and sexual prowess of the ANE gods. Since ancient Israel was a part of that ANE culture, we must consider the possibility that Exodus 34:29 really is saying that Moses was “horned,” with the “horns” on Moses’ head representing the virility and sexual prowess of YHWH. Consider the setting of the story: Moses had just spent forty days with YHWH, during which time YHWH showed Moses his buttocks and carved the Ten Commandments into two stone tablets (“stones” acting as a euphemism for testicles). As Stavrakopoulou states in her book, after this encounter with YHWH, Moses had become “semi-divine.” She writes, “Moses undergoes a bodily transformation so profound that the Israelites cannot look him in the face and are afraid to go near him. Moses’ visual encounter with God has left a mark on him, rendering him more divine than human” (177). What better way to depict such a status than describing Moses with horns and two stones?
This explains the reaction of Moses and YHWH to the Israelites’ worshipping of the golden calf in Exodus 32. Given the Israelites’ so-called exodus from Egypt, it is probable that the golden calf was an image of the Egyptian goddess Hathor (often depicted as a cow). Therefore, the sight of the Israelites worshipping a golden calf who didn’t have any stones, namely a heifer, causes YHWH to fly into a fit of misogynistic jealousy. Moses’ smashing of the stone tablets thus acts as a symbol of YHWH’s feeling of emasculation by the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf. Ultimately, YHWH’s hyper-masculinity triumphs when he provides Moses with two new stone tablets. Yet this comes only after Moses orders the golden heifer to be hacked down, ground up, and thrown into the water that the Israelites must drink.
This scene at Sinai is a surprising twist to a common type-scene in the Hebrew Bible. In his ground-breaking book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, Robert Alter discusses the betrothal type-scene found in the Hebrew Bible in which a man goes to a foreign land, meets a woman at a well, and yet is faced with some kind of opposition or challenge. After meeting the challenge at the well, the man ends up being betrothed to the woman. We see such scenes with Abraham’s servant meeting Rebekah as a wife for Isaac, Jacob’s meeting Rachel, and Moses’ meeting Zipporah.
In Exodus, though, this betrothal type-scene is transferred to the national level, with YHWH travelling to a foreign land (Egypt) to take Israel out of that foreign land to enter into a marriage covenant with him. Only this time, the standard scene at the well is transferred initially to the scene in the wilderness of Sin, where the Israelites complain about not having any water to drink in Exodus 17:1-7. It is then that YHWH instructs Moses to strike the rock at Horeb (another stone reference) and then provides water from the rock for the Israelites to drink as they make their way to his mountain home at Sinai.
At Sinai, though, the Israelites actively construct a golden calf so they can worship Hathor, whom they no doubt worshipped in Egypt. Not only does YHWH, as the jilted husband, essentially walk in while Israel, as the newly betrothed wife, is in bed with someone else—that someone else is a female! The scene is utterly shocking. There is Moses, with the two stone tablets of the “marriage covenant” between YHWH and Israel, witnessing YHWH’s bride in erotic lesbian play. The smashing of the stone tablets, therefore, doesn’t just signify YHWH’s emasculation, and it doesn’t just signify the breaking of the covenant—it signifies the breaking of a marriage covenant.
This brings us to the significance of Moses ordering the golden calf to be ground up, scattered in the water, and then forcing the Israelites to drink the water if they hope to ever reunite with YHWH as their husband. Their actions showed they had ultimately rejected YHWH’s water from the rock at Horeb and were not wholly faithful to him. Since the water from the rock at Horeb in the wilderness of Sin didn’t lead to marital bliss, the dirty water at Sinai was a means of punishment and subjugation. The message conveyed in the story is clear: worshipping a female deity will arouse YHWH’s jealousy and make one’s life bitter.
Numbers 5: The Water Ordeal
This lesson was almost surely applied to Jewish marital relations as a warning to women not to step out of line. We can see this dynamic in the “water ordeal” of Numbers 5:11-31, where a wife suspected of adultery is forced to drink a cup of water in which dust from the tabernacle floor had been thrown. If she has committed adultery, her “womb will swell,” her “uterus will fall,” and she will become a curse to her people. If she has not committed adultery, the “water of bitterness that brings a curse” still causes immense pain, but ultimately nothing happens to her. As with the golden calf scene, the message to women here is Numbers 5 is also clear: don’t do anything to make your husband suspect you’ve been unfaithful, or else your husband, just like YHWH, will force you to drink bitter water that causes immense pain.
