An exposition with practical observations continued upon the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second,…

But though I shall not deliver any opinion of my own to the contrary, yet I suppose it will not be unpleasing to the ingenuous and learned Reader, if before I proceed with my own meditations, upon what is said in this Chapter, about this creature, I here insert the discourse and opinion of that learned Physician, and Divine Critic, Doctor Arnoldus Bootius, in the third Book of his Sacred Animadversions upon the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament, and the first Chapter of that Book: The substance of which I have gathered, and in most places translated word for word, as followeth

But though I shall not deliver any opinion of my own to the contrary, yet I suppose it will not be unpleasing to the ingenuous and learned Reader, if before I proceed with my own meditations, upon what is said in this Chapter, about this creature, I here insert the discourse and opinion of that learned Physitian, and Divine Critick, Doctor Arnoldus Bootius, in the third Book of his Sacred Animadversions upon the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament, and the first Chapter of that Book: The substance of which I have gathered, and in most places translated word for word, as followeth

That the word Reem (saith he) is the name of some certain Animal all Writers agree; but what this Animal is, is not agreed. Hierome renders it sometimes a Rhinoceros, sometimes an Unicorn; and so do some others in translating the Bible. Pagnine translates it only once a Rhinoceros, in all other places where it occurs, an Unicorn; yet in his Dictionary he seems to incline, that the word signifieth a Rhinoceros, rather ⟨p. 349⟩than an Unicorn. But the Greeks generally are more constant in rendering it an Unicorn, than a Rhinoceros; and in this almost all interpreters, both they who translate the Scriptures into the Latin tongue, and they who translate them into their Mother tongue, follow them, and do so too; the Rabbins also go the same way. And therefore one of them writing upon those words of Moses concerning Joseph (Deut. 33.17.) His horns are like the horns of (Reem) an Unicorn (which seems to oppose this opinion which makes Reem to be the Unicorn, a beast of one horn; he I say, to avoid this difficulty) saith that place is to be understood by an Enallage or change of the number, the word Reem Unicorn, being put for Reemim, Unicorns; with which answer several others wipe of that objection. Nor doth it a little help this interpretation that most of those marks, which the Scripture takes notice of in that beast called Reem, namely, his extreme fierceness, great strength, and the extraordinary magnitude of his horn, are all ascribed by Authors to the Unicorn. Yet to me this interpretation seems the less probable, because Unicorns are found only in India, say they, who have written of them. Now it is not likely, that Mses, David, and the Prophets should speak so often of, and take similitudes from, and that God himself should spend so much time in a discourse with Job about a creature unknown in their Countries. And it must needs be, that he was there (and to them) unknown, if no Country nearer than India produced the Unicorn; for the world was not so discovered in those times, by mutual commerce, that living creatures, and things proper to Nations, should be familiarly or much known, in Nations far remote. Of this we have a clear instance in the Elephant, of which famous animal, so useful to man for various services, and so abounding in many parts of Africa and Asia, the Israelites seem to have had little or no knowledge at all;