תָּלָא

# The Hebrew Word for Hanging: תָּלָא (talá) The Hebrew verb תָּלָא (talá) carries the straightforward meaning "to hang" and appears only three times in the biblical text. This rarity makes it a specialized term rather than a common everyday word, suggesting its use was reserved for specific contexts where this particular action needed to be described. With only three occurrences across the entire Hebrew Bible, תָּלָא represents a narrow semantic field—it denotes the action of suspending something or someone. The limited frequency of this verb indicates that biblical Hebrew writers had other options for expressing related concepts, or that the specific notion of hanging was not a prominent concern in the texts that survived. The word's existence, however small its footprint, demonstrates that ancient Hebrew speakers recognized hanging as a distinct action worth naming with its own dedicated verb form. For readers encountering this word in biblical study, its rarity actually aids recognition: whenever תָּלָא appears, it signals a deliberate choice by the author to emphasize the action of hanging specifically. This concentration of meaning, though the word is sparse, gives it particular weight when it does occur in the text.

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