That said, the golden calf episode in Exodus 32, as well as the entire story of the Exodus, never really happened. As modern scholarship has shown, we can no longer accept that the so-called “history” of Israel from Abraham in Genesis 12 to Solomon in I Kings 1-11 is actual history. (Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III provide a thorough discussion in chapters 1-5 in their book A Biblical History of Israel regarding how modern biblical scholarship has conclusively shown that the so-called historical texts in the Old Testament aren’t really historical at all). In line with Stavrakopolou’s claims, we can see these stories are fictitious tales that later androcentric scribes of the post-exilic period made up in order to downplay the historical reality that the ancient Israelites were typical ANE pagans who worshipped the golden heifer-goddess throughout their history up to the time of the Babylonian exile. It was only during the exile that those androcentric scribes re-wrote their inherited writings to cover up the pagan reality of ancient Israel and imposed the worship of a single masculine deity, YHWH, on the exilic and post-exilic community.
Judges 13-15: The Story of Samson
Once we acknowledge this, we can also see the same type of scribal deception displayed in Judges 14, which not surprisingly is another variation of the betrothal type-scene. Here, Samson marries a Philistine woman. Samson’s new bride, though, “cheats” on him by telling the Philistine groomsmen the answer to Samson’s riddle. After they give him their answer to win the bet, Samson famously says, “If you hadn’t plowed with my heifer, you wouldn’t have gotten the answer to my riddle” (Judges 14:18). This starts a series of events that culminates in Judges 15:18-19, where after killing a thousand Philistines with a jawbone of a donkey, Samson cries out to YHWH that he is dying of thirst. In response, YHWH splits open a “hollow place” and causes water to gush forth for Samson to drink. Thus, what began with an unholy marriage with a “Philistine heifer” ended up with a slaughter of Philistines and clean water for Samson, their executioner, to drink.
At least, that is what the writer of Judges would like us to believe “happened” during the so-called time of the Judges. If we read between the lines of this fictional story falsely presented as history, though, we can see an earlier tradition that gives us a better understand of what life in ancient Israel really was like. It is worth noting that Judges 13 tells us that Samson was from Dan, one of the places, along with Bethel, where King Jeroboam later installed a golden calf shrine for the people of Israel to worship. The writer of I Kings may have wanted us to believe that the golden calf worship in Israel was a bastardized form of YHWH worship, but it is more likely that they had their roots in the shrines to the golden calf heifer-goddess that had been imported from Egypt into Philistia, most notably around Ashkelon. Therefore, far from being a judge of YHWH, the Samson in the original story was an Israelite male sacred prostitute of the golden calf heifer-goddess, and the Philistine groomsmen were misogynistic monotheists who tried to wipe out the heifer-goddess worship in the area. That is why, when the Philistines eventually capture Samson in Judges 16, they shave his head. It is an attempt to emasculate a man who had been subservient to women.
Of course, the exilic and post-exilic Jewish scribes sought to obscure such an understanding of the true Israelite history in which ancient Israel was no different in their worship practices than their ANE neighbors. The result being that a mythological story about the eventual triumph of the worshippers of Hathor over radical, fringe monotheists was re-written as supposed “history” in which Samson the sacred male prostitute of the golden calf heifer-goddess becomes YHWH’s judge, and the radical, fringe monotheists become the evil pagan Philistines.
Conclusion
Thanks to the recent advances in modern academic scholarship, we are now able to reconstruct what the original stories that lay behind Exodus 17 and 32-34, Numbers 5, and Judges 13-15 really meant. Since we cannot hope to excavate meaning from these texts, we need to create it. And what holds true for ancient biblical texts also holds true for the art of Michelangelo, particularly his famous statue of the horned Moses. It is time we view it in a different light. Perhaps Michelangelo’s horned Moses was not simply the result of a faulty translational choice of Jerome. Perhaps it was a subtle, yet bold, challenge to the attempts of the later misogynistic Jewish scribes and patriarchal Masoretes to eradicate any memory of goddess worship in ancient Israel.
***NOTE: If you’ve gotten to the end, let me clarify–yes, this is 100% complete satire!
