Moses with horns! Have you ever seen a painting of Moses with horns?

It was a common artistic convention in the middle ages to portray Moses with two horns, one on each side of his head. It all began with this passage. It says that when Moses came down from the mountain, the skin of his face shown. The root of that verb for shining (grn) is the same as the word for horn. Here it seems to be used in the sense of a ray (of the sun) coming forth from the head as a symbol of divinity. The Latin translation, the Vulgate, took it literally and referred to a "horned Moses." From that translation came the pictorial representation of Moses with horns.

Questions of interpretation come not only from the shining face, but also from the veil which Moses put on his face. What kind of a veil was this? …