one: the cardinal number one, with the everyday senses that grow out of counting a single thing
At its core this is simply the number one. It behaves like a describing word that follows its noun and agrees with it (one man, one day, one woman), and almost everything else it does in the Bible is an ordinary outgrowth of counting a single item. Because it names one thing, it slides easily into singling out one unspecified member of a group (a certain man), into naming the opening item in a counted run of days or months, into spreading one across a set (each one, one to another), into saying that things that could be counted as many are really one and the same, and, in its plural form, into the vague small number a few.
The senses below sort these everyday jobs apart so a reader can see which one a given verse is doing. They are shades of the same number, not separate words, which is why every standard lexicon keeps them under one entry. The lines between plain one, a single, and the same are often soft, and translators differ verse by verse, so many occurrences are left unsorted here rather than forced into a slot.
The most weighed-on uses are the ones where calling something one makes a claim about unity:
- a man and a woman become one flesh
- two sticks become one stick
- a scattered people is gathered into one nation
The unity in these cases comes from the thing being described, not from a special meaning hidden inside the number itself, which is the point modern scholarship presses hardest. The single most discussed verse is the opening line of the Shema, where what one claims about God is a long-running question the number alone does not settle (see the disputes).
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the number one at Genesis 1:5 (yom echad) should be read as the ordinal first (the first day) or as the cardinal one (one day, defining a day as one evening-and-morning cycle).
- majorityOrdinal: the first day, with the cardinal standing in for an ordinal as Hebrew often allows in such series.; Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC), at 1:5; Westermann, Genesis 1-11, at 1:5; Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT), at 1:5
- minorityCardinal: one day, the text defining one day as evening plus morning rather than ranking it first in a series; the unusual lack of the article on both words tells against the ordinal reading.; Steinmann, "echad as an Ordinal Number and the Meaning of Genesis 1:5," JETS 45 (2002): 577-84; Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I, at 1:5