קַדְמַי

# Qadmai: The Hebrew Word for "First" The Hebrew word *qadmai* (Strong's H6933) denotes "first" and appears only three times in the biblical text. This rarity suggests it functioned as a specialized or emphatic term rather than the standard way Hebrew speakers typically expressed priority or primacy. The limited occurrences indicate the biblical authors selected this particular word deliberately when they needed to communicate the concept of firstness. The word's meaning—straightforwardly "first"—would have conveyed temporal or sequential priority in the contexts where it appeared. With just three biblical instances, however, we cannot determine from the lexical data alone whether it carried specific theological weight, whether it was regional or archaic, or whether it appeared predominantly in certain genres of biblical literature. The data provided does not reveal these contextual patterns. What we can establish with certainty is that *qadmai* functioned as a legitimate Hebrew vocabulary option for expressing "first," though it was not the primary or most frequent choice in biblical Hebrew. Understanding why the authors chose this term over alternatives would require examining the actual passages where it appears, information not included in the lexical data here.