THE MYSTERY OF THE HORNY CUCKOLDS: This week in the Forward, a reader asks Philologos if Yiddish has a word for "cuckold." The only one Philologos can come up with is the Hebrew phrase ba'al-qarnaim, which in Hebrew means something like an "owner of two horns."

Ba'al-karnayim first occurs in medieval Hebrew � specifically, in the Mah.barot Emanuel, a large and sometimes bawdy work of poetry and rhymed prose by the late 13th-and-early-14th-century Italian Jewish writer Emmanuel of Rome. (References to cuckolded husbands as having or growing horns occur in Hebrew sources even earlier, one of them being a letter written in the 12th century by Maimonides.) Emmanuel was translating the Italian cornuto, "horned," which means cuckold in Italian and has close equivalents in other European languages ...

The first statement is not strictly correct: the phrase ba'al-qarnaim first appears in the Hebrew Bible in an apocalyptic prophecy in Daniel 8. In v. 20 the phrase is applied to a ram which represents the Medo-Persian empire (cf. v. 3), which is to be destroyed by the "he-goat from the west," which represents Alexander the Great. In the Qur'an (Surah 18:84-99) the Arabic phrase dhul-qarnayn seems to come from the Danielic passage, albeit with a little confusion, since it is taken by commentators to refer to Alexander the Great.

What does this have to do with cuckolding? Beats me. The meaning "cuckold" appears in Hebrew as well according to Alcalay's dictionary, but Jastrow lists the phrase only with the meaning a possessor of power, so perhaps the cuckolding sense is medieval or later rather than rabbinic. Philologos adds the following:

Just why horns have been connected so widely with cuckolds is an interesting question. The explanation would seem to lie in the association of horns with male sexuality, no doubt because they accompany sexual maturity in many ruminants, which use their horns and antlers as dueling weapons during the rutting season. (This is why, too, in parts of Asia, the ground horns of various animals mixed into food or drink are considered a powerful aphrodisiac.) Perhaps cuckolds have symbolic horns because they are "horny" � i.e., itching with sexual energy that has no outlet, since as their wives are off consorting with other males; perhaps their horns are not their own but symbolically those of the rivals who have bested them, so that "to give someone horns" originally meant to take away someone's wife in sexual combat.

All that being reasonably plausible, maybe speakers of Hebrew drew on this archetypal image and applied it to the biblical phrase ba'al-qarnaim simply because it was ready to hand and because in the Bible the bearer comes to no good (the horns are smashed by the he-goat from the west). Language does some funny things and that's just a guess at what might have happened. Anyone have any better ideas?