I just thought to mention in case you are unfamiliar with it, but Barne’s commentary has a great entry on Job 39:9. He gives some great and seemingly very reliable information that gives great insight into what the unicorn actually was. Just as the “discovery” as it were of dinosaurs sheds great light on the Bible’s as well as various’ cultures reference to dragons, so too we need to, like you do, realize that we don’t have to pick a creature we are intamitely familiar with to be the unicorn.

After Barnes lists a wealth of information about what unicorns are, he gives 2 reasons why he doesn’t believe that the Bible is refering to the actual animal known as the unicorn. But, I don’t agree with him. He doesn’t have solid reasons for negating all the evidence he gives for the unicorn in my opinion. He lists his first reason as being that Job wouldn’t be familiar with unicorns… (he basis this, I bleieve, on the evidence showing that unicorns lived in deserts and if I recall correctly mountainous areas however, this reasoning makes no sense, and is similar to many many mistakes made today. We cannot say what Job was or was not familiar with, we can only go on what the Bible says. Based on God’s talking to Job about the unicorn, that is 100% evidence that Job was familiar with them in my mind, as it seems unlikely that God is talkign to Job about animals he isn’t familiar with, then Job couldn’t understand the point God was making.

Furthur proof of this is that God speaks to Job about a wide range of animals, including Leviathan, which appears to be at least partly if not completley a marine animal (which actually breathes fire as testified by God himself). So if Job could understand what God psoke of a water animal, why not a desert animal and so on. Besides the evidence and information of unicorns and dates Barnes gives appears to be hundreds and thousands of years after when the book of Job was likely written, so the habitats and population size of the unicorns could have greatly dwindled in that time.

His second reason seems to be that he doesn’t feel the described unicorns fit the Biblical description. That is he doesnt’s eem to think its big enough or strong enough. Yet in the evidence he lists for true unicorns it is commonly said that they are fierce, and that they weren’t often captured alive. In fact one witness said that the unicorn (based soley on its head) would be larger than a rhinoceros and that there was no known animal that would be a match for the unicorn. Its possible the other witnesses of the unicorns, which all come from seemingly reliabile sources, were of young unicorns not fully grown if they weren’t as big. It could make sense that younger uniocnrs woudl be more likely to be seen and to be near people. Watching Gorillas interacting with humans once it was the babies and some of the female gorillas that got close to the humans, but the huge greyback stayed off in the back.

From the evidence Barnes lists I see no reason to doubt that the unicorn is the creature his witnesses describe, which each witness from all over the world describing almost the exact characteristics of this creature, so it seems likely the unicorn is the creatuer they describe and actually covered a large area of space. Amazingly some of teh dates are only a few hundred years old, in fact there are seemingly reliable sources that suggest that natives around the congo (which I think might still be not fully mapped and explored) terrified of a creature that matches a certain kind of dinosaur, and also reporting a creature that looks like a triceratops, there have been various reports, different people groupls from different parts of teh congo, who aren’t connected and even have different names for this creature, but the same description. Perhaps even a few hundred years ago some dinosaurs and unicorns still existed. Barnes wrote his commentary around 1847 to the late 1800′s, and he says that the Giraffe itself was only recently discovered, adn taht the Gnu used to be thought to be a mythical creature, but was now discovered. We have learned that mythical dragons are based in reality based on dragons, and it appears that unicorns as well are real too, minus the magical fantasy land stuff, but based on a real creature, that while it doesn’t look exactly like the unicorns we see in fiction works today, it is interesting how close and realisitc the descriptions are, not just being a horse with a horn, but various details that make it sound reasonable.

And the soruces for all these things are actual historians, and high ranking military officials… not exactly information from the tabloids.

Like you say, we need to stop trying to make God fit our opinions and our minds. We don’t need to turn the unicorn into somehting we are familiar with, we need to not turn God into waht we understand, but open ourselves to God’s understanding. Learn what the Bible teaches, not make the Bible fit our opinions.

Thanks for the great article, Lord willing, I intend to use the information about various translations that translate the word as unicorn for Sunday School

Thank you – jason