The two uses of the root may not even be related all languages have homonyms, and ע.ק.ד appears to be such a case in ancient Hebrew. In this story, Jacob and Laban negotiate which type of sheep goes to Laban and which to Jacob, some of which are עֲקֻדִּים נְקֻדִּים וּבְרֻדִּים, “ brindled, spotted, and speckled.” Thus, we see the same root, but with a totally different meaning. Technically, וַיַּעֲקֹד is not a strict or absolute hapax legomenon, that is, a word from a root that appears only once in a given corpus, in this case the Bible, since the same root occurs 7x in the story of Jacob and Laban in Genesis 30‒31. The root ע.ק.ד ( ʿ.q.d) with the meaning “bind” appears only here in the Hebrew Bible. Gen 22:9 And they came to the place which God had told him, and Abraham built an altar there, and he arranged the wood and he bound Isaac his son, and he placed him on the altar, on top of the wood. In Christian tradition, this story is known as “the sacrifice of Isaac,” as Christians are wont to see Isaac’s experience as the prefiguration of Jesus, even if, of course, Isaac was not sacrificed in the biblical story. Genesis 22 narrates the dramatic story of Abraham’s bringing Isaac to Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice him, an act prevented only by the last-minute intervention of an angel/messenger of YHWH.
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