the totality of something: the whole of it, or each and every one of its members
This is one of the most common words in the Hebrew Bible, and at its heart it is a noun meaning "the whole, the entirety." From that single idea of totality flow all of its familiar uses: whole, all, every, each, any, everything. Which English word fits best depends on the grammar of what follows, not on any change in the word itself.
Applied to one thing, it gathers that thing into a whole ("the whole earth," "with all your heart"). Applied to a countable group, it means "all of them" ("all the days of his life"). Applied to a single unnamed item, it fans out to "every" or "each" ("every tree of the garden"). Standing on its own, it means "everything." And inside a question or a negative, it shifts toward "any," so that the pattern "all ... not" comes out as "none at all."
That last pattern is the main trap for English readers. When a negative is present, the word usually means "none," not the English "not all," and reading it the English way can flip a verse into its opposite.
A second trap runs the other way. This word is the Bible's favorite tool for sweeping, emphatic summary: all the earth comes to Egypt for grain, Joshua strikes all the land and leaves no survivor, all Israel gathers as one. Such totals are meant as decisive completeness, not as a head count, and the very books that use them often name in the next breath the peoples or places that in fact remained. Writers across the ancient world used "all" in just this way, so reading these sweeping lines as arithmetic misses how they were meant to land.
In a few late books, especially Ecclesiastes, the word stands alone as "the whole" and takes on unusual weight, close to "everything that exists," and scholars disagree over how far that reaches.
Nuances
Whether the standalone "the whole" (ha-kol) that opens and closes Ecclesiastes reaches toward a philosophical "the totality of existence, the universe" or stays within its ordinary sense of "everything the writer has surveyed."
- majorityIt means "everything the writer has considered," a feature of Late Biblical Hebrew style with no philosophical loading; illegitimate totality transfer from the Greek "the All" must be resisted.; C. L. Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (1997); Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up (1999); James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961)
- minorityIt carries a heightened, near-philosophical sense of the totality of existence, shaped by or resonant with early Greek thought about "the All."; Norbert Lohfink, "Koh 1,2 'alles ist Windhauch'," in Studien zu Kohelet (SBAB 26, 1998); Hans-Peter Müller, "Kohelet im Lichte der frühgriechischen Philosophie," in Qohelet in the Context of Wisdom (BEThL 136, 1998); Jaco Gericke, "הכל הבל in Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:8," HTS Teologiese Studies 77.1 (2021)
How the sweeping totals of the conquest summaries (all the land struck, no one left alive) were meant to work, given that the book of Joshua itself goes on to list peoples and land that remained. The question is not what "all" means here (everyone agrees it is a word for totality) but how such totals functioned and how their first hearers took them.
- majorityThey are recognized exaggeration, a shared convention of ancient war reports (a style Wolterstorff called "hagiographic hyperbole"); an ancient audience heard them as bold claims of a decisive victory, not as a body count.; K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts, JSOTSup 98 (1990); Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), 162-174; Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (2014)
- minorityThe totalizing and devotion-to-destruction language carried real weight in its own world, as the similar wording of the Moabite Mesha inscription shows, so treating it as mere exaggeration is anachronistic; the story of Saul's partial obedience in 1 Samuel 15 assumes the command was meant to be carried out to the letter.; John J. Collins, "The Zeal of Phinehas," JBL 122 (2003): 3-21; Wesley Morriston, Philosophia Christi 11 (2009): 7-26; Douglas S. Earl, The Joshua Delusion? (2010); William G. Dever, Beyond the Texts (2017); Christian Hofreiter, Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide (2018)
- minorityA middle reading: these totals were an ordinary, pervasive way of speaking sweepingly that everyone understood in practice, without being consciously felt as a figure of speech; the modern label "hyperbole" fits the effect but overstates how self-aware the usage was.; Jason M. Silverman, "Yes We Can (Hyperbolize)!," Journal of the Bible and its Reception 1 (2014): 263-284