Logos Pro Summer Training: One-Hit Wonders in the Bible

Each week this summer the Logos Pros will teach you how to master the tools and resources of Logos Bible Software. You’ll get some pointers and some study questions. 

Shakespeare used around 17,000 different words to write his plays; some of them he used only once, such as imbecility. Words that appear just one time in a given text are called hapax legomena. The New Testament contains quite a number of these. (A Logos user made a full list here.)

Biblical hapax legomena present a unique challenge to translators, because we discover what words mean by observing how they’re used. When these rare words occur, translators are forced to search usage outside of the Bible to discover their meaning.

In this week’s video, we take a look at a famous hapax legomenon from Ephesians.

Recommended Resources

• Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament
• Liddell-Scott-Jones
• Abbott-Smith’s Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament 

Study Questions

• Τελευτή (teleute) is a hapax legomenon appearing in Matthew 2:15. If you did not have access to a Greek-English lexicon, what other New Testament words might help you understand this one?
• Συνδρομή (syndrome) is a hapax legomenon appearing in Acts 21:30. What pitfall will English speakers have to avoid in discovering the meaning of this word?