Perhaps some of you have seen Michelangelo's great marble statue of Moses. Or if you have just seen a picture of that statue, you know that it depicts Moses sitting, holding the tablets of the law. And strangely enough, on Moses' head are two tiny horns. That depiction furnishes us with a good lesson in the history of Old Testament manuscripts. The verb "shone" in verse 29 of our text can also be translated as "horned," and that apparently was the rendering that the Exodus manuscript available to Michelangelo used. It said that Moses' face (or head) was "horned." So that is the way Michelangelo depicted him. Moses had horns. 

What our text really says, of course, is that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai after talking with God, the skin of his face "shone." It shone so brilliantly that …