Literally 'said once' in Greek, a hapax legomenon is a word or expression that appears only once in the entire OT or NT. Properly, the plural of a hapax legomenon is hapax legomena. Nowadays, however, it is conventional to speak of 'hapaxes.'
There are about 400 'true' in the OT (i.e., based on the roots) but swells to about 1400 when considered on the basis of their forms. NT boasts 686.
Hapax legomenon presents the peculiar difficulty of providing us with insufficient contexts to ascertain its meaning. To solve the problem somewhat, resort is often made to cognate languages. Hapaxes, therefore, play a very important role in comparative linguistics. Some scholars think that hapaxes also open the path to dating the document, though the method is fraud with difficulties. F. E. Greenspahn makes this additional observation about the importance of hapaxes:
It is well known that the Hebrew Bible represents only a fraction of the literature produced in ancient Israel. From a linguistic perspective this implies that we have available only a small sample of the ancient Hebrew language. Many words and phenomena which are rare in the extant corpus may have been widespread in antiquity while there were no doubt others in use which are simply unknown to modern scholarship. This was recognized already by medieval grammarians . . . More recently, Theodor Noldeke has noted that the Bible's "numerous [hapax legomena] are a sufficient proof that many more words existed than appear in the Old Testament, the writer of which never had occasion to use them". This perspective entails several assertions. The first is that there "exists an inordinately large sector of the BH vocabulary made up of words which occur a single time only in the OT writings". The rareness of these words is then ascribed to an accident of history, namely their limited number of occurrences in texts which survived because they were included in the biblical canon. From this it is suggested that although these words may not have been rare in antiquity, their limited attestation in extant texts makes them particularly obscure for us. (p8.)
Resources:
Mark Barnes, "List of New Testament Hapax Legomena," Logos.com. The full list of hapaxes is available as a Word document for download. html N
F. E. Greenspahn, "The Number and Distribution of Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew," Vetus Testamentum 30.1 (1980):8-19. Available through JSTOR.
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