Exodus 39:14

Summary

The verse specifies that the stones just described bear the names of the sons of Israel: twelve stones for twelve names, each one engraved like a seal with a single name, corresponding to the twelve tribes.

Key words

• avanim ("stones", H0068G) — feminine plural, definite (with ha, H9009), the subject of the sentence.
• shemot ("names of", H8034) — feminine plural construct, appearing three times in the verse, each time governing a different noun (benei-Yisra'El, the suffixed -am "their", and the suffixed -o "his").
• shteim esreh ("two-ten", H8147/H6240) — the number "twelve" in its feminine form, agreeing grammatically with the feminine noun avanim ("stones").
• pittuchei chotam ("engravings of a seal", H6603/H2368) — masculine plural construct + singular noun, describing the engraving technique applied to each stone.
• ish ("each one", H0376I) — literally "a man", used here distributively to mean "each" (i.e., each stone).
• shevet ("tribe", H7626H) — masculine singular, paired with shneim asar ("two-ten", H8147/H6240), the masculine form of "twelve," agreeing with this masculine noun.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around three uses of the construct noun shemot ("names of," H8034): first linking the stones to "the names of the sons of Israel" (benei-Yisra'El, H1121A/H3478), then to "their names" (shemotam, with the H9028 suffix), and finally to "his name" (shemo, with the H9023 suffix) for each individual stone. This repetition creates a chain moving from the collective (all twelve names) to the distributive (one name per stone).

A notable grammatical feature is that the number "twelve" appears twice with two different grammatical genders: shteim esreh (H8147/H6240) in feminine form, agreeing with the feminine noun avanim ("stones," H0068G), and shneim asar (H8147/H6240) in masculine form, agreeing with the masculine noun shevet ("tribe," H7626H). Hebrew numerals regularly take the gender opposite to the counted noun in some constructions, and here the same numeric value is grammatically adapted to each noun it modifies — a distinction not visible in translations that render both simply as "twelve."

The phrase pittuchei chotam (H6603/H2368), "engravings of a seal," describes the engraving technique — the same term used elsewhere in the chapter for seal-like carving — while ish al-shemo ("each on his name," H0376I) uses the noun "man" distributively to indicate "each stone individually."

Differences between versions

The Septuagint text supplied for this reference (Swete) does not correspond to the Hebrew content of Exodus 39:14; it describes bringing garments and tabernacle furnishings to Moses, reflecting the LXX's differently ordered arrangement of the tabernacle-construction material in this section of Exodus. The Vulgate ("Ipsique lapides duodecim... singuli per nomina singulorum") and the Hebrew agree closely in content, though the Vulgate renders both Hebrew forms of "twelve" (feminine shteim esreh and masculine shneim asar) uniformly as "duodecim," not reflecting the gender-based numeral distinction present in the Hebrew.