Hebrew word · H6422
פַּלְמוֹנִי
lapalmoni
certain
Occurs only here. Standard dictionaries (BDB, HALOT) explain it as a contraction of pəlōnî ʾalmōnî, 'such-and-such a one, so-and-so.' That idiom is used when someone or something is deliberately left unnamed (Ruth 4:1, Boaz to the nearer kinsman; 1 Sam 21:2; 2 Kgs 6:8).
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
a certain one
Another spelling of pe.lo.ni (פְּלֹנִי "someone" H6423)
Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
Occurs only here. Standard dictionaries (BDB, HALOT) explain it as a contraction of pəlōnî ʾalmōnî, 'such-and-such a one, so-and-so.' That idiom is used when someone or something is deliberately left unnamed (Ruth 4:1, Boaz to the nearer kinsman; 1 Sam 21:2; 2 Kgs 6:8).
- Against the English
KJV has 'that certain [saint],' which is right. YLT has 'the wonderful numberer,' which follows an old guess (also in the KJV margin) that the word combines pele' 'wonder' and a root meaning 'to count' (mānāh).
- How it drifted
Because the answer in 8:14 is a number (2,300), later readers took this unusual word as a title, 'Wonderful Numberer' or 'Numberer of Secrets.' Some then made it a name for the divine figure who keeps the timetable of prophecy. The guess is about how the word was built, and it is not supported by Hebrew usage.
- Used elsewhere in the period
The Greek versions just copy the sound of the word (phelmouni), so the translators did not read it as a known title. Jerome's Latin Vulgate has 'to someone, I know not whom' (nescio cui), which captures the 'so-and-so' sense.
Where it appears
Daniel · 1
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Daniel 8:13 לַפַּֽלְמוֹנִ֣י to the certain [one]
Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to him, “How long until the fulfillment of the vision of the daily sacrifice, the rebellion that causes desolation, and the surrender of the sanctuary and of the host to be trampled?”
Here: This word occurs only here in the Bible. It is almost certainly squeezed together from the stock phrase pəlōnî ʾalmōnî, 'so-and-so,' used for a person left unnamed. So it means 'to that particular one,' 'to the one in question.' It is not a title.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.