Numbers 28:9

Summary

The verse specifies the additional offering prescribed for the Sabbath day: two unblemished year-old lambs, accompanied by a grain offering of fine flour mixed with oil and its corresponding drink offering.

Key words

• yom ("day of", H3117G) — construct singular noun, linking directly to ha-shabbat to form "the day of the sabbath," marking this as a specific temporal occasion for the offering.
• ben-ei shanah ("sons of a year", H1121L + H8141) — a construct phrase meaning "year-old," describing the age of the lambs (khevasim) rather than counting literal "sons."
• temimim ("unblemished", H8549G) — masculine plural adjective agreeing with khevasim ("lambs"), specifying the physical condition required of the animals.
• belulah ("mixed", H1101A) — qal passive participle, feminine singular, agreeing with solet ("fine flour") or minchah ("grain offering"), indicating the flour is in a state of having been mixed with oil.
• nisko ("its drink offering", H5262 + H9023) — construct noun with third-person masculine singular suffix ("its"), grammatically tying the drink offering back to the grain offering or the whole sacrificial unit described earlier.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a series of construct chains and appositional phrases rather than full verbal clauses — there is no explicit verb of offering in this verse itself (the verb appears earlier in the chapter and is understood to carry over). The phrase shenei khevasim benei shanah temimim ("two lambs, sons of a year, unblemished") stacks a cardinal number, a noun, a construct age-phrase, and an adjective in sequence, all describing the animals for the sacrifice. Similarly, shenei esronim solet minchah belulah va-shemen describes the grain offering: "two tenths, fine flour, a grain offering, mixed with oil" — the nouns solet and minchah stand in apposition, and belulah as a passive participle modifies this flour, marking it as already prepared in oil rather than describing an action performed in the moment of the verse.

The final word, nisko ("its drink offering"), carries a pronominal suffix that ties this drink offering possessively to the preceding items — the flour/grain offering unit — showing how the sacrificial elements (lambs, grain offering, drink offering) are treated as a linked set through grammatical suffixation rather than separate independent clauses.

Differences between versions

The LXX inserts an explicit verb, προσάξετε ("you shall bring/present"), which is not present as a finite verb in this specific Hebrew verse (the Hebrew relies on the verb from the preceding context). The LXX also renders nisko ("its drink offering") with the noun σπονδήν ("libation") without a possessive suffix, and pairs it with εἰς θυσίαν ("for a sacrifice"), slightly restructuring the relationship between the grain offering and drink offering compared to the Hebrew's construct-suffix chain. The Vulgate similarly supplies the verb offeretis ("you shall offer") and uses liba (plural "drink offerings") where the Hebrew has a singular nisko with a suffix.