What is a qilin according to the Bible?

A church historian once remarked that the Bible does not name the qilin, yet readers keep finding it in the text. They are looking at the wrong animal. The qilin appears nowhere in canonical scripture, but a single mistranslation in the Greek Septuagint placed a chimeric creature into the Book of Job, and that error has fueled speculation for two thousand years. The creature in question is the re’em (אֶרֶץ, a wild ox or aurochs), which the translators of the Septuagint rendered as monokeros (μονόκερως), the single-horned beast. What follows traces how a Hebrew ox became a Chinese unicorn in the Western imagination, and why the confusion matters.

Only 150-160 characters for the meta: The qilin does not appear in the Bible, but a Septuagint mistranslation of the Hebrew re’em as monokeros created a centuries-long confusion between the Chinese qilin and the biblical unicorn.

The Exact Verse That Started Everything

The trouble begins in Job 39:9-12. The Hebrew text describes a wild ox that cannot be tamed, that refuses to serve in the barn, that is too powerful for the yoke. The Masoretic Text reads ha-yishmor re’em — “will the re’em serve you?” The animal is clearly an aurochs, the massive bovine that once roamed Eurasia and was extinct by 1627. We know this because the same word appears in Numbers 23:22 and Deuteronomy 33:17, where the re’em is compared to the strength of an ox.

The Septuagint, translated in Alexandria between the third and first centuries BCE, chose monokeros. Why? The debate has not settled. Some scholars argue the translators confused the re’em with the Indian rhinoceros, which has a single horn. Others suggest they relied on Egyptian sources that described a one-horned wild ox. Either way, the damage was done. When Jerome translated the Vulgate in the late fourth century CE, he kept the Greek reading: unicornis.

How the Monokeros Became the Qilin

This is where the Chinese qilin enters the story. The qilin (麒麟) had been part of Chinese mythology since at least the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE). It appeared as a composite creature: the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, the hooves of a horse, and a single horn. It did not harm living things. Its arrival signaled the birth or death of a sage. Confucius himself reportedly saw a qilin before his death, and the event is recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals.

European missionaries in China during the Jesuit missions of the 16th and 17th centuries encountered the qilin and recognized its single horn. They assumed it was the biblical unicorn. The mistake was natural. The King James Version of 1611 had already firmly placed the unicorn in the Bible, appearing nine times in the Old Testament (Numbers 23:22, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9-10, Psalm 22:21, Psalm 29:6, Psalm 92:10, and Isaiah 34:7). If a Chinese beast had one horn and appeared in Chinese texts from antiquity, it must be the same animal.

Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who lived in China from 1582 to 1610, wrote in his journals that the Chinese had a unicorn called the kilin (his transliteration). He noted its peaceful nature and its appearance only in times of righteousness. He never explicitly claimed it was the biblical unicorn, but later missionaries made the connection explicit.

The Chinese Qilin as It Actually Was

Before the missionary confusion, the qilin had its own complete mythology. The earliest references come from the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), compiled between the 4th century BCE and the 1st century CE. The text describes the qilin as a beast with one horn, a deer’s body, an ox’s tail, and a horse’s hooves. It walked without crushing grass or treading on insects. It ate no living thing.

By the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), the qilin had become a symbol of justice and benevolence. Judges wore qilin badges on their robes. The beast appeared in art as a gentle, almost melancholic creature, its single horn pointing upward as a sign of its singular connection to heaven. When the Emperor Wu of Han sent expeditions to the West, the qilin was reported in Central Asia, which suggests the word may have been applied to real animals like the giraffe (the Chinese still call giraffes changjinglu, or “long-necked deer,” but the Ming dynasty called qilin what were almost certainly giraffes brought from Africa).

Why the Bible Never Mentions a Qilin

The Chinese qilin and the biblical re’em share almost nothing beyond the single horn. The re’em is a wild, untamable beast of strength. The qilin is a gentle, omniscient omen of virtue. The re’em appears in contexts of God’s power over creation, specifically his ability to bind an animal that no human can control. The qilin appears in contexts of moral purity and the arrival of sages.

The Bible’s silence on the qilin is complete. No Hebrew word corresponds to it. No Aramaic targum mentions it. The Greek New Testament, written in the first century CE, contains no reference to any single-horned creature. The qilin entered the Western conversation through the Jesuit encounter, not through scripture itself.

The Nine Biblical Appearances of the Unicorn (and What They Actually Mean)

Every Bible reader who has found unicorns in the King James Version has found an error. The nine occurrences all translate the Hebrew re’em. Here is what each actually describes:

Numbers 23:22 and Deuteronomy 33:17 use the re’em as a metaphor for God’s strength leading Israel out of Egypt. The animal’s horns are “like the horns of the wild ox” — plural, by the way, which makes the single-horn reading even stranger.

