Although extremely detailed and impressive beyond compare, as all of Michelangelo’s works were, the statue appears to simply be Moses seated with a serious assertiveness. The crucial part of the statue comes from two subtle details included on Moses’s head. The detail that Michelangelo included was a pair of horns, and it’s these horns that have been the cause of much debate over the statue and how Moses is depicted. The inclusion of horns comes from a description of Moses’ face in the Latin Vulgate translation of a passage in Exodus where Moses returns to the people after his second meeting with God in which he receives the Ten Commandments. The word used to describe the face of Moses was the Hebrew word “???”. Unfortunately this word can be read as either horn or glow, depending on how the word is dotted. It’s possible that the original translation was right, but I like to believe that after an encountering with God over the Ten Commandments, Moses was glowing, not wearing horns. Regrettably this mistranslation didn’t only lead to the inspiration behind one of Michelangelo’s best statues, but also lead to many centuries of “horned Jew” illustrations.