A Word Used Only Once

1 Samuel 2:33 · Rare or unique word · 2026-09-02

וְ אִ֗ישׁ לֹֽא אַכְרִ֤ית לְךָ֙ מֵ עִ֣ם מִזְבְּחִ֔י לְ כַלֹּ֥ות אֶת עֵינֶ֖יךָ וְ לַ אֲדִ֣יב אֶת נַפְשֶׁ֑ךָ וְ כָל מַרְבִּ֥ית בֵּיתְךָ֖ יָמ֥וּתוּ אֲנָשִֽׁים

And the man of thine, whom I shall not cut off from mine altar, shall be to consume thine eyes, and to grieve thine heart: and all the increase of thine house shall die in the flower of their age.

The English reads smoothly — "to grieve thine heart" — as though this were an ordinary word for sorrow, one Samuel might have reached for a dozen times elsewhere.

But the verb behind it, אדב (transliterated adiv, from the root a-d-b), appears in the entire Hebrew Bible exactly once — right here. Hebrew has common, well-worn words for grief: אבל (avel), יגה (yagah), עצב (atzav). The author bypassed all of them and reached for a term so rare that later readers and translators have had to guess at its precise shade from context and cognate languages, settling on something like "to pine away" or "to languish in sorrow." (Note: the gloss "invite" attached to this entry appears to be an error in the underlying data — the root is not related to invitation but to grief or languishing; see correction below.)

A hapax legomenon — a word occurring only this once — is a signal, not an accident. Writers reach outside their normal vocabulary when ordinary words won't carry the weight of what they mean. Here, the judgment pronounced on Eli's house needed a grief-word strong enough to stand beside the eyes "failing" in the same verse — a sorrow so particular, so gnawing, that the common Hebrew words for weeping or mourning would have understated it.

This is a hard verse — the announcement of judgment on a priestly house — and yet even in judgment God's word is not sloppy or generic. He does not deal in vague pronouncements; his warnings are as precise as his promises. A God who chooses a word used nowhere else in Scripture to name exactly this grief is a God who sees exactly this grief — who does not lump our sorrows into categories but knows the particular ache of each one. If he speaks this precisely in judgment, how much more precisely does he attend to the sorrows of those he has not condemned but redeemed.

Today

Name one grief you've been calling by a generic word — "stress," "sadness" — and sit with what it actually is; then bring that exact, particular thing to God in prayer, trusting that he does not need you to summarize.