Numbers 29:39

Summary

This verse closes the festival calendar of Numbers 28–29 with a summary instruction: the offerings just listed are to be presented to Yehovah at Israel's appointed feasts, and these are distinct from — additional to — whatever vow offerings, freewill offerings, burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings, and peace offerings the people might also bring.

Key words

• ta'aSu ("you will offer", H6213I) — qal imperfect, 2nd masculine plural, addressing the community as a collective body responsible for carrying out these offerings at the proper times.
• mo'adei ("appointed feasts", H4150H) — masculine plural construct with pronominal suffix, "your appointed times," anchoring the whole offering system to a fixed festival calendar rather than to spontaneous occasions.
• bad ("apart", H0905J) — combined with the preposition le- and followed by min-, forms the phrase levad min-, meaning "apart from" or "in addition to," marking a clear separation between the categories that follow and what precedes.
• nidrei ("votive offerings", H5088) — masculine plural construct, "vows of you (all)," referring to offerings promised under a vow, distinguished from the fixed festival offerings.
• nidvotei ("freewill offerings", H5071) — feminine plural construct, offerings given voluntarily without a prior vow, paired with nidrei to form a two-part category of personal, non-obligatory gifts.

What the text says

The verse opens with the demonstrative 'Elleh ("these", H428) pointing back to the entire preceding list of festival sacrifices, followed by the verb ta'aSu ("you will offer") in the imperfect, which carries an instructional or obligatory force appropriate to cultic legislation. The phrase levad min-nidreikhem ("apart from your votive offerings") introduces a structural pivot: everything listed afterward is explicitly separated from the required festival offerings just enumerated.

The remainder of the verse consists of a chain of construct-suffix nouns — nidrei, nidvotei, 'olotei, minchotei, niskei, shalmei — each in construct form with the second-person plural suffix -khem ("your"), joined by the conjunction ve- ("and") and the preposition le- ("to/for"). This creates a cumulative list: vow offerings and freewill offerings (grouped together under levad min-), then burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings, and peace offerings, each introduced by le-. The repeated construct chains give the sentence a cataloguing rhythm typical of priestly legislative texts, where each offering type is named without elaboration, relying on prior chapters (Numbers 15, 28) to supply the details of how each is performed.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the sequence of construct nouns as ablative phrases ("in holocausto, in sacrificio, in libamine, et in hostiis pacificis"), using "in" where the Hebrew uses the preposition le- ("to/for"), a stylistic shift rather than a change in the list's content. The LXX text as transmitted here shows visible repetition/corruption in the manuscript (duplicated "τὰ τὰ" and stray "κα τ"), making its precise wording for the grain-offering and drink-offering terms uncertain from this witness, though it clearly preserves holokautōmata ("burnt offerings") and sōtēria ("peace offerings") corresponding to the Hebrew 'olotei and shalmei.