Numbers 7:21

Summary

Numbers 7:21 lists three sacrificial animals — a young bull, a ram, and a one-year-old lamb — designated as a burnt offering. Each animal is marked individually as singular ("one"), and the lamb's age is specified through a construct phrase meaning "son of its year."

Key words

• par ("a young bull", H6499) — masculine singular noun, the first animal named.
• 'echad ("one", H0259) — cardinal number, feminine singular in form, repeated three times to mark each animal individually as a single unit despite modifying masculine nouns.
• ben-bakar ("a young one of cattle", H1121H + H1241) — construct chain specifying that the par belongs to the category of cattle.
• ben-shenato ("son of its year", H1121L + H8141 + H9023) — construct chain with pronominal suffix, idiomatically expressing the lamb's age as one year old.
• le-'olah ("for a burnt offering", H9005 + H5930A) — preposition plus noun indicating the purpose of the offerings.

What the text says

The verse is structured as a simple list of three animals, each followed by the numeral 'echad ("one"), producing a rhythmic, itemized enumeration: par 'echad ("one young bull"), 'ayil 'echad ("one ram"), kesev 'echad ("one lamb"). Grammatically, 'echad is marked as feminine singular even though all three nouns it modifies (par, 'ayil, kesev) are masculine — the data shows this form consistently across the three occurrences, a notable feature of the construction as given.

The phrase ben-bakar attached to par functions as a construct chain clarifying that this "young one" belongs to the category of cattle, rather than being a separate animal. Similarly, the lamb's age is not given as an independent adjective but as a construct chain, ben-shenato, literally "son of its year," with the pronominal suffix -o ("its") attached to shanah ("year"). This construction expresses age through a genitive-type relationship rather than a direct adjectival form. The final element, le-'olah, uses the preposition le- ("to/for") governing the noun 'olah ("burnt offering"), stating the purpose for which the three animals are designated.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ben-bakar as ek boōn ("from cattle"), a prepositional phrase rather than the Hebrew construct chain. For the lamb, the LXX uses the adjective eniausion ("yearling") to render ben-shenato, collapsing the Hebrew's genitive "son of its year" into a single descriptive term. The Vulgate similarly uses the adjective anniculum ("one year old") for the same phrase, and omits any equivalent of 'echad ("one") before bovem ("bull") and arietem ("ram"), stating them without an explicit numeral, unlike the Hebrew's repeated 'echad.