שְׁפוֹת

# שְׁפוֹת (Cheese) The Hebrew word שְׁפוֹת appears only once in the biblical text, making it a hapax legomenon—a term that occurs in just a single passage. Its definition is straightforward: it denotes cheese, a dairy product created through the curdling and processing of milk. This singular occurrence suggests the word was either uncommon in biblical Hebrew or fell out of regular usage by the time the biblical texts were standardized. The extreme rarity of this word's appearance limits our ability to understand its full semantic range or cultural context within ancient Israel. We cannot determine whether it had specialized or technical associations, whether it referred to a particular type or quality of cheese, or how it was distinguished from other potential dairy terms that may have been more commonly used. The single biblical reference provides only the basic meaning but no additional nuance about its usage, cultural significance, or relationship to related terms in the Hebrew vocabulary. This word serves as a reminder that many everyday items in ancient Israelite life—even common foods—might be expressed through vocabulary that is now largely lost or appears only fragmentarily in our surviving biblical records. Without multiple contexts in which the word appears, scholars can identify its meaning but cannot fully reconstruct how it functioned within ancient Hebrew's broader lexical system.

AI synthesis uses only provided lexicon data -- never training knowledge.