דָּגַר

# דָּגַר (dagar): A Rare Hebrew Verb for Gathering The Hebrew verb דָּגַר (dagar) appears only twice in the biblical text, making it one of the rarest verbs in the Hebrew Bible. Its core meaning is "to gather," indicating the action of collecting or assembling items or people together. Despite its simplicity of definition, the extreme scarcity of this word in the biblical record means it occupies a marginal position in Hebrew vocabulary. The limited attestation of dagar—just two occurrences—prevents us from fully understanding its range of usage or any specialized contexts in which it might have been preferred over more common gathering verbs. We cannot determine whether it had a particular nuance that distinguished it from synonyms, whether it was already archaic when the biblical texts were composed, or whether its rarity reflects the specific literary contexts in which it happened to appear. The data simply does not provide sufficient examples to establish such distinctions. For readers of the Hebrew Bible, dagar represents the kind of vocabulary item that would have been instantly recognizable to ancient speakers but remains somewhat opaque to modern interpreters. Its significance lies primarily in its rarity itself—a reminder that the biblical text preserves Hebrew words across a wide spectrum of frequency, from the commonplace to the exceptional.