The Paradox of the Transmission of Sacred Texts

We’re still months away from the autumn Holy Days, but Leo Staschover is already thinking of them. He writes:

Here is a language question that no rabbi or cantor I’ve put it to has been able to answer. Why, after the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, do we say [using the masculine form of the Hebrew verb arav, to be pleasing] areshet s’fateynu ye’erav lefanekha [“May the areshet of our lips be pleasing to You”] rather than te’erav [the feminine form]? Isn’t areshet feminine?

Indeed it is. But before we discuss its grammatical gender, something needs to be said about its meaning. Areshet is a biblical word found a single time in all of Scripture, in the book of Psalms—which makes it, using the traditional Greek term for such singularities, a hapax legomenon, a “said only once.” Hapax legomena are often textually problematic because their meaning can be difficult to pin down, especially when we can’t relate them to other words.