תְּשׁוּרָה

# The Hebrew Word Tešūrāh (תְּשׁוּרָה) The Hebrew word *tešūrāh* appears only once in the biblical text, making it one of the rarest terms in the Hebrew Bible. Its short definition translates it as "present," suggesting a gift or offering of some kind. The single occurrence limits our ability to establish broader patterns of usage or semantic range, as a word's full meaning is typically clarified through multiple contexts and applications. Because *tešūrāh* occurs only once in the biblical corpus, interpreters must rely entirely on that singular instance to understand how the ancient Hebrew speakers employed it. This rarity raises questions about whether it was a specialized term, a poetic or archaic expression, or simply a word that appeared infrequently in the texts that have survived to modern times. Without comparative usage across different biblical passages, the precise nuance of "present" in this context—whether it means a gift, tribute, or offering—cannot be definitively established from lexical evidence alone. The significance of *tešūrāh* lies mainly in its status as a linguistic hapax legomenon (a word occurring only once). Such rare terms are valuable to biblical scholars because they remind us of the limits of our knowledge about ancient Hebrew vocabulary and the incompleteness of our textual record. The word's existence demonstrates that biblical