Exodus 39:20

Summary

The verse describes the making of two gold rings and their attachment to the two shoulder-pieces of the ephod, specifying their exact position: on the front, near the seam, above the ephod's woven band.

Key words

• taBBe'ot ("rings of", H2885) — feminine plural construct, linked to zahav ("gold", H2091) that follows; construct chain gives "rings of gold."
• kitFot ("shoulder-pieces of", H3802) — feminine plural construct, governed by ha-'eFod ("the ephod", H0646); marks the two shoulder-pieces as a defined pair via the preceding shTei ("two", H8147).
• michbarTO ("its joining", H4225) — singular noun with 3ms possessive suffix -o ("its"), referring back to the ephod; used after the preposition le-'ummat ("close to", H5980) to fix the ring's position relative to a seam.
• Cheshev ("girdle/band of", H2805) — masculine singular construct, governed by ha-'eFod ("the ephod", H0646); names the woven band against which the rings' height is measured.
• miLmattah (built from mi, H9006 + le, H9005 + maTTah, H4295, "downwards") — a stacked prepositional phrase meaning "from below," anchoring the rings' vertical placement.

What the text says

The verse opens with two narrative-chained verbs, va-ya'aSU ("and they made", H6213H) and va-yitteNUm ("and they put them", H5414H), both qal forms with the third-person plural subject implied and carried by the vav-consecutive chain typical of Hebrew narrative sequence. The object of the first verb is shTei taBBe'ot zaHAV ("two rings of gold", H8147/H2885/H2091), a construct chain where the cardinal number and noun are both in construct form, tightly binding "two" to "rings" to "gold."

The bulk of the verse's grammatical complexity lies in the string of prepositional phrases that follow va-yitteNUm ("and they put them"): 'al-shTei kitFot ha-'eFod ("on the two shoulder-pieces of the ephod"), then miLmattah miMUL paNAV ("from below, in front of its face/front"), then le'ummat mechbarTO ("close to its joining"), then miMA'al le-Cheshev ha-'eFod ("from above, to the girdle of the ephod"). Each phrase uses construct nouns (kitFot, paNAV, mechbarTO, Cheshev) governed by possessive suffixes or the noun ha-'eFod ("the ephod"), producing a layered spatial description — below, in front, near the seam, above the band — that locates the rings with a precision difficult to render smoothly in translation without breaking the phrase into separate clauses, as the modern versions (BSB, SBLIBRE, RV1909) do.

Differences between versions

The Greek (LXXSWETE) and Latin (VULCLEM) texts supplied here correspond to different content — court hangings and pillars in the LXX excerpt, and a blue tunic in the Vulgate excerpt — reflecting the differing verse/chapter divisions between the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Greek/Latin traditions in this section of Exodus 39, rather than a translation of the same Hebrew clause.