Job 39:9-12 is the longest passage. God asks Job whether the wild ox will consent to serve him. The answer is no. The passage emphasizes the creature’s independence and power, traits that fit aurochs but not qilin.

Psalm 22:21 uses the re’em in a cry for deliverance: “save me from the lion’s mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.” The writer imagines himself gored by a wild bull.

Psalm 29:6 describes the voice of the Lord making the re’em skip like a calf. It is an image of God’s power over even the strongest beasts.

Psalm 92:10 has the speaker’s horn lifted like the horn of the re’em, a symbol of strength and exaltation.

Isaiah 34:7 includes the re’em in a prophecy of judgment, where the wild animals fall alongside the domesticated ones at the slaughter.

In every case, the animal is powerful, dangerous, and beyond human control. The qilin, by contrast, is gentle to the point of sacred timidity. The two cannot be the same creature.

What the Mistranslation Tells Us About Sacred Texts

The Septuagint’s translation of re’em as monokeros is not the only oddity in that version. The translators also rendered the Hebrew tachash (an unknown animal whose skin was used for the tabernacle) as hyakinthinos (blue), and the nesher (eagle) as aetos (eagle, though the context demands a vulture). Translation errors in sacred texts are not scandals. They are the natural result of moving a text across languages, cultures, and centuries when the original animals had already become unfamiliar.

Alexandria in the third century BCE was a Greek-speaking city. The translators were Jews who knew Hebrew but may not have seen a wild aurochs in their lives. They reached for the closest Greek word they knew, and monokeros was what the Greeks called any single-horned animal. The Greek historian Ctesias had described a wild ass with a single horn in his Indica in the 5th century BCE. The natural historian Pliny the Elder repeated the claim in the 1st century CE. The single-horned creature was already a Mediterranean legend, and the Septuagint translators folded it into the Hebrew text.

Why the Qilin Still Gets Read Into the Bible

Despite the evidence, the belief persists. Modern readers find the qilin in the Bible for several reasons:

The symbolic overlap is real. Both the qilin and the biblical unicorn represent something rare and pure. The qilin appears only in times of righteousness. The unicorn in medieval bestiaries became a symbol of Christ, captured only by a virgin. The King James translators, who worked from the Hebrew and Greek but also consulted the Vulgate, cannot have been unaware of the unicorn’s Christian symbolism.

The visual similarity is also real. The qilin’s single horn, its composite body, and its association with purity mirror the medieval European unicorn. When Renaissance artists and later Bible illustrators drew unicorns, they drew creatures that looked more like qilin than aurochs.

But the textual fact remains. The Bible does not mention the qilin. The animal that appears in the King James Version as a unicorn is a wild ox, and the Chinese qilin entered the European imagination through the Jesuit missions, not through scripture.

FAQ

Does the King James Bible mention unicorns? Yes, the KJV uses the word “unicorn” nine times in the Old Testament, but it is a mistranslation of the Hebrew re’em, which refers to the extinct wild aurochs.

Why did the Septuagint translate re’em as monokeros? The third-century BCE Greek translators likely confused the re’em with the Indian rhinoceros or relied on earlier Greek accounts of a single-horned wild ass described by Ctesias.

Is the qilin the same animal as the biblical unicorn? No. The qilin is a Chinese mythological creature first recorded in the Shanhaijing (4th-1st centuries BCE), while the biblical unicorn is a translation error for the aurochs. The two creatures share a single horn but have different origins and characteristics.

Did any early Christian writers associate the qilin with the Bible? Not directly. The association came through Jesuit missionaries in the 16th-17th centuries, particularly Matteo Ricci, who observed the qilin in Chinese texts and noted its similarity to the European unicorn.

The Bibles That Got It Right

The King James Version has undergone multiple revisions, and modern translations like the New International Version, the English Standard Version, and the Revised Standard Version all render re’em as “wild ox” or “aurochs.” The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh uses “wild ox” in all nine occurrences. The Catholic New American Bible follows the Vulgate’s “unicorn” in some editions but uses “buffalo” in others.

If you read the qilin in the Bible, you are reading the history of translation itself: the Septuagint’s choice, Jerome’s preservation, the King James’s Englishing, and the missionary encounter with China. The beast in Job 39 is an aurochs, massive and untamable. The beast in Chinese mythology is a qilin, gentle and wise. They share a horn through the accident of translation, but the scriptures themselves contain no qilin.

For a deeper understanding of the qilin’s actual mythology, see our guide to mythical creatures of East Asia. The re’em itself, the true biblical animal, is covered in our guide to the aurochs in scripture. The broader tradition of single-horned creatures appears in the glossary entry on the unicorn in occult tradition.