A Name Named Once

Luke 3:28 · Rare or unique word · 2026-07-28

τοῦ Μελχὶ τοῦ Ἀδδὶ τοῦ Κωσὰμ τοῦ Ἐλμαδὰμ τοῦ Ἢρ

Which was the son of Melchi, which was the son of Addi, which was the son of Cosam, which was the son of Elmodam, which was the son of Er,

The English reader sails past this whole verse as filler — a rope-bridge of names between Zerubbabel and David, none of them memorable, all of them equally unimportant.

Among these names, Kosam (Κωσάμ) appears nowhere else in the entire New Testament — not before this verse, not after it. It occurs exactly once in the whole corpus. Unlike Melchi or Er, which surface elsewhere in the genealogy or in other Jewish records, Kosam is a hapax legomenon: a word — here, a man's name — that Scripture mentions a single time and never returns to. Luke had access to some source, likely a family record or temple genealogy, that preserved this man's name though nothing else about him survived into memory. He is not called anyone's father who did anything, not linked to a single deed, prophecy, or story. He simply held a place in the chain: son of Elmadam, father of Addi.

The uniqueness of the word mirrors the unrepeatable uniqueness of the man. Kosam lived once. He is named once. He mattered enough to be preserved by name, in a genealogy leading to the Messiah, though nothing else about him was thought worth keeping. That is not an editorial accident — it is the shape of most human lives, including yours.

This is what stuns me: God's redemptive lineage runs directly through a man about whom we know absolutely nothing except that he existed and was someone's son and someone's father. He did not need Kosam to be famous. He needed him faithful enough to exist, to marry, to raise a son, to occupy his one small link in a chain stretching toward Christ. If the God who numbers the hairs on your head also numbers Kosam worth naming once, then no obscure life is wasted in his accounting. Every unrecorded faithfulness is recorded in the ledger that matters.

Today

Name, in prayer, one person in your own family line whose name you barely know or half-remember — a great-grandparent, an ancestor — and thank God specifically for their unrecorded faithfulness that led, in some hidden way, to you.