One Word, Borrowed From Far Off

Song of songs 4:14 · Rare or unique word · 2026-09-09

נֵ֣רְדְּ וְ כַרְכֹּ֗ם קָנֶה֙ וְ קִנָּמֹ֔ון עִ֖ם כָּל עֲצֵ֣י לְבֹונָ֑ה מֹ֚ר וַ אֲהָלֹ֔ות עִ֖ם כָּל רָאשֵׁ֥י בְשָׂמִֽים

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

The KJV's 'saffron' sits so comfortably in the list of spices that an English reader assumes it's just another garden herb, familiar and local.

The Hebrew word here is karkom (כַּרְכֹּם), and it appears exactly once in the entire Hebrew Bible — this verse, and nowhere else. Hebrew had other, ordinary ways to speak of fragrance and spice, words used again and again throughout Scripture. But the poet reaches instead for karkom, a loanword most scholars trace back through Semitic trade languages to the crocus flower cultivated far beyond Israel's borders. It's not a native word pressed into service; it's an import, kept in its foreign clothing.

A hapax legomenon this deliberate is a choice, not an accident. The garden the lover describes in Song of Songs 4 is already extravagant — nard, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, aloes — but karkom pushes the extravagance one step further by refusing to sound native. It signals that this garden's riches exceed what the local vocabulary can even name. The beloved is not merely lovely by the standard measures; she requires borrowed words, words fetched from beyond, to be described at all.

There is something of the character of God in a love that will not be contained by the vocabulary already at hand. Scripture again and again reaches past its own familiar words to say that grace, glory, and beauty overflow the categories we keep ready for them — new wine, new wineskins, a name above every name. If a single earthly garden required the poet to import a word from another tongue, how much more does the beauty of the God who made that garden strain every language we possess? Worship begins exactly where our vocabulary runs out and wonder must borrow new words to keep speaking.

Today

Name one thing about God's goodness today for which your ordinary words feel too small — and sit with that inadequacy as praise, rather than trying to shrink it down to fit.