pele

The critical lexicons (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat פֶּלֶא as a nominal derivative of the root פלא and agree on the core sense: that which is extraordinary, surpassing human capacity or comprehension. BDB separates the general sense (an extraordinary or hard-to-understand thing) from the theologically weighted use for God's acts of judgment and redemption, while HALOT and DCH note the standard collocation עָשָׂה פֶלֶא, "to do a wonder," which accounts for the majority of the thirteen occurrences. The theological dictionaries (TLOT, TDOT, NIDOTTE) stress that the root does not designate a metaphysical category such as a suspension of natural law but a relational judgment: the act exceeds what the observer could have produced or foreseen, and Israel's confession assigns its source to Yahweh. The plural in Lamentations 1:9 is standardly parsed as an adverbial accusative, "astoundingly," and Psalm 119:129 applies the plural predicatively to the divine testimonies rather than to divine acts. The construct form in Isaiah 9:6 (Hebrew 9:5) sits inside the long-running discussion of the throne names, where most commentators, including Wildberger and Roberts, take פֶּלֶא יוֹעֵץ as a single title with the noun functioning attributively; the older division into two independent names is now a minority reading. No lexicon proposes a homonym split for this noun.