Hapax Legomena: Ten Biblical Examples

For general orientation, see Maya Nandakumar, “How Do You Decode a Hapax? (Also, What’s a Hapax?),” Atlas Obscura, September 7, 2017. For more specific details, see Harold R. (Chaim) Cohen, Biblical Hapax Legomena in the Light of Akkadian and Ugaritic, SBL Dissertation Series 37 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), 1.

The standard edition remains Nehemia Allony, כתאב אלסבעין לפט׳ה לרב סעדיה גאון, Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1958), Hebrew section, pp. 1‒48. For an important article in English, with general introduction to Kitab al-Sabʿin Lafẓah, including the most recent folio to be identified, see Aron Dotan, “A New Fragment of Saadiah’s Sabʿīn Lafẓah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80 (1989): 1‒14. Other medieval Hebrew grammarians (both Rabbanite and Karaite) followed with additional treatises devoted to rare and unique words in the Bible. For a survey, see Cohen, Hapax Legomena, 2‒4.

See Frederick E. Greenspahn, Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew: A Study of the Phenomenon and Its Treatment since Antiquity with Special Reference to Verbal Forms, SBL Dissertation Series 74 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 4 n. 11, with numerous examples. These expressions even reached the translators of the King James Version (1611)—all of whom were accomplished Hebraists (or at least those who worked on the Old Testament)—through their reading of Jewish commentators such as Rashi and David Qimḥi.

As the editors/translators state in the Preface: “There be many words in the Scriptures, which be never found there but once, (having neither brother nor neighbour, as the Hebrewes speake) so that we cannot be holpen by conference of places.” For the full Preface, see “1611 King James Bible Introduction,” King James Bible Online.

Abraham S. Yahuda, “Hapax Legomena im Alten Testament,” Jewish Quarterly Review 15 (1903): 698‒714.

Allyson Gonzalez, “Abraham S. Yahuda (1877–1951) and the Politics of Modern Jewish Scholarship,” Jewish Quarterly Review 109 (2019): 406–433. See also Hellen Mardaga, “Hapax Legomena: A Neglected Field in Biblical Studies,” Currents in Biblical Research 10 (2012): 264‒274; and my own work, e.g., Gary A. Rendsburg, “Talpiyyôt (Song 4:4),” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 20 (1994): 13‒19; and Gary A. Rendsburg and Ian Young, “שֶׁמֶן תּוּרַק šεmεn turaq (Song 1:3),” in Le-maʿan Ziony: Essays in Honor of Ziony Zevit, ed. Gary A. Rendsburg and Frederick E. Greenspahn (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 383‒396.

Greenspahn, Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew. See also my review, “Greenspahn’s Hapax Legomena,” Jewish Quarterly Review 75 (1985), 410‒412. Using a chi-square statistical analysis, Greenspahn demonstrated that if the corpus were doubled in size, we would find not fewer hapax legomena, but rather more of them! Which is to say, some of the words may appear a second time, and thus would no longer qualify as hapax, but a corpus twice as large would create a whole new wave of hapax legomena.

The former setting is suggested by, e.g., Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 114. The latter setting derives from my own imagination.

The two words oral and aural, of course, are hard to differentiate in spoken English. In fact, the Oxford English Dictonary (OED), provides virtually identical phonetic transcriptions: British /ˈɔːrəl/, /ˈɔːrl̩/; U.S. /ˈɔr(ə)l/ ~ British /ˈɔːrəl/, /ˈɔːrl̩/; U.S. /ˈɔrəl/.

For additional examples beyond those discussed here, see my articles cited above, n. 6, and my recent book: Gary A. Rendsburg, How the Bible Is Written (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2019). Note that in English literature, alliteration typically refers to the initial sounds of words; whereas in Hebrew literature, given the root structure of the language, alliteration is not limited to the initial sounds, but rather cuts across the entire word. For another recent study, see Arthur Keefer, “Sound Patterns as Motivation for Rare Words in Proverbs 1‒9,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 43 (2017): 35‒49.

While my standard practice is not to emend the Masoretic Text, in this case, the prevailing evidence argues for repointing קִנִּים qinnim, “nests” to קָנִים qanim, “reeds.” Prime evidence is forthcoming from the parallel flood narrative present in Gilgamesh Epic, Tablet XI, in which Utnapishtim constructs his boat from wood, reeds, and pitch. This technique of boat construction continues in the Middle East down to the present day.

We need not decide whether the Greek form or the Hebrew form is primary, for the word may be a Kulturwort or Wanderwort, which spread across the eastern Mediterranean through maritime trade. That said, note that Hebrew גּפֶֹר fits into a known Hebrew morphological form, whereas the form of Greek κυπάρισσος reveals a non-Greek origin. See Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1.803‒804.

See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 196, 212–213.

I have translated the noun as “pitch-cover” to capture the role of this noun following the verb וְכָפַרְתָּ, “and you shall cover,” itself a unique usage in the Bible.

Significantly, the Hebrew noun is cognate with the Akkadian noun kupru, “pitch,” which occurs in the Babylonian flood story preserved in Gilgamesh Epic, Tablet XI, line 55.

In phonetics, velar refers to a sound that is pronounced with the back of the tongue. A voiced sound is one that engages the vocal cords.

The expression in the verse is‎ הַרְחֵק כִּמְטַחֲוֵי קֶשֶׁת , lit., “at a distance like the shooters of a bow,” which yields an English equivalency “at a distance of a bowshot.”

I would analyze the verb as denominative from the noun ‎צְפִיר, “he-goat” (known for its great leaping ability, while both ascending and descending), used commonly in Aramaic (see, e.g., Ezra 6:17) and as an Aramaism in Late Biblical Hebrew (see, e.g., Daniel 8:5, 8, 21).

My translation uses common English words to render common Hebrew words, but less common English words to render atypical Hebrew words, as here, with my choice of “cadre.”

My translation recognizes the etymological connection of כְּלוּלֹת- kəlulot-, typically rendered “espousal” or the like, to the common noun כַּלָּה kalla, “bride,” and at the same time exploits its unfamiliar nature, hence my use of “bridal.” The word is relegated to an adjective nowadays, but was used as a noun in centuries past, for example, by Shakespeare in Othello (1622), “Such obseruances as fits the Bridall” (Act III, Scene 4), and by Alfred Lord Tennyson in Idylls of the King, “Enid” (1859): “I . . . will clothe her for her bridals like the sun.”

Alfred Guillaume, “The Meaning of תולל in Psalm 137:3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 75 (1956): 143–144.

T. M. Johnstone, Jibbāli Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 270.

To use the felicitous phrase coined by Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), even if I diverge somewhat from the author’s original meaning of the expression.

Including, most famously, Achilles of the Acheans and Hector of the Trojans.

The author would like to express his gratitude to Lanier Theological Library and Learning Centre, located at Yarnton Manor (Oxfordshire), for affording him accommodation and Visiting Scholar status during Summer 2023. As all who have stayed at Yarnton Manor can attest, the pleasant surrounds of this special place are most conducive to ongoing research, including into the arcane subject of Hebrew hapax legomena.