פּוּקָה

# Pukah (H6330): A Hapax Legomenon in Biblical Hebrew The Hebrew word *pukah* appears only once in the biblical text, making it what scholars call a "hapax legomenon"—a word that occurs a single time in a corpus. Its definition as "staggering" suggests a physical or mental state of instability, though the solitary occurrence limits our ability to determine its precise shade of meaning or whether it describes literal movement, emotional disturbance, or a metaphorical condition. Because *pukah* appears only once in the Bible, we cannot trace how it was used across different contexts or determine whether its meaning remained consistent or varied. This single appearance makes it impossible to establish the word's full semantic range or to identify whether it was a common term that fell out of use or a rare, specialized vocabulary choice by one biblical author. Without additional occurrences, comparative usage, or clear contextual signals, the word remains largely isolated in the historical record. The scarcity of *pukah* underscores a broader challenge in biblical lexicography: words that appear infrequently resist definitive analysis. Scholars must rely on etymology, cognate languages, and contextual clues from the single passage where it occurs, but these methods necessarily involve some degree of inference rather than certainty based on biblical usage patterns.