Words That Occur in the Bible Only Once—How Hard Are They to Translate?

For over a thousand years, students of the Hebrew Bible have been intrigued by the fact that some words in the text occur only once. Medieval Jewish manuscripts mark these unique forms with the Hebrew letter lamed, an abbreviation for the Aramaic word layt, which means “there is no other.” The Masoretes, medieval scholars who sought to preserve and fix the text in its authentic form, made lists of such words, presumably for the benefit of scribes who might otherwise have thought the words wrong just because they were unique. Medieval Jewish interpreters of the Bible described words for […]