Tamim comes from the root תמם (t-m-m), to be complete, to be finished, to be spent all the way to the end. It is not a legal word and it is not an accounting word. It describes a thing with nothing missing from it: whole, entire, sound, all of a piece. When HaShem tells Avraham to walk before Him and be tamim (Genesis 17:1), and when Moshe tells Israel tamim you shall be with HaShem your God (Deuteronomy 18:13), the demand is not for an unbroken record of compliance. It is for a man who is not divided.

The clearest proof is the lamb. Exodus 12:5 calls for a lamb tamim, and that animal has no moral record at all. It has never obeyed anything, never been tempted, never chosen, never resisted. It is tamim because nothing has been broken off it. Undamaged. Entire. The same adjective lands on Noach, tamim in his generations (Genesis 6:9), and it carries the same sense about a man: not flawless, whole. Hold those two uses side by side and the accounting reading falls apart in your hands. Wholeness is a condition of a thing, not a quantity, which is exactly why it has no transfer mechanism. You cannot be handed someone else's wholeness any more than you can be handed someone else's health and stop being sick.

Watch what happened on the way to English. The Septuagint renders tamim two ways, ἄμωμος (amomos, without blemish) and τέλειος (teleios, complete, carried through to its end), and it reaches for teleios at the Passover lamb itself. Latin took it up as perfectus, thoroughly made, finished. Every language in the chain kept the sense of entire and completed. English is where it narrowed. By the time a modern reader hears "perfect" he hears a transcript with no infractions on it, a courtroom word, and the wholeness every prior language carried has quietly dropped out. So when a pulpit says Yeshua lived a perfect life, the English is doing work the Hebrew never asked it to do. Tamim was never a scorecard. It was a portrait.