SHONE, sent forth beams — 'the skin of his face qaran' (34:29), and the verb shares its root with keren, the ordinary Hebrew word for a literal animal HORN. That shared root produced one of the most consequential mistranslations in Western art. Jerome's Vulgate rendered the verb almost literally, cornuta esset facies sua, 'his face was HORNED' — a defensible reading of the bare consonants, but one no other detail in the passage supports. The Douay-Rheims, translating the Vulgate, keeps it: 'his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.' Michelangelo, working thirteen centuries later from that same Latin tradition, carved Moses with two small horns rising from his head for the tomb of Pope Julius II — a sculpture now visited by millions who often assume the horns are simply what a fierce lawgiver looks like, not the fossil of a translator's word-choice. Every major English version corrects the reading to 'shone' or 'radiant'; the horns survive only in stone. → first discussed at Exod 34:29