I am looking for a list online of all Hapax Legomena in the Hebrew Bible in text format that I can copy and paste into MS Word for further studies. I need something that's free and is not in a picture format (for example, the list in the old Encyclopedia Judaica article has all the Hebrew words as pictures not as text).
1 Answer
Here are some leads found by skimming the Hebrew versions of relevant articles:
Your original Encyclopedia Judaica article on hapax legomena
The Hebrew Wikipedia article on hapax legomena in the Tanakh
Hebrew Wiktionary category page: unique words in the Bible
Hebrew Wikisource category page: unique words in the Bible
Bible Navigation site: list of hapax legomena
Of all these, I suspect the best method (besides a Shebanq query as Keelan suggested above) is to compare the Encyclopedia Judaica article with the Bible Navigation site. Although they're ordered differently — EJ is alphabetical (excluding definite articles) within the books in the Bible, while BN is alphabetic without reference to books — they both include verse references, so you could probably programmatically cross-reference them.
For BN, you would need to be able to read Hebrew book name abbreviations (e.g. בר' = בְּרֵאשִׁית = Genesis) and numerals for chapters (e.g. לא = 31).
Example: The first word in EJ is from Gen 41:43. The same word is listed for the same verse in BN. It is אַבְרֵךְ.
Example: The second word in EJ is from Gen 14:11. This word is found in BN under Gen 43:11 (the correct reference). Uh oh, EJ may have faulty Roman numerals. Guess what: xiiii is obviously an OCR mistake for xliii. You'll have to watch for those.
Example: The third word in EJ is from Gen 6:14. This word is found in BN.
Given that the EJ article claims it's using only the strictest hapaxes, it may well be possible to continue in the above vein, and ignore BN entries that are not in EJ.
Also, the BN one includes markup that might help zero in on the narrowest hapaxes or whatever other info the system encodes. Let's try to decipher some of it...
How about the normal brackets? Example: BN has a word at Deut. 33:25, (דָּבְאֶךָ (דֹּבֶא, also in EJ. This turns out to indeed be a hapax (Strong's), the word in brackets being the proposed root.
How about the square brackets? Example: BN has a word at Job 39:26, [אבר] יַאֲבֶר. This word is not in EJ. Yet it too turns out to be a hapax (Strong's), the word in brackets being the proposed root. So you may need to get some from BN that are not in EJ.
What about a question mark? Example: BN has a word at Job 34:36, אָבִי. This word is in EJ. It has another word at Ezekiel 18:10, אָח. This word is not in EJ. Not clear what the question mark means, but I do note that both of those examples are words that appear to be homographs of very common words. One thing that might differentiate them is that the Job 34:36 one, which appears in EJ, does not make sense as the common word it looks like, whereas the one in Ezekiel 18:10, which does not appear in EJ, does make sense as the common word it looks like. If I were to jump to a conclusion I would suggest that you take these from BN only if they also occur in EJ.
This might be enough for you to get started with the analysis and to write a script extracting what you need. If not, you can leave a comment and I might have some time to keep investigating. It's an interesting task.
P.S. It goes without saying that you can't take the EJ's glosses of these words, or anyone's, with absolute certainty — the natural challenge of hapaxes.
answered Jul 12, 2020 at 14:33
select all objects where [lex focus [word first and last]]on shebanq.ancient-data.org? I haven't tested it, but this should return a list of lexemes that occur only one (have a word which is the first and last in the list, hence the only occurrence) in the Hebrew Bible. You need to create an account to run the query, but then you can download the results as a csv file.select all objects where [lex focus nametype='' [word first and last]]. You then get 2006 words in 1638 verses, still too many according to most counts. It includes, for instance, הרון 'pregnancy' in Gen 3:16, which other lists exclude because the verb הרה 'be pregnant' occurs as well. Shebanq does not have links between these lexemes, so this kind of cases cannot be removed programmatically; you'd have to filter them manually. You can be sure that there are no false negatives, however.