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How many words occur only once in the Hebrew Bible?
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Answer: Between 300 and 400
Within the Hebrew Bible a significant number of words occur only once. Identified in medieval Jewish manuscripts as layt (Aramaic for “there is no other”) and termed hapax legomena (Greek for “once said”) by scholars, these words have long intrigued students of the Bible, both for their uniqueness and their sometimes uncertain meanings. Indeed, since the meanings and nuances of words are typically derived from the contexts in which they are used, hapax legomena are exceptional in that their meaning must be inferred from a single occurrence.
As Biblical scholar Frederick Greenspahn has pointed out, however, determining the meaning of such words is not as troublesome as it first appears. In some cases, the context in which the word occurs provides sufficient information to determine its meaning. The verb nbḫ, for example, occurs only in Isaiah 56:10: “They are all dumb dogs that cannot nbḫ.” The word’s context, together with similar words known from Ugaritic and Akkadian, suggests nbḫ should be translated as “bark.” Many of these unique words also have cognates in languages that are much better known, such as rabbinic Hebrew and medieval Arabic, which has traditionally made their translation relatively straightforward.
Perhaps more problematic is determining exactly how many words truly occur in the Bible only once. Many such words are closely related to more common words, for example, harisah (Amos 9:11), a rare word meaning “ruin” derived from the well-attested verb haras (“to break, tear down”). Scholars refer to these as non-absolute hapax legomena, of which there are more than 1,200 in the Bible. And even absolute hapax legomena (those with no connection to known words) cannot easily be counted, as some of these rare words do, in fact, appear multiple times, but either within an isolated passage (e.g., ’amtaḫat, “sack,” repeated 14 times in Genesis 42–44 but nowhere else) or among identical passages repeated in different books of the Bible (e.g., shenhabbim, “ivory,” used in both 1 Kings 10:22 and 2 Chronicles 9:21 in describing the wealth of Solomon). Thus, while the most restrictive definitions give around 300 absolute hapax legomena in the Hebrew Bible, others count closer to 400.
How many words occur only once in the Hebrew Bible?
056 Answer: Between 300 and 400
