the lobe of the ear: the small piece at the outer edge of the ear, not the ear as a whole
This word never stands on its own. All eight times it appears, it is joined to the word for ear (אֹזֶן) and to the word for "right," so the full phrase is always "the lobe of the right ear." It picks out one small piece of the body rather than the ear as a whole, and it belongs to a set of three places a priest touched with blood or oil:
- the lobe of the right ear
- the thumb of the right hand
- the big toe of the right foot
The second and third of those are named with a different word (בֹּהֶן), which covers both the thumb and the big toe.
Two ceremonies use this word, and they mirror each other. When Aaron and his sons were installed as priests, Moses put blood from a ram on those three points (Exodus 29:20; Leviticus 8:23; Leviticus 8:24). When a person who had recovered from a serious skin disease was brought back into the community, the priest put blood on the same three points and then oil on top of it (Leviticus 14:14; Leviticus 14:17; Leviticus 14:25; Leviticus 14:28). The healed person is handled with the very gestures that set a priest apart.
Because the word turns up nowhere else, it has no everyday or figurative life in the Bible. It is a plain body-part term that survives only because a ceremony needed to say exactly where the blood and the oil went. Whatever wider significance readers find in the moment belongs to the ceremony and to the body parts it singles out, not to this word by itself.