“The Horns of the Altar” and bulls?

[JairCrawford]

However from my online searching and digging I have yet to find any writings that attempt to connect the bull iconography with the biblical horns of the altar. I’m wondering if any of you have come across resources that have, or if any of you have any insights on the topic?

I have come upon some explanations by the biblical schoolar Francesca Stavrakopoulou. Here is some of what she says:

The bull was an enduring ancient symbol of an aggressively potent, unrestrained hyper-masculinity. It manifested military might, sexual prowess and divine generative power. These were the qualities of the masculine gods of creation, who harnessed the wildness of chaos to impose order upon the cosmos and bring fecundity into the world. It is an ancient and sophisticated constellation of religious ideas, offering an image of a raw, animalized sexual virility that is celebrated in a Sumerian myth dated to about 2000 BCE. [...] god Enki – himself ‘engendered by a [divine] bull, begotten by a wild bull’ – fertilizes the world by digging irrigation ditches with his penis and creating the great rivers of Mesopotamia with his semen: [...]
Alongside El at Ugarit, the god Baal used what is described as his ‘tumescent’ penis to mate with a heifer, fathering the wild bull who impregnated the city’s cattle. The Assyrian storm-god Adad was often depicted standing atop a great bull, while various unidentified goddesses across the region are depicted upon a divine bull, commanding its virility – an image seemingly recast and abased in the famous Greek myth of Zeus’ sexual abduction of Europa, whom he carries off across the sea on his back while disguised as a bull. Among these high-status deities, it is no surprise to find that Yahweh, too, was often understood as the divine bull. Bovine language (the Hebrew term abbir) underlies his biblical designation as the ‘Mighty One [abir] of Jacob’ who grants genital fertility to the Israelite tribe of Joseph, and in some biblical texts, Yahweh’s cult statue is said to take the form of a bull or a bull calf.

Like the Sumerian god Enki, Yahweh’s status as a fertile creator god of the highest order is also confirmed in the Bible with a fleeting portrayal of his sexual encounter with the earthly realm. Although the biblical writers (and their later translators) have done their best to sanitize the story by diluting Yahweh’s corporeal sexuality, its erotic features nonetheless suggest that an older myth lurks in the background: the God of the Bible sexually takes the land of Israel as his wife and excites the cosmos into an aroused, mutually reproductive fecundity as he impregnates his bride at a place called Jezreel (‘He Seeds’) – a region famed for its rich agricultural soils: ...

You can read more in her book "God: An Anatomy".

I will have to take a look at that book for sure. That’s what I’m looking for. I’d be very curious to see if the horns are mentioned in any connection to what she’s talking about. Thanks for the reference!