Q: In your opinion, were there unicorns on Noah’s Ark and is it OK for Christians to like them?  —Sharon

A: The Bible tells us that God commanded Noah to “bring a pair of every kind of animal—a male and a female, pairs of every kind of bird, and every kind of animal, and every kind of small animal that scurries along the ground” into the ark (Genesis 6:19-20, 7:8-9,15-16). But we can never know what these animals were, simply because Scripture did not list them.

The unicorn is a mythical creature resembling a white horse with a large pointed spiraling horn on its forehead. Modern zoologists do not believe that the unicorn ever existed.

In the OT, an animal of great strength (Hebrew re’em) is mentioned in several places—eg. Numbers 23:22, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9-12, Psalm 22:21, 29:6, 92:10. The translators of the KJV incorrectly translated “re’em” as “unicorn.” Later translations of the Bible like the NKJV, NAS, RSV, NIV, NLT, ESV corrected this, and translated the animal as “wild ox.” Scholars believed that the Biblical writers had the now extinct aurochs in mind in these verses. Noah Webster, however, in his very first edition of his dictionary (1828 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language) says that the unicorn is the rhinoceros.  —K.T. Sim

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