Master of Amiens (Maître du Amiens)
Moses receiving the Law and Synagogue, from La Somme le Roi, 1311, Illuminated manuscript on parchment, 215 x 150 mm, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris; Ms-6329 réserve, fol. 7v, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Horns, Hare, and Synagogue
Commentary by Alison Gray
This striking illustration of Moses receiving the Law is set above a depiction of the golden calf episode, collapsing the key narrative moments of Exodus 32–34. It accompanies short, pithy teachings on the Ten Commandments in some editions of La Somme le Roi, a book on Virtues and Vices, commissioned by King Philip III of France towards the end of the thirteenth century.
The author and compiler, Dominican Brother Laurent d’Orléans, was the royal confessor and tutor to the king’s children. Written in the vernacular, it was intended to be a resource to help parish priests to instruct the laity in Christian doctrine. Its ninety extant manuscripts and translation into six different languages are a testament to the manual’s popularity and circulation across Europe.
When Moses receives the commandments for a second time, his face shines with divine glory and he has to wear a veil to avoid dazzling the people. Moses’s horns are a quirk of ancient translation. A linguistic, if not conceptual, connection between the Hebrew verb qāran (‘shone’) and the noun qeren (‘horn’) led to Jerome describing Moses’s face as cornuta ‘horned’ in the Latin Vulgate. This interpretation made its way into artistic depictions of Moses in the eleventh century, alongside depictions of Moses’s face shining with rays of light.
On the right, the female symbol of Synagoga (synagogue), often—and unfortunately—contrasted with Ecclesia (church), stands with her crooked staff in one hand and the Law in the other. She is seen as forlorn and blind to the ‘truth’, communicating the antisemitic supersessionist belief that the rightful inheritors of the covenant are now those in the embrace of the Church.
At the centre of this illustration is Mount Sinai with a fiery outline that recalls the burning bush from Moses’s first encounter with God in Exodus 3. The appearance of the hare, often used to symbolize the way that individual Christians or the collective Church hide themselves in Christ the rock, might also be explained by Jerome’s description of Moses as ‘the Lord’s hare’ in his commentary on Exodus 33:22–23.
