People are in love with unicorns, even though they do not exist • Did the animal ever exist?
• If you look at the sources of Judaism the answer is clear • The "Hidden Theory" project
Unicorn
Photo:
Illustration - Getty Images
If you look around, you will see lots of unicorns.
Do not believe?
Take your head off the phone and check.
They are found almost everywhere: on shirts, pajamas and pillows.
Now turn your head back to the phone and open the phone's emoji keyboard.
Here, too, there are unicorns.
And yet, even though they are around us, smiling and twinkling, no one has ever documented a unicorn in the wild.
So have unicorns really ever existed or is it just a legend?
Let’s start from the beginning: the unicorn appears in the traditions of many cultures around the world.
We are all familiar with the classic unicorn: a noble and white horse with one horn in the center of the forehead, but there are more unicorns, lesser known.
Sometimes the unicorn is described as a savage (wild donkey) with one horn, and there are places where the unicorn is generally a bearded goat with one horn.
More in the "Hidden Theory" project
- The Jewish secret of the Bermuda Triangle
- Is it allowed to eat mermaids?
Were you surprised?
Wait until you read the following description of the unicorn, by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder: “A very fierce animal called a monochorus, has a deer head, elephant legs and a wild boar tail, while the rest of its body is like that of a horse; This animal makes a deep growling sound, and has one black horn, which protrudes from the middle of its forehead and is about two cubits long "(about 90 cm). Magical pony and tail in all the colors of the rainbow - is simply the European version of the unicorn, which has spread around the world since the Middle Ages.
We Jews also have our own unicorn.
Our late sages tell in the Talmud that the first man sacrificed a unicorn: "An ox that sacrificed the first man, he had one horn in his forehead." Neither a horse nor a goat, a bull, a bull with one horn. The horn became part of the covers of the tabernacle: "A great animal God showed to Moses, and made him [through it] the need of the tabernacle and shelved ... she had one horn on her forehead."
According to this explanation, the unicorn was a miraculous creature, who came into the world for one purpose, the construction of the Tabernacle, and then disappeared.
If we look in nature for creatures with a single horn, which could have been a source of legends about unicorns, we will find only one family of such creatures: the rhinos.
But the horn of the rhinos, as their name suggests, comes out of the nose - not the forehead.
The rhinos are also not white, but dark gray or at most light gray.
Even the "white rhino," as most people call the broad-rimmed rhino, is not white;
According to the explanation, the origin of his name is in the incorrect translation of the word weit ("wide" in Afrikaans) to white ("white" in English).
Still, the rhino is, apparently, the "unicorn" described by old Pliny, the one with the pig's tail, the elephant's legs and the dark horn.
So were there unicorns here or is it just a myth?
- There is another creature that could have served as a source for stories about unicorns: the white ram.
It is a species of white antelope that lives in the deserts of the Land of Israel and its surroundings and has straight and long horns.
Although the vast majority of rams have a pair of horns, rams that have lost one of the two due to injury or illness are also known, so their forehead is permanently adorned with only one horn.
In addition, from a certain angle, the pair of rams' horns may look like a single horn, especially if you are watching an animal from a distance.
Probably not by chance in King James' translation of the Bible, the word "ram" is translated as "unicorn."
Is the ram the source of the stories about the unicorn?
- This time we will leave the question open.
