THE WILD OX — the aurochs, the huge wild cattle of the ancient Near East, hunted by Assyrian kings and extinct since the seventeenth century. ⭐ This is the animal behind the KING JAMES UNICORN. The Greek Bible rendered it monokerōs, one-horn; the Vulgate followed; and the chain surfaces as the KJV’s ‘unicorn’ at Numbers 23:22, Geneva’s the same, and the Douay-Rheims’ ‘the rhinoceros’ straight off the Latin. ⚠ The Spanish shelf shows the same fossil being unwound at a different date: the RV 1909 reads «unicornio» and its own 1960 revision replaces it with «búfalo». The ASV had printed ‘wild-ox’ as early as 1901. In the Torah the animal appears three times, all in poetry — Numbers 23:22, 24:8 and Deuteronomy 33:17 — and two of the three are Balaam’s. ⚠ The word paired with it at 23:22, to’afot, is itself uncertain: either HORNS or lofty STRENGTH, and the versions divide on that too. ⭐ Numbers 24:8 repeats the line almost exactly one chapter later, which is the strongest internal evidence for how to read it: whatever to'afot means, Balaam said it twice about the same people. → first discussed at Num 23:22