The Philistine ark

Gary Rendsburg posts about ἅπαξ in Hebrew. The Greek word means "once" and is usually applied to once-spoken words. Like, in the Biblical Noah story, to גֹפֶר-wood.

I never had clue-one about what "gopherwood" meant. I figured you needed a nine-iron for those blighters. Maybe bronze . . .

For Rendsburg, the Torah would do what modern poets and rhetoricians do, whenever we're looking for some wordplay: reach for a thesaurus. In this case, the Genesis 6:14 context (vv. 9-22 is Priestly) demands a ship worthy of the highest seas in time and space. For Canaanites, and Torah is in a Canaanite language, these were assembled from conifers, like pine and (mostly) cedar. But at a pinch Canaan was aware also of cypress and oh lookie גֹפֶר looks a lot like kuprissos whence we Latins get that name.

Torah mostly already had a word for cypress. It was בְּרוֹשׁ. Also I had the impression the Flood story was at base an Iraqi one with a coracle as wouldn't need Mediterranean wood. The Priest, it seems, was Western.

So here, P was using perhaps a loanword. Of interest is that, for Greeks, kuprissos is also a loan: the word is not Indoeuropean, obviously, but more-exactly has that -issos suffix noted of many non-Greek words in the lexicon. Smells like Knossos, or Parnassos, or freakin' Tarhuntassa.

That KPR root will recur in the Classical names for Cyprus (originally Alasiya) and for Copper (originally Khalkos). Copper and cypress will both be found on Cyprus but I do not think exclusively so.

I'm thinking that here, P took a word from the Philistines.

P inherited a legend but, for whatever reason, wanted to relocate it to the west, and to make it bigger, which meant using the finest wood. That finest wood - in P's day - was imported. The closest ports were on the Gaza-Ashkelon coast. The Philistines, in turn, might not have been on the best terms with Egypt and their Lebanese cedar-suppliers. They had, instead, Cyprus: their shipwrights worked with cypress.