Numbers 29:23

Summary

Numbers 29:23 specifies the animal offerings prescribed for the fourth day of a festival: ten young bulls, two rams, and fourteen unblemished yearling lambs. The verse follows the pattern of daily offering lists found throughout Numbers 29, marking a decrease in the number of bulls from the previous days.

Key words

• ha.rvi.'i ("the fourth", H7243) — masculine singular ordinal number with the definite article, modifying "day" and marking the sequence within the festival's offering schedule.
• parim ("young bulls", H6499) — masculine plural noun, the first category of animals offered, here numbered ten by the following word asarah.
• benei-shanah ("sons of a year", H1121L + H8141) — construct phrase meaning "a year old," using "sons of" idiomatically to express age, applied to the lambs.
• arba'ah asar ("fourteen", H0702 + H6240) — a compound cardinal number (literally "four-teen"), split across two words per Hebrew numeral construction, modifying kevasim ("lambs").
• temimim ("unblemished", H8549G) — masculine plural adjective agreeing with the lambs (or potentially all animals listed), describing their physical wholeness/lack of defect.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no main verb; it is a list construction typical of ritual instruction texts, where the day is named first (u-va-yom ha-rvi'i, "and on the fourth day") followed by the enumerated offerings without an explicit verb like "you shall offer." This elliptical style assumes the verb from the surrounding context of the chapter, which consistently uses formulas of presentation for each day.

The numbers follow the animals rather than preceding them in most cases (parim asarah, "bulls, ten"), a common Hebrew numeral pattern where the noun comes first and the number acts almost appositionally. The lambs receive additional qualification: benei-shanah ("sons of a year") specifies their age, and temimim ("unblemished") specifies their physical condition. The adjective temimim is masculine plural, agreeing grammatically with the lambs, though translations extend "unblemished" to describe all animals in the list.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) reorders the numeral fourteen by placing "quatuordecim" at the end of the sentence after "immaculatos," differing from the Hebrew word order where arba'ah asar ("fourteen") directly precedes temimim ("unblemished"). The LXX renders benei-shanah ("sons of a year") as the single Greek adjective ἐνιαυσίους ("yearling"), collapsing the Hebrew construct phrase into one word. The LXX also uses the numeral abbreviation ἰδ' for fourteen, a Greek numeral notation not reflecting the Hebrew's two-word numeral construction (arba'ah asar).