The Esther Word List

Esther is a short book with a strange mouth. One hundred sixty-seven verses, and inside them sit words the rest of the Hebrew Bible never uses — not once, not anywhere.

This page lists all of them.

How the list was made

Not by reading and noticing. By counting.

The text is the Westminster Leningrad Codex as tagged by the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project, which attaches a dictionary entry — a Strong’s number — to every word in the Hebrew Bible. All thirty-nine books were loaded, every word reduced to its dictionary entry, and Esther’s vocabulary subtracted from the vocabulary of the other thirty-eight.

Esther uses 464 distinct dictionary entries. Sixty-five of them survive that subtraction. That is about fourteen percent of the book’s vocabulary appearing nowhere else in the Bible.

Because the comparison is at the level of the dictionary entry, all the inflections of a word count together: a verb in Esther is tested against every form of that verb everywhere else. And because the test is arithmetic rather than impression, it can be re-run by anyone with the same file, and it can be wrong in only one direction — a tagging error, not a lapse of memory.

The twenty-six ordinary words

Not names. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs — the working vocabulary of the book.

Where the last column reads 1, the word occurs exactly once in the entire Hebrew Bible. Fourteen of these twenty-six are that rare. The technical name is a hapax legomenon — “said once.”

Two footnotes on that table. Pur and Purim share one dictionary entry, so the eight occurrences at 3:7 and through chapter 9 are counted together. And ʾobdan at 8:6 and 9:5 is spelled two different ways, each spelling occurring exactly once; the lexicons give it two entry numbers, and both are unique to this book.

The thirty-eight names

The control

A list like this is only worth something if it also says no. Names that feel just as exotic, and fail the test:

• Mordecai — a Mordecai comes up in the return lists at Ezra 2:2 and Nehemiah 7:7.
• Ahasuerus — Ezra 4:6 and Daniel 9:1.
• Shushan — Nehemiah 1:1 and Daniel 8:2.
• Nisan — Nehemiah 2:1. (Adar, Sivan and Tebeth pass; Nisan does not.)
• Tarshish — the one prince of the seven at 1:14 whose name is common elsewhere.

The filter is doing real work. It is not simply flagging everything that sounds Persian.

What the shape of the list says

Four in every ten of the ordinary words are spent on one party. Eleven of the twenty-six unique words fall in chapter one, and six of those eleven are inside verse six alone — the hangings and the pavement. The author burns a quarter of the book’s rare vocabulary describing a single room.

That is a choice, not an accident. He is not naming colours; he is naming things his readers have no word for. The strangeness of the vocabulary is the opulence. A reader in Judah hearing bahaṭ, dar, sōḥeret in one breath is being told, in the only way language can tell it, that this is not a room he has ever stood in.

Then it goes quiet, and comes back at the reversal. The second cluster lands in chapter eight: new words for the royal post-horses, for the mares that bred them, for the robe Mordecai walks out in. The book spends its rare words in exactly two places — the throne at its most foreign, and the Jew at his most exalted.

And then the last one. Esther 8:17:

And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.

Became Jews is one Hebrew word — מִתְיַהֲדִים, mityahădîm — and it exists nowhere else in the Bible. Not in Genesis, not in the Law, not in the Prophets. It is built out of the name Yehudi, “Jew,” bent into the reflexive: they made themselves Jews.

Hebrew had no verb for a Gentile crossing over into Israel. The language had words for the resident alien, the sojourner, the stranger within the gates — words for a foreigner who stays a foreigner. It had no word for one who stops being one. This book needed it and coined it, and the word is used once, in the sentence where the nations come in.

Notes and caveats

• Scope is the Hebrew Old Testament. Esther has no Greek.
• The Aramaic sections of Ezra and Daniel carry their own dictionary entries, so three words on this list have Aramaic cousins elsewhere: Adar (Aramaic at Ezra 6:15), nēzeq, “damage” (Aramaic at Daniel 6:2), and by the same rule dāt, “law” — the signature word of Esther — is not on this list, because Hebrew dāt also appears in Deuteronomy, Ezra and Daniel.
• One extra candidate arrives only through a scribal variant. At 8:13 the written text has עתודים where the reading tradition has עֲתִידִים, “ready.” That is a spelling, not a word, so it is not counted among the sixty-five.
• The count depends on the tagging, not on the text. Where lexicons split one word into two entries, or merge two into one, the number moves by one or two. Sixty-five is the figure this particular tagging yields, and the file that yields it is linked